Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Reviewing your trades

Reviewing your trades consistently is a must if you want to be a great trader. It will not hurt you to take ten minutes a day to see how your portfolio has been doing.

The first thing you will probably look at is how much money you made or lost. While this is an important part it should not affect your decisions.

You should not decide to get out of a trade because you have made money and are afraid it might turn against you. This can lead to getting out of profitable stocks too soon, which is a very bad thing.

You should also not get upset if you are losing money and just get out because you had a bad day in the market.

What you should look at when you are reviewing your trades is where your trades are now? Have they hit your stop or target? Do you need to set your stop up? What should you do to follow your trading rules? Remember successful traders trade their systems.

Another thing you should be looking at is you can improve. Maybe you will find your system works well as it is. But maybe you will find it works even better when a certain oscillator coincides with your current rules. If that’s the case think about testing that system out with the oscillator.

Clearly reviewing your portfolio can be a big help, but how often should you do it? Well an average trader trades stock on day by day bases. If you trade like this you should check your portfolio daily.

But this is not true for all traders. You can always set your chart so that every week or month will be counted as 1 candlestick as opposed to every 1 day. In this case you should check your trades after every 1 candlestick.

For more information on how to trade in the stock market visit http://www.stocks-simplified.com

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