As discussed in the previous article, trust in your strategy and confidence in yourself are necessary components to developing the discipline to stick to the plan. Apart from deliberate practice and constantly tracking the results of your plan under live market conditions, there are several more ways to develop and maintain confidence in your trade plan.
Having confidence in your plan means that you can focus on executing trades if market conditions confirm an entry and on managing your positions properly. This allows you to isolate negative thought patterns that could cause you to doubt your trading strategy and abandon your plan altogether.
One way to maintain confidence in your trade plan is to focus on the process rather than the profits. Quite too often, traders get blinded by the potential gains or losses, and this can negatively affect their decision-making. Some wind up closing trades too early instead of holding on according to their trade plan when they don’t want to forego any paper profits. Lack of confidence in one’s trade plan can also lead to exiting too early when signs of losses are seen instead of giving the trade enough breathing room.
Losing streaks can also hurt your confidence when you are too zoomed in on the profits. Instead, look to build your trading discipline by repeating processes as outlined in your trade plan and you might be on a better track to achieving consistent profitability. Remind yourself that losses will happen every now and then, but what’s more important is to develop the proper mindset in achieving longer-term success.
Consistent practice is another way to enhance your trading confidence, as this will put you in better sync with the markets and have a clearer idea of how your trade plan fares in various conditions. From there, you can determine what kind of adjustments you need to make both in the execution or risk management side. With that, you feel more assured that your trade plan can be able to withstand changing market conditions, along with your trading psyche.
Being more optimistic, as cliché as it may sound, can also help boost trading confidence. Looking at the brighter side of things and giving yourself a pat on the back when you’ve made a good trading decision can also be healthy for your trading psychology. Accept that mistakes will happen at one point or another but you should also be able to reward yourself when you stick to the plan.
Not all good trading decisions lead to huge profits, but you should be able to chalk this up as a notch in your favor. By letting yourself acknowledge the good decisions you’ve made and the instances when you followed your trade plan, you are encouraging positive thinking, which will help you trust yourself in the next trading decisions that you make.
With enough trading confidence, you can be able to make probabilities work better in your favor. You can work on adding to positions or increasing your risk as you continually develop your skills and trust in your trade plan. You can expand to more currency pairs and tweak technical indicators to suit different markets as you gain expertise and confidence in your current approach. The next article will discuss further the various ways to enhance your trade plan.
