5 Steps To Consistently Profit in Forex

In today’s lesson, I am going to give you five tips to help you make consistent money in the markets. Whilst I can’t promise you success, if you actually read and implement the five points discussed below, you should see some improvement in your trading results. This lesson was written to draw your attention to some of the more nuanced aspects of successful trading that you may have been ignoring but that can make or break your trading account.

1) Focus on trading, not just on making money

Believe it or not, one of the main reasons you are not making money consistently in the markets is because you are too focused on money.

Most people come into the markets chasing freedom from their job or a quick road to riches. However, what they don’t know is that they are up against a test of mental strength and their ability to manage themselves in an arena of never-ending temptation; the Forex market.

If you want to make consistent money in the markets you will need to let go of all your fantasies of telling your boss to stick his job up his #$! or trading from an exotic beach location. You see, the more focused you are on making money really fast, the more the money will elude you. This is because focusing your mind on the money creates emotional tension, and the more emotional you are the more likely you are to commit the account-destroying mistakes of over-trading and over-leveraging.

So, if you want to increase your odds of consistently profiting in Forex, focus on mastering one Forex trading strategy at a time and forget about making a lot of money. Obviously you are in the markets to make money, but you need to understand that the more you feel a “need” to make money the more you will experience difficulty in actually making it. By effectively managing your risk on every trade you can begin to forget about the money. This means setting your risk tolerance at a dollar amount that you are TRULY OK with losing on any trade. You will not feel any pressure or emotional tension if you truly do not care if you lose the money you have at risk on a trade. If you are thinking about your trades very often or losing sleep over them, you are probably focused too much on the money and not enough on the process of trading, and this means you are probably risking too much money per trade.

2) Learn that NOT trading is part of the game (Being out of a trade is a position)

It may seem counter-intuitive, but not trading is one of the easiest things you can do to help you make money consistently in the markets.

Of course, in order to know when not to trade you have to know exactly WHEN to trade. This involves mastering an effective trading strategy like price action so that you have NO DOUBTS about what your trading edge is and when it is present in the markets.

Always remember that by not trading you are also not losing money. If your goal is to profit consistently, then by not losing money you are obviously closer to your goal than if you had entered a stupid trade and lost. So, just be sure you have absolutely no doubts about entering every trade you take, because if a particular trade setup does not meet your pre-defined trading plan rules, it means that your edge is not present, and trading when your edge is not present is the same thing as gambling.

In my daily members’ commentary we often discuss how not trading is the best thing to do at the moment. Many traders underestimate how important sitting on the sidelines is to their long-term trading success. You really want to trade Forex like a sniper and not a machine gunner, by picking your trades wisely and only trading when your trading edge is present.

3) Become organized and disciplined

Becoming an organized and disciplined trader is something that every trader knows they must do. However, most traders are anything but organized and disciplined, or they make an attempt to become organized and disciplined but they don’t maintain it.

Instead of rambling about why you need to become disciplined and organized I will give you some tips to get you started (I assume you understand the importance of discipline and organization in trading, if not check out some of my other Forex articles):

1) You obviously need to know what you are looking for in the markets if you want to build an organized and disciplined trading approach around it. So, make sure you know what your trading edge is and that you have mastered it.

2) Create a trading plan, you need a forex trading plan, no matter how much you don’t want to make one or think that you don’t need to make one, I am telling you that you absolutely need to make one. You will build this around the trading strategy you have mastered. It should include what your trading edge is, how and when you will trade it, and risk management plans. Basically it needs to cover everything you will do in the markets as concisely as possible, yet still be comprehensive.

3) You need a Forex trading journal. Tracking your trades is a crucial element to developing and maintaining both organization and discipline in your trading. Simply put, if you don’t know where you’ve been you can’t know where you are going, you need to see your trading progress tracked over time in a real and tangible format in order to reflect back to you your discipline and organization or lack thereof.

My trading course and community will give you an organized guide that you can use to create your own trading plan off of. I have a forex trading journal that you can use to get started tracking your trades. You really need to get started on an organized and disciplined track in the market, and my course can give you that extra little “push” you need to get started.

4) Take a longer-term view of what “success” means

You need to stop and ask yourself what success in the markets means to you. Would you rather make 100% in one month in your trading account and then lose it all the next month, or would you be happy with a nice 30-50% gain over the course of one year?

Your chances of Forex trading success will be greatly improved if you just learn to “slow down” and take a part-time view to your trading, rather than wanting to be a full-time trader right of the gate.

By learning to trade on the daily charts first you will better understand why taking a longer-view is important to your overall success. You will get a much clearer and more accurate view of the markets by focusing on the daily charts. Many traders confuse themselves and induce over-trading by constantly obsessing over the lower-time frames. Lower time frames (time frames under the 1hr chart) induce over-analysis and inconsistency. If your goal is long-term consistent profitability, I suggest you focus your analysis on trading the daily charts in forex.

5) Develop a strict daily trading routine to develop positive trading habits

If you want to become a consistently profitable trader you will have to develop a consistent trading routine that is devoid of gambling-like behavior. By becoming organized and disciplined like we discussed above, you can develop a trading routine that will work to reinforce positive trading habits instead of negative ones.

Trading success really is dependent on developing the proper trading habits and continually reinforcing them. However, most traders develop negative trading habits and reinforce those instead. They do this by getting lucky on a few trades they have entered on a gamble by either over-trading or over-leveraging. Once they win on one or more of these gamble-trades, they have reinforced a negative trading habit that is very hard to break.

If you want to obtain the knowledge necessary to develop your own disciplined trading routine that will help you reinforce positive trading habits, check out my Forex trading course. You will find all my insight on price action trading and the other concepts discussed in today’s article.