What’s wrong with deviating from your forex trading plan if you make a profit anyway?
Making an occasional winning trade, even when you throw your trading plan out the window, may provide a short-term pleasure, but entering trades haphazardly can adversely influence your ability to maintain discipline in the long term.
Trading is a marathon, not a sprint!
When you stop following your trading plan, you become rewarded for lacking discipline and you may start believing that abandoning a trading plan is no big deal.
An unjustified reward may increase your tendency to abandon trading plans in the future.
You may be prone to think “I was rewarded once, maybe I will be rewarded again. I’ll take a chance.”
But the positive outcomes of undisciplined trading are usually short-lived, and a lack of discipline ultimately produces long-term trading losses.
It’s important to distinguish justified wins from unjustified wins.
A justified win is when you create a very detailed trading plan and FOLLOW the plan. A win that results from following a trading plan is justified and reinforces discipline.
An unjustified win occurs when you make a plan but don’t follow it or if you have no plan at all. You might be rewarded, but the outcome occurred by chance.
You might as well flip a coin or hang a printed copy of your charts on the wall and throw darts at it to help you make trading decisions.
The win is unjustified and can reinforce undisciplined trading.
Maintaining discipline is vital for consistent and profitable trading.
Trading is a matter of getting the law of averages to work in your favor.
You trade proven forex trading strategies, over and over, so that across a series of trades, the strategies work enough to produce an overall profit.
It’s like making shot after shot on the basketball court so as to accumulate a winning number of points. The more shots you take, the more likely you will amass points.
The winning player is the person who first develops the skill to make the shot consistently so that at every possible opportunity, the ball is likely to go through the basket.
They’ve developed the skill to learn how to shoot the ball the same way every single time. Consistency is crucial!
It’s the same for trading. One must trade consistently, following a specific trading plan on each and every single trade.
If you trade one approach this time, and a different approach at another time, your performance will more than likely be haphazard.
We can’t stress this enough…
You have to allow the law of averages to work in your favor so that across a series of trades, you will make an overall profit.
If you follow the plan sometimes and abandon it at other times, you throw off the probabilities, and you will most likely end up losing overall.
With trading discipline comes profitability.
Don’t let unjustified wins interfere with your ability to maintain discipline.
Follow your own trading plan, and cement in the mindset that if you follow your plan, you will end up more profitable in the long run.
Now that we’re done explaining how important a trading plan is (can we stress this enough?), it’s time for you to learn what should go inside a good trading plan.
Reprinted from Babypips, the copyright all reserved by the original author.
면책 조항: 본 게시글에 표현된 견해는 전적으로 작성자의 견해이며 Followme의 공식 입장을 대변하지 않습니다. Followme는 제공된 정보의 정확성, 완전성 또는 신뢰성에 대해 책임을 지지 않으며, 서면으로 명시적으로 언급되지 않는 한 해당 내용을 기반으로 취해진 어떠한 조치에 대해서도 책임을 지지 않습니다.
