Know your trading edge

I often write about the aspects of my own trading that I am struggling with, and the things that I am working on. I think it’s important to stay on top of the things that you are trying improve. However, I also believe that spending too much time mulling over your mistakes can have a negative impact on the way you think. It is important, therefore, to sometimes focus on the things that you are good at and are doing right.

This serves to not only remind yourself that you can do this successfully (and thus help foster and maintainable winning mind set), but also to improve upon your strengths so that they can become even stronger. Winning traders know what their edge is, and they make that edge work to the best of its ability.

So I think the time has come, after so much time working on my weaknesses, to remind myself of the things that I am good at:

Finding high probability trade setups

I have spent a long time studying technical analysis and have become very familiar with it. I have knowledge of many different price patterns, and the theorems on the driving sentiment behind these patterns. I’m also very familiar with different indicators and their applications, and I’m pretty good at identifying areas where the price is likely to stall or gravitate toward.

I have also been around long enough to see over and over again, how many of those patterns either work out or fail. I wouldn’t go as far as calling myself the world’s best technical analyst (that honour goes to Shaun Murison), but I do believe that I am a very proficient technical analyst. This enables me to block out news and other market-related noise, focus on the charts and find high probability setups to trade on daily and hourly time frames.

I keep learning

I adopted an attitude of work to build knowledge first and money second a long time ago and still have that outlook on pretty much most of my endeavours. It may sound super cheesy, but the main motivator for me is not the money. Sure, money is great, but to know that I have achieved to the best of my own ability would be even better.

I also believe this means that I will go on to achieve great things. In order to do that though, I need to learn as much as I can about the world around me and, most importantly, myself.

There is much more to say on this topic actually. So much, in fact, that I could probably talk for an hour about it all. This is great because next week I will be talking about getting trading right at the JSE Power Hour in Cape Town. How convenient?

See you there!

Petri