Trade less, profit more

How you can start trading less often and increase your trading success rate.

Anyone who has traded the forex market for any length of time knows that making consistent money as a trader is not the easiest thing to accomplish. Most traders make the art and skill of profiting consistently in the forex market far more difficult than it needs to be however, they do this by over-trading. The sometimes overwhelming feeling that traders experience that makes them want to enter a trade when no trade worth taking is there, is one of the many emotional feelings they must conquer with logical thinking if they want to make money consistently in the market. The most practical way to use logic to conquer the emotions of over-trading is simply to trade less frequently.

– How does trading less lead to bigger profits?

Trading less frequently than you do right now is a very good way to give a boost to your trading account. When you restrict yourself to only entering a few positions a week or even a month, you will naturally give more thought to the trades you take, and you will have a better chance at picking winning trades because of this. Simply put, trading less is a filter, just like trading higher time frames acts like a filter for the noise of lower time frames, trading less is yet another filter that traders can use, think of it as the final filter that you use before entering any trade.

It is a good idea to restrict your trading to a certain low number of trades each week or each month, at least until you become a consistently profitable trader. Let’s say you write into your trading plan that you will only allow yourself to enter three trades per week, if you truly follow this rule you are going to have to use the filter of discretion for each trade setup you contemplate taking because most traders find themselves wanting to trade a lot more than three times a week or less. This technique will work to improve your winning percentage over-time,

and it will also grow your trading account much faster than you think.

When we talk on this website about “mastering one price action setup at a time”, using discretion and taking a small number of well-defined and well-placed price action setups is how this is accomplished. Developing your ability to read a price chart and to spot the highest probability price action setups, is something that comes via patience, and you can work on enjoying and improving your patience by accepting the fact that the less you trade the more you are likely to profit. Anyone who has traded the forex market for any length of time knows that often what you “feel” like you want to do, or your first urge after looking at a price chart, is wrong. By deciding to take a small number of trades each week or each month, we force ourselves to step back and really put our objective thought processes to work prior to putting any hard earned money on the line for any particular trade setup.

– You cannot control the forex market:

There is perhaps nothing worse than losing money that you have toiled and sweated to obtain because you were trigger happy in the market. We all can agree that it is exponentially more time consuming and difficult to make money in this world than it is to lose it or spend it, a sort of inverse analogy to this is losing weight; it’s really easy to gain weight but very difficult to lose it.