02.07
Article from MT4 Alert
Anybody who wants to learn day trading wishes to follow certain guidelines. I will not say rules because a lot of people don’t like the word, but beliefs. Many of them are quite well known and some of them are less so, but they’re all urgent to the successful day trader. I call them the four major guidelines of day trading.
1. The Buck Stops With You
Whether or not you are looking round for a day trading system or developing your own, remember that whatever you do is your responsibility. Ask for recommendation and help by all means, but don’t believe everything you hear. People are different and their trading styles can vary hugely, so never follow advice blindly.
Equally, you can purchase in a system but do not neglect to test it. Whether or not the guy who designed it is saying that it’ll double your money in two months for certain sure, you must test, because there are three possible issues with that. One, he might be lying. Two, perhaps it used to work well but it doesn’t work any more. Three, perhaps it works for him except for some peculiar reason to do with your spread or whatever, it does not work for you. Your cash is your responsibility and yours alone, so put the system to work on a demo account until you are sure.
2. Stay Calm
The most important enemy of any trader is his or her own emotions and this is especially true for the individual that wants to learn day trading. If you’re the kind of person who makes bad decisions under stress, you might want to think again about selecting day trading as your method. This is a fast moving world where seconds can count in thousands of greenbacks, so you need to keep a particularly cool head.
Now just about everybody likes to think they are a calm kind of person who would react way under pressure, so even if you’re convinced you’re going to be the world’s number one ice cold trader, test yourself as well as your system in that demo account. If you curve off the system even once or start altering your position size, closing out early, waiting too long etc in demo mode, sorry but you aren’t prepared for real life trading when things will be much more hairy. Work on it.