Trading with focus... wow, just wow!
I spent most of last week in bed being sick... my focus was scattered and not being able to be productive I was going nuts!!! All I wanted to do was sit on my station record videos for our new day trading course and trade the markets with focus, but I couldn't do any of that.
So... come Friday I started to feel better (I got sick on Monday) and I decided to dabble into the markets, I didn't have the energy or a strong enough focus to trade the tick charts so I decided to give it a go on the 5m chart, but before I did that I brought my focus to reality, which is that I am rusty (didn't touch the charts for a few days), I was weak/tired and I wasn't too confidant, which only means that if I made losses they could make my situation worse by affecting my mindset, so I did what any professional/real trader would do.... I prepared!
Since I was aware of my mental and physical state devoted time to proper trading and mental preparation, and soon you will realize just how important that was for my results.
Here are the X things I did to prepare:
I first did my fundamental and technical work, which is simple.... I checked the 5/10min charts of the key assets I normally trade (like xauusd, wti, Nasdaq, DAX and a few Forex pairs)
I made up a small watchlist of what to focus on and then moved to mental prep!
For a solid ten minutes I concentrated on my breathe by doing a small guided YouTube meditation session, this helped me change my mental state from tired to calm and focused
As a final note I reviewed my process and prepared how I would trade based on how the markets were moved now, I put my focus on action and not results
I started trading!
So, like I say above I first traded the 5m charts, which was around 17h GMT, I took 4 trades, XAUUSD, NASDAQ, WTI and GBPUSD.
I made profits on xauusd, nasdaq and WTI, with nasdaq being the best one of all, while I took a small 7.7pip loss on GBPUSD
I then stopped trading, and came back to the markets again at about 8pm GMT where I only focused on the NASDAQ, but... I redid the exact same process above again and that got me "in the trading zone", now it is time to show you these results...
TOTAL TRADING TIME: 33 minutes
TOTAL PIPS EARNED: 370
How was this possible? I owe my all my profits to my ability to properly prepare and then focus with complete concentration for a limited period of time on the markets and my trading process.
Was it easy? No, not at all, was it worth it? Absolutely freaking YES!
If there is anything you can take away from this post to help make you a better day trading it would be 2 things,
Proper preparation prevents a piss poor performance (sorry for the language)
Focusing for a small period of time is the holy grail to success in trading
I hope this blog post helps! and good luck with your trading!