3 Trading Hacks For Successful Trading

In this post, I share 3 trading hacks & tricks which will help you to succeed as a profitable trader.

Please note that this blog post contains affiliate links.

This video shares 3 different trading hacks taken from the book; Trade Mindfully. These 3 trading hacks will help you to succeed long term as a trader.

The hacks from this video are suitable whether you trade stocks, Forex, options or cryptocurrency. They will help you whether you are a scalp trader, a day trader or a swing trader. This video shares how you can continuously learn & develop in your career as a trader, by utilising the following hacks;

– High-Quality Preparation

– Effective Execution

– Constructive Self-Assessment

3 Trading Hacks For Successful Trading

These three different hacks serve as a beginning, a middle and an end to your trading day. They involve preparing before trading, followed by the trading exercise itself, concluded with evaluating your trading performance.

Each hack contains lots of different tips and skills. Furthermore, they all work together to help you with your continuous learning and development cycle.

continuous learning and development cycle for day trading

Trading Hack #1 High-Quality Preparation

High-quality preparation takes place before trading itself. It combines different tasks to help you to get into the zone, ready for your trading session. Allowing you to trade from a mindful space, responding rather than reacting to the market.

Routine

Routine allows you to feel prepared and to be mindful of your emotions. Following a healthy routine such as; getting up early, exercising and utilising a healthy diet. Allows you to maintain your focus and poise, which will help to prepare you for your trading day.

Exercise is a really important part of the preparation for trading. Regular exercise helps to reduce stress, improve resilience to emotional reactivity and promotes personal discipline. Which are all essential qualities for successful trading performance.

Eating a healthy diet is also important for trading. The neurons in your brain cannot store glucose and the brain needs to get glucose continuously from the bloodstream. This means that you need a steady stream of blood sugars which are attained from a balanced diet. Which will help to avoid energetic crashes from low blood sugars whilst trading, which could cause poor trading decisions.

Mindfulness

You may have come across mindfulness before, which can be utilised from meditation or mindfulness exercises. Mindfulness meditation carried out before trading can really enhance your trading performance.

Simply taking a few mindful minutes before you start trading is beneficial to become aware of any feelings, thoughts or emotions that you have. In addition, you can use mindfulness to step back from those, drawing your attention and focus to the present moment ready to trade.

Furthermore, mindfulness allows you to utilise all of your current skills, knowledge and experience for trading rather than being distracted from any thoughts or emotions which could cause poor trading decisions.

Clarity

It is important to evaluate your goals before you trade. You can simply ask yourself, “Why am I trading”, “Why is it important” and, “How does it fit in with the rest of my life.”

From evaluating these goals help to harness your focus and build that sense of personal motivation ready to trade.

Trading Perspective

Allows you to evaluate your trading plan, to set your goals ready to trade e.g.

What is your plan?
Where do you find your trades?
Build your watchlist
What is the market saying?
What patterns are you looking for?
What strategy are you using?
What money management practices are you following? e.g. capital preservation, scaling out etc.

Incorporate New Learning

This is a good place to evaluate any new learning that you want to incorporate into your trading session. You may have attained these new goals from previous self-assessment sessions or they may be common trading patterns that you are trying to overcome.

These serve as your mission statements for your trading day.

E.g. cut losers and allow winners to run.

The idea behind the high-quality preparation is to focus on the process, preparation and performance, allowing the results to take care of themselves.

Trading Hack #2 Effective Execution

As this is a process-orientated approach, we are focusing on the process itself rather than the results. There are different steps you can take to help with effective execution for trading.

Self-Confidence

I don’t believe that confidence is something that we are all necessarily born with. I think that it is gained from learning new skills, acquiring knowledge and more importantly experience.

You will find that as time passes, the more that you study and develop these skills, the more that your self-confidence will grow. It is important to remember this process and to trust in your own personal development.

If you are at the beginning of your trading journey, a low-risk method for developing crucial trading experience is from practising in a simulator. Whereby you are trading with fake paper money but able to learn and practice your trading skills.

I personally traded in a simulator for around nine months, which was useful for developing computer skills, strategy, technical analysis and trade management.

Trust In Self Confidence

This involves trusting in your decision-making ability.

E.g. On a quiet trading day, sitting on your hands and not trading instead of taking unnecessary trades.

It is important to recognise your ability from drawing upon your skills, knowledge and experience, to know when is best to trade and when is best not to trade.

Emotional Intensity

This is the ability to recognise where your energy levels are at.

E.g. you may need psyching up, to grow your energy ready to trade. On the other hand, if you are too energetic and intense, you may need to take a breath, calm down and centre yourself before trading.

Emotional intensity is all about finding the right balance, to respond to trading rather than react to trading.

Self Talk & Self Soothing

Self-talk and self-soothing are really effective to help to recognise any emotions or feelings that you are experiencing. Which may hinder your trading performance from emotional reactivity.

