4 Tips To Achieve Good Forex Trading Discipline

Trading requires various skills to succeed: technical analysis, understanding of the forex jargon, proficiency in using various tools, etc. Learning these technical skills is not challenging. Given the time and the right resources, anyone can develop these skills. Besides these skills, however, there are some other things that nobody can teach you, such as acquiring trading discipline. There is no guidebook for this. No courses! You have to find your own way to become a disciplined trader.

Finding out what works for you and what doesn’t is a personal journey, and you should be ready to comply with it. But some habits or routines can help you become more disciplined. Let’s discuss four things that can help you become more disciplined or closer to it.

1. Set a Concrete Goal

Setting concrete trading goals has been stressed a lot; however, the majority of traders still fail here.  You can’t place trades randomly, as it only leads to aimless trading, resulting in losses. Therefore, you must establish a set of trading goals to help you trade within a certain layout. This also helps you become more disciplined in trading because you will have something to look after.

Here are a few things that you could do to set concrete trading goals that will make you a disciplined trader-

1. Define Your Objectives: Before setting trading goals, it’s important to define your objectives. What is it that you want to achieve from trading? Traders have a fixed number or a certain percentage in mind. So, based on your skills and expectations, have well-defined long-term and short-term trading goals. If you are a new trader, you can keep your goal simple, such as improving your trading skills. However, keep your long-term trading goals in sight.
2. Set Specific and Measurable Trading Goals: Establish specific and measurable trading goals that can be tracked and evaluated.For example, instead of setting a goal to “make more money,” set a goal to “earn a 10% profit in the next six months. If you are unsure how much you should risk, use a margin calculator, which helps you figure out the right margin to make a decent profit without risking too much capital.  There are other tools as well, which you can use to improve your chances of placing trades more smartly.
3. Set Realistic Goals:  One of the reasons that many forex traders fail is that they don’t set realistic forex trading goals. They have a poor mindset and want to “make a lot of money.” It’s not bad to have big goals, but are you even ready to achieve them? Before you set your trading goals per trade, be aware of where you stand. How much risk can you afford? These few things will help you avoid unrealistic goals, saving you from the frustration and disappointment that come when you fail miserably.
4. Focus on the Process:  Trading is as much a mind game as it is a technical knowledge-based skill. For any trader, it is natural to think about profit while executing a trade. However, if you fixate all your attention on the money, you will never be able to focus on the trading process. Hence, you will fail to execute your plan. Focusing only on the trading process will help you avoid distractions and trade with more discipline.

2. Keep a Trading Journal

A trading journal is more than a book that contains entries for every trade. Rather, it is a chance to work on yourself by realizing your strengths and weaknesses as a forex trader. Using a Forex trading journal can help you become more disciplined, which will lead you closer to your goals.

Below are some of the reasons why every disciplined trader uses a trading journal –

1. Promotes Self-Awareness and Discipline: Keeping a trading journal helps promote self-awareness and discipline among traders. You can analyze your decisions, emotions, and patterns by keeping track of every trade, which can help you make better decisions and exercise more restraint.
2. Provides a Historical Perspective: A trading journal serves as a historical record of trades, summarising all the trades made over a period of time. You can decode this data to review your trading account’s performance, identify successful trades, and determine which currency pairs performed better. Moreover, you can analyze the best profit percentages based on different time frames.
3. Assessing Strengths and Weaknesses: A trading journal can help you assess your strengths and weaknesses. If you review your past trades properly, you can identify patterns, strategies, or setups that work well for you and those that don’t. This self-reflection will enable you to focus on your strengths and work on your weaknesses.
4. Better Accountability and Setting Goals: When you keep a record of everything—your mistakes and successes—you are more likely to work on yourself. In fact, this will make you more accountable for your results. While keeping track of your trades, you can measure your performance and make adjustments as needed with the help of a demo trading account that you can make on MT4 or MT5, depending upon your expertise. If you have just started to trade, then the MT4 trading platform would be a better choice. This accountability and goal-setting process can lead to more focused and disciplined trading.

3. Create and Stick to A Schedule as Part of Your Trading Discipline

Discipline is built on good trading habits. From being a regular trader to trading on time, a disciplined forex trader sets a schedule for his trading and follows it religiously. No matter how the day pans out, they show up! So, if you don’t have a schedule and are not consistent with your trading, you need to fix this.

You can start by defining your daily, weekly, and monthly trading goals. Maintain a chart or spreadsheet to create your trading schedule. And do your best to execute your trades at the same hour. This requires a level of commitment. Traders working full-time or having multiple jobs can face problems with trading on time. However, you should prioritize things and focus on trading every day.

You can create a daily routine that includes time for market analysis, trade execution, and a review of past trades. Stick to this routine as much as possible to develop a habit of disciplined trading. If you want to ease your journey to becoming a more disciplined trader, you can take advantage of technology to help you stick to your trading schedule. You can set alerts and reminders on your trading platform or mobile device to notify you of important market events or trading opportunities

4. Be Patient

Patience is the most coveted virtue among traders. Developed over time, not everyone can keep up with the distractions and disappointments thrown in the way. Nobody is born a trader and becomes a trader in a month. Yet, many traders approach the market to earn desired profits “right now.” This poor mindset is also one of the reasons why many of them quit early. However, if you acquire patience, you can easily become a disciplined and better trader. Below are some useful tactics that you can incorporate into your trading to become a patient and disciplined trader.

• Wait for the Right Opportunities: Patience in forex trading involves the right opportunities. You should avoid impulsive trading decisions and wait for the market to present favorable conditions for your trading strategy.
• Stick to a Trading Plan: Sticking to a trading plan can help you develop patience in forex trading. A clear trading strategy can assist traders in staying committed to their objectives and preventing irrational decisions based on feelings or market noise.
• Track Progress and Learn from Mistakes: Tracking progress and learning from mistakes can help traders develop patience in forex trading. You can check where you are lacking and spend more time on improving them.
• Cultivate Patience in Daily Life: Cultivating patience in daily life can also help you develop patience in forex trading. A valuable life skill – patience, is something you can apply to every skill in your life. Moreover, even the most mundane tasks become interesting if you do things with patience. You can cultivate it by adding simple habits to your life- such as waking up early or working out on time. This way, you can develop the discipline and mindset needed for successful trading.

Wrap Up

Trading is no different from any other profession in the world. You have the opportunity to build a successful career, and you can only do it if you are disciplined about it. In this article, we have shared the top 4 things you can include in your trading to be more disciplined. To keep it short, it all comes down to your goals and how willing you are to achieve them. From small daily habits to being more realistic about your goals, these suggestions will help you look at trading from the perspective of a serious and disciplined trader.