Bad Habits of Traders – Profit Management in Day Trading

As I mentioned earlier, the screwy thing that can happen is that we develop bad habits in trading before good ones.

Table of Contents

Profit Management – Or Lack There Of

The second biggest, and can be more harmful to your emotional state of mind than losing, is not holding out for your profit target.

I know, this seems absurd. But let me tell you, this is still something I battle with every.single.day and most traders do too.

As painful as it is to see your trade go in the wrong direction, our psyche for some reason can stand it and we see our trade being stopped out.

Yet, when it’s moving in the right direction, going positive we get so nervous, so uncomfortable that we usually press the get out button and take our small profit.

What happens in the end is that you can have more winning trades than losing ones, but since you let your losers go to their full stop out and get out too early for the profitable ones you can either be in the red or break even.

Profit Management in Day Trading

What I had to do to start to retrain myself is several things:

1. Once I’m in a trade – GET UPPPPP!!!! Why this is hard for me to do? Mainly because mostly everyone teaches to ‘SIT THROUGH THE DISCOMFORT’ but why? I have my profit target and stop loss set up. I don’t need to be there to do it. This is called ATM strategy when you set it up with ninja trader.

2. The hard work is already done – that is everything before the actual entry. When I analyze to see if all my green lights are on and the probability of the trade of working out is over 75% – who cares what happens now – the MOST IMPORTANT thing in trading is making consistently the right decisions. And if you stick to your plan and make the right decisions you can safely leave the work area until you hear either the profit was hit or the stop.

3. What to do when getting up – ok, great so now I’m up, what now? This was a huge factor for me. At first I wanted to meditate, but honestly, this isn’t the best time to do that. After several other ideas, for me, getting up and doing exercise is the best way to relieve the energy while waiting. You can do whatever you want.

The most important thing of all, whatever will fit you best while you’re in a trade for it to hit your profit target, remember there is NO RIGHT OR WRONG. This is most definitely the most important thing to take away from here.

Don’t limit your mind with what you think you SHOULD do. But do what you know is best for you – as long as you are CONSISTENTLY MAKING THE RIGHT DECISIONS!

Make sure to catch the Part 1 of Bad Habits of Day Traders