E.g. As you are about to take a trade, you experience fluttering in your stomach and the physical manifestation of your nerves distract you from trading in the zone. You can use self-talk and self-soothing to reassure yourself. Tell yourself that you are okay to calm your brain that wants to react to your emotions.

Mental Parking

Mental parking is an application of mindfulness and is another great skill to use when you are trading.

Mental parking is the ability to recognise what thoughts may be present and mentally parking them out of the way so that they do not distract you from trading.

E.g. Put those thoughts into a box, out of sight out of mind. You are here to trade.

Mental parking can be applied in trading itself by setting aside a loss and continuing trading from a clear focused mindset rather than an emotional one.

Recite Daily Mission

Finally, when trading it can be helpful to remind yourself of your daily mission that you had in your preparation phase. Remind yourself what it is you want to develop or improve in this trading session.

Trading Hack #3 Constructive Self Assessment

The third part of the learning process is evaluating your trading performance and is equally as important as the previous two trading hacks.

This is a really important step as it takes everything carried out from your trading session and evaluates it.

E.g. any mistakes made, decisions that were made, areas for improvement to learn and develop.

If you are not constantly evaluating your process, you are not going to learn from mistakes and progress along your trading journey.

Diffuse From Ego

Which may sound easier said than done…

E.g. after you have taken a big loss, step away from that loss and access it to learn from, how was the loss made, where can you improve?

This can be difficult but stepping away from your ego and the emotions involved can help you to evaluate your process to improve and develop.

Remember that all mistakes are opportunities to grow and improve

Healthy Self Esteem

This trading hack is about being positive and humble regardless of your performance.

E.g. Not being overly elated after a big green day, as this could lead to overconfidence and a sense of cockiness which may hinder your trading performance in the future.

It’s all about zen trading, about being balanced.

Maintaining healthy self-esteem is being humble on green days. On the other hand, it is also about not allowing your inner critic to give you a hard time on the lower days,

Evaluating Your Process

This involves how you made your trading decisions and how you managed your trades.

E.g. did you make your decisions from an emotional point of view because you got kicked out of a trade, so you got back in. On the other hand, did you follow your strategy and utilise technical indicators to make your decision.

Track Your Trades

Tracking trades is essential for evaluation, I have been tracking my trades since day one of being in a simulator, and I continue to track them now. I use Microsoft Excel to tracks my trades.

Key points to note when tracking your trades are;

Date and time of trade
Position size
Long or short
Entry price
Stop price and target price
Exit price
Entry setup e.g. bull flag
Notes from trade e.g. why did you get out of the trade
Any improvements that you noticed from that trade.

Trading Journal

This can be either a written trading journal or a digital one. I use Trader Vue to make daily trade journal entries, which is a free useful software.

You can make a journal entry before you start trading to note how you feel and what is on your watchlist. Following this, you can add to your entry during trading to note anything important, or you may prefer to make a journal entry after trading.

It can be important to include points in your journal even if they aren’t related to trading, e.g. you didn’t exercise that day, or if you felt unwell. This allows you to see if there are any patterns between daily activities and trading performance.

Remember Perseverance

It is important to sustain your interest and effort over long periods of time despite any adversity and failures. Trading takes time to learn and improve. Therefore you need to keep your mental stamina alive.

It is important to keep going, don’t give up and trust the learning process.

Repetition

Repeat your learning cycle. Each day, remember to:

Carry out high-quality preparation before trading, going over all of the trading hacks shared above.
Execute your trades effectively
Continually evaluate and carry out constructive self-assessment. Note any new learning which will be incorporated in the following day’s preparation session…

Alongside this, you may also decide to study, research, practice, join seminars etc. Carry out activities which will continuously learn, develop and improve your trading performance.

Mental Parking

Finally, it is useful to utilise mental parking once more, to set aside your trading workday and continue with the rest of your day.

It is important to put trading to the side and let your subconscious mind take over for you. Remember to maintain mental wellbeing, as it is important to keep your mental stamina alive.

#3 Trading Hacks For Successful Trading

I hope that these three trading hacks have been useful for you. The trading hacks shared are taken from the book; Trade Mindfully by Gary Dayton.

Trade Mindfully is a brilliant book which focused on trading psychology. If you struggle with your emotions when trading, you should certainly check out this book.

Click here for more information on the Trade Mindfully book!

Meanwhile, below are some further trading resources that you may find interesting. In addition, you can sign up below to receive a free pdf guide on Mindfulness exercises.

Trading View – Charting Platform for trading.
Trade Ideas – Intelligent scanning software to find stocks for trading.
Finviz – Scanners and news website for trading

Looking for some further reading? You may like;

– 6 Stages to make money day trading

– How to find the best stocks for day trading

– My journey as a beginner trader

Until next time!

Emily x

3 Trading Hacks For Successful Trading