By Nial Fuller
You are busy, I’m busy, everyone’s busy, right? We’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is, it doesn’t matter if you’re busy because you can learn how to trade and trade properly no matter what your schedule is. The bad news is, you aren’t going to get rich quick.
But there is good News!
We are going to show you the 30-minute per day trading routine that we’ve developed, it saves tons of time and mental stress, and ultimately improves lifestyle. Once we religiously started following this routine and adopted the mentality of placing trades, walking away and letting the market just ‘do its thing’, trading results improved dramatically.
The 30-Minute a day trading routine:
The two main components to the 30-minute a day trading routine are:
#1. New York Close End-Of-Day Chart Analysis
End-of-day chart analysis basically just means you are doing your daily analysis after the market has closed. Now, the tricky part here is that different chart providers will show different close times on their daily bars, which is just silly. The New York close at 5pm New York time, is the REAL close of the Forex market, it’s the end of the trading day.
The point here is, we want to make our trading decisions on the daily chart time frame and we are only looking at daily bars that have closed out. So, it really doesn’t matter where you live in the world, just make sure you’re only looking at the previously closed out daily bars; if the current daily bar is still open, don’t give it much weight yet.
We are spending just 30 minutes or less, per day, analyzing the markets and making our trading decisions. This is the basic cornerstone principle, if you will, of my entire trading approach.
#2. Setting and Forgetting
The next part of the 30-minute per day trading routine is my set and forget trade management approach. This approach serves a couple purposes. The first and most important one is that it largely eliminates the potential for human error (you making mistakes) by being overly-involved with your trades once they’re live. Over-involvement or ‘meddling’ in your trades after they’re live, is the SINGLE BIGGEST REASON traders lose money. You simply must accept that you must LET THE MARKET DO THE ‘WORK’, by taking yourself mostly out of the equation after you push that buy or sell button.
Setting and forgetting is about walking away and trying to purposely avoid letting yourself get addicted to watching the charts. This is the second biggest purpose of my set and forget approach; it frees up your time. You can set your trade up and simply walk away and go play golf or some other sport or hobby, do whatever it is that you do. You need to learn to let go and let the market take you out of your trades rather than constantly trying to exit trades manually because you have a need to be in control. Trust me, the ONLY thing you can 100% control in the market is YOU.
Exceptions to the ‘rules’:
The concept of set and forget is not a perfect science and I do often exit trades before they reach my pre-planned target, or I may move a target further out if the market conditions look right, such as another subsequent signal or breakout and trending market that is looking like runaway trend type.
However, and we would STRESS THIS: WE NEVER MOVE STOP LOSSES. But, IF there is a LARGE signal in the opposite direction of the trade we are in, we may exit the trade prior to the stop loss being hit, but these instances are rare.
Biggest benefits of the 30-minute trading routine
Trading in this low frequency, reduced-involvement approach really is the best way to trade and it really is a “win-win” scenario. The very act of trading less and focusing on daily charts, increases your chances of making money over the long-term and it gives you the time off and the ability to spend 30 minutes or less a day on trading. Win-Win.
The mental state of mind that you will get from focus on end-of-day charts and trading with reduced involvement is the state of mind you need to trade properly. The proper trading mindset is not easy to come by and most traders induce the completely wrong trading mindset by trading too much and focusing on intraday charts too much. The 30-minute per day trading routine allows you to cultivate a winning trading mindset.
Your busy, we are all busy, you can’t spend 5 hours a day staring at your charts, and you shouldn’t! Not only will the 30-minute per day trading routine allow you to fit trading into your schedule, whatever that may be, but once you start building up your trading account you will really start reaping the rewards. You will realize that you can make money without ‘working’. You set the trade up and you leave, come back and check on it tomorrow. The trade either works or it doesn’t. Barring a huge signal against your position, as mentioned earlier, you just leave it be.
By trading end-of-day and waiting for those obvious daily chart trades, you’re naturally going to get better trades than someone day trading. Less trades also means fewer transaction costs, and believe it or not, transaction costs (fees, commissions, spreads) can and do eat away at a trading account faster than most people think. Overall, this 30 minute a day approach is just the best way to trade, trust us, we’ve been at this about 12 years and we’ve done and seen it all. If you let it, this will work.
Example of the 30-minute per day trading routine:
Typically, start the day out by scanning through favorite markets. We are looking mainly at the long-term trend and the near-term daily chart trend. We may look at the weekly first, then look at the daily chart. This gives us a good top-down view of a market and we can quickly and easily see the key chart levels as well as the current market condition, be it trending or consolidating.
If we spot a daily chart signal that we are interested in, quickly we make note of it in the trading journal and then after our analysis is complete we will come back to it and decide if we want to trade it or not.
In the daily chart below, price had just bounced up from a very strong / key support level when it formed the bullish pin bar highlighted:
Next, we will come back to that signal and we will decide if we want to trade it or not. If we do, we simply determine the stop loss placement FIRST, then we will determine the profit target and set our position size. Now, if a 1:2 risk reward or more isn’t clearly possible, we will aim for 1:1+ or 1:1.5+, we never even consider anything less than 1:1 risk reward because the trading math simply doesn’t play out.
We will then monitor a trade we are in every 12 hours or so after the next few days. We DO NOT incessantly checking on it or watching at night when we should be sleeping. One big reason we don’t do that is because we don’t ever risk more money than we care to lose. Once you start jacking up your risk beyond what you’re comfortable with, you’re doomed to start staring at those charts all night and that will cause you to make all kinds of mistakes.
Let the trade run and let the market do the ‘work’ – YOU don’t have to do anything 90% of the time!
You may want to use your trading journal each day to record how you’re feeling, what you’re thinking and just to stay accountable to something. Over enough time, you will notice trends and patterns regarding your feelings and your trading outcomes. There is really no end to how helpful a trading journal can be, and we highly recommend all beginning or struggling experienced traders use one consistently.
Conclusion
The 30-minute per trading routine can transform your trading career. Once you get into the grove of this minimalist trading approach, you will start to see it’s power and the routine will turn into a habit. The goal is to develop the proper trading habits, that is how you make money in this game. It’s no different then getting in good physical shape; you start with a routine, that may even be ‘boring’ to you in the beginning, but you keep pushing and keep trusting the routine and the reasoning behind it.
Over time, you will start seeing results and this will reinforce what you’ve been doing and you will begin to ENJOY the routine. It’s at THIS POINT that habits are born, and lives are changed. Utilizing the concepts that we taught in this lesson and that we expand upon in further detail in our Modules 1 and 2, you will develop a trading routine that meshes with your life and your schedule. This low-frequency reduced-involvement approach will work if you give it time, we know because its what has worked for most of our busy clients on a daily basis.
What did you think of this lesson? What would you like us to write about? Please share it with us in the comments below.
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