Trading As A Business

 The ideas behind “treating trading like a business” are very important to get you on the right track and after we have taken a look at the different aspects, I am sure you will get some ideas on how to take your trading to the next level and treat it more like a business.

 As a trader, your setups and your strategies are your products. Your setups are a set of rules and triggers to help you find potentially profitable trades. Whether your setups consist of classic patterns, indicators, pure price action or a combination doesn’t matter here.

What is important is that YOU must be the expert in your setups and patterns. You must know every little detail, when the setup works best, during which market conditions it doesn’t work, in which markets and timeframes to use it, how to improve the odds, how to set stops and pick targets, when to move stops and how to manage trades, when to add to a position or take some off the table, when to stay out, etc.

So , really commit. In my trading, for example, I trade very specific patterns and most of my trades look very similar. This comes from years of specializing in only those setup types. For years I have been looking for the same things, patterns and price clue every single day, without deviation.

Losses are costs and a part of doing business

We have all heard this phrase and I hate it. Why? Because it has lost its meaning.

Every business has costs and you need to buy material, build plants, hire workers and invest in research and marketing. But for a business, it only makes sense to spend money if you’d expect to get a return on your investment. If you hire someone without skills, blow your marketing money for the wrong target audience, buy overpriced and useless material or purchase a private jet although your company is barely profitable, should you really look at those costs as a part of doing business`?Well, obviously not.

Yes, losses are part of trading but there are losses and then there are losses.

Losses are only good if you have followed your rules and most people lose because they don’t have an approach or break their rules. Those losses are not part of trading and your trading business.

A business usually always has a plan, businessmen know what their goal is, what their objectives are, they are prepared, they analyze costs and opportunities and they also analyze past projects and keep accurate numbers of everything that goes on.

A trader must have a plan before he starts his trading to avoid being just reactive. I sit down every weekend and every morning and I analyze all my Forex pairs, I look at the timeframes that I trade and then I create my trading ideas. I know when I want to get in, when I stay out of a market, what the price action has to look like for me to get interested and what a no-trade scenario is. For that, I use my trading plan and I also use price alerts to stay on top of things.

This is only possible, though, if you know your products and services a.k.a. your setups and strategies. It all ties together.

Once done with my trading, I write all my trades in my trading journal. I analyze how I followed my plan, if I missed something, where I went wrong, what I did well, how I could have made more money and how I could have minimized losses.