Taking Your Trading To The Next Level

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Round-the-clock activity

This exercise is designed to help the experienced discretionary trader take their trading to the next level. This excercise is not for the new trader. This not for the weak. You should already be a confident trader before attempting this exercise.

The activity consist of trading continiously around the clock -- so you want to put in a 10 to 12 hour day -- or as much as you can. The rules are that you must take new trades constantly and you must use a rather tight and fixed stop loss. There is no waiting for setups. If you have a setup, you can take it but even if you don't you have to keep trading. For obvious reasons, I only recommend one to do this on the simulator. You have to really try to make as much as possible for it to work. No matter how much you are up, you have to keep trading. You could even try to do this in 2 markets or with 2 NinjaTrader charts on the same market. As much as possible, you want to be making decisions and placing trades constantly.

You want to do this for 15 to 30 days for the full effect. You should probably set a profit objective of at least 2x to 4x what you think possible. What will tend to happen is you'll have some good trades that you recognize as such but much of the rest of the time, you'll be forced to take marginal trades which will eat away at any profits. But what should happen is you'll start to identify those good trades better and better. You must use a semi-realistic/realistic fill engine (not a touch fill obviously).

The goal of this activity is to help the trader recognize when they have a real opportunity versus the more marginal opportunity, as well as to learn to trade marginal opportunities better. What you make or lose isn't really important but you have to try to make as much as possible for the task to be beneficial. No matter how much you make, you have to keep trading.

After you complete this exercise, I advise not to trade for at least 2 weeks. You have to take a complete break from trading and a rest for the brain to re-organize this information. After the rest, you should find it much easier to recognize when you have a really good trade.
 
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