End of The Trading Week – What Are You Doing?
Hello Traders,
It is now the end of my trading week and I wanted to ask a critical question:
When the trading week ends, whether it has been a winning or losing week, and you know you will not make any more trades, what do you do?
Most typically shut down the charts, close the platform down, exhale and then walk away.
If it has been a winning week, I’m guessing many of you go for a drink to celebrate your hard work. For a losing week…I’m guessing many of you go for a drink to forget about your mistakes and what you lost.
Instead, I suggest trying another path.
Reviewing the Tape
I noticed a long time ago the best players and athletes spend tens of hours per week reviewing tape. They are looking for what they did well, but also zoning in on their mistakes, so they know what to spend energy on correcting. Ironically, some of the best traders I know do the same.
If you are really passionate about this, and are excited to get back to the chair (win or lose) after the day, week or month – then you’ll come back and work on your mistakes while re-enforcing your successes.
Oftentimes, the difference between a successful and unsuccessful trader, is doing all the little things which add up to a big result. Taking time to review your trades and performance is one of those little things that has a far reaching reward.
There are many ways you can do this easily, using programs such as Jing, Screencast or Camtasia, which are all done by TechSmith (some are free).
How I do it is I have a folder, with sub folders for each month and week. After a trade is done, I take a screenshot (or video), color code the trade (green for a win and red for a loss), and put them in the trading folder for that week. Below is a screenshot from a live trade I video recorded, which I shared in the member traders forum.
When trading is done for the week, after getting a brief cup of tea, I come back and sit down for my analysis on what I did well and what I need to work on. Sure, at the end of the week, I’m a bit tired. But I love what I do, and dedicate a ton of energy to becoming a better trader each day, to increase my skill and craft.
What I often find is there are patterns in the price action, or Ichimoku, that repeat themselves in my winners and losers. These patterns get stored in your long term memory and central nervous system.
If you do this enough, when you are trading in real time, you will be better able (and prepared) to spot patterns, either consciously or unconsciously, which will lead to finding and making better trades.
You will spot patterns on whether it’s time to reverse and go short, or time to exit a current trade, or time to enter before a big move. All of this review builds pattern recognition skills which lead to automaticity – a critical tool for success and mastery of any skill.
Trading is a constant learning process – it never ends, and that means a constant effort and fine tuning of your skills. So the next time your week ends, consider taking a moment to review your week of trading, and build a little habit that goes a long way.
Kind Regards,
Chris Capre
Hello, Chris.
Just this morning I decided that during the weekend I would take the whole month of January across a whole lot of currency pairs and start a library of screenshots to build my pattern recognitition.
Interesting how today your end-of-the-week article deals with just that. I plan on making this an ongoing effort in my trading career, one I’m sure will pay off more and more.
I look forward to watching the live trade video in the course forum.
Thanks for the synchronicity and have a great weekend!
Hello Gabriel,
Really good to hear this – it means you are looking to work on the little details which all add up to a big result.
Hope you enjoyed the video of my live trade in the course.
Kind Regards,
Chris Capre
Hi Chris
Love it. Its exactly what I have tasked myself with this weekend.
After simply the best trading week in terms of pip haul, two separate trade that gave the biggest pip hauls in both demo and live account history, simply put more please. So the big questions are:
1. How do I replicate this
2. What will it take to turn this into a habit (thinking “Your Brain, Trading and Finding The Zone” here 🙂 )
3. Which processes are easily repeated that can be turned into simple trade rules
Another task is to absolutely nail R:R, percentage profit and understand why despite an amazing week the percentage profit was so low with over 250 pips snagged for the week. Actual percentage profit was 1.19%. Thought I was using 2% of equity for each trade as well. Clearly a mistake/misunderstanding on my part Lol.
Further:
a) What are the critical factors for this weeks big successes (x2) one of which I posted at Babypips in your thread. (by the way, missed the absolute best entry for that trade so reviewing the factors that contributed to that as well).
b) What are the critical factors for the weak although positive results
c) What should I put in place when the opposite happens
d) Why did I think XZY trade was going to continue in the chosen direction and reversed just prior to the TP target then hit SL (SL already moved to profit) and as just noticed later went to power through the TP target.
Very good suggestion to take screen shots and put in a folder. That’s a habit I must form right away and attach them to the trade in the journal.
Then during the dry times they can be looked at and remembered for the positive feeling gained from great wins. Then with positive reinforcement its
BUCKLE UP BUCKKO…you can do this
Kind regards
Greg AKA Spuzzana
Hello Chris, As always this is a great article and words to live by, I too was one of those people that went out for a drink after the week was over. But now thanks to the price action course i sit down with a cup of blueberry bliss and pineapple kona pop from Teavanna, and go through the week past and gauge what i did wrong, so that i learn from my mistake. You have told me in the past to concentrate and make good trades and i have been doing so. I too what to be able to make a living from trading and i have a new lease on life thanks to you. Kind Regards Ismael Lozada
Hi Chris, greetings from Czech Republic. Im new to this site and i respect your knowledge of trading. I dont know if its possible, but i would like to see an article with some of your lossing trades, as you o over them and explain what you have done wrong and what you might have done differetly and what might have caused your loss.
Hello Patrik,
Greetings from Canada. Am glad you like the site and am finding it useful.
RE: Your Request
So how do you learn to swing a golf club correctly? By observing and following a correct golf swing? Or by observing someone swing the golf club like a baseball bat?
I’m guessing the first answer is what you’ll say. Why is that? Because we ‘learn’ correct technique by observing correct technique.
So watching a bunch of losses with incorrect technique will not teach you how to do correct technique will it?
The only losses we learn from are the ones we did correct technique and executed correctly. Very much like I may shoot a basketball perfectly, but still miss. As long as I’m using correct form, then there is nothing to correct as missed in basketball will happen – just like losses in trading will happen.
So sure, I could show you a loss, but as long as I’m executing correctly technically and mentally, you won’t learn anything new now will you as there would be nothing I would have done differently.
Does this make sense as to why I show trades with correct technique? FYI – the EURUSD trade was only up +18 pips when I did my latest trade video, yet I had no idea if that was going to win or lose.
It turned out to be a winner, but would I have changed anything about the trade if it lost? No because I executed my trading method correctly, so nothing new to learn.
Food for thought and hopefully this gives you a different perspective on this, and why I do things this way.
Kind Regards,
Chris Capre