Join Paul Tuesday-Friday for webinars each week, for details please see the Webinar Calendar.
Today was a break away from one of the days where we go over a particular topic, or lesson, and focused on questions and answers pertaining to the many topics we typically discuss each week.
One trader asked, “If I am trading off a daily chart, does it make sense to find a better entry on the 1-hr time-frame”. The simple answer is, yes. For the beginner, however, this may be a bit challenging to do at first and it’s recommended that you focus on entries and exits on a preferred time-frame. Keep it as simple as possible in the beginning. But as you become more experienced, using this tactical approach is an excellent way of not only establishing better entries but also skewing risk/reward more in your favor. It is important, though, that if moving to a shorter time-frame to take an entry that you don’t lose sight of the bigger picture which got you in the trade in the first place. It is easy to start dialing in too closely on the faster time-frames and lose focus on what originally gave you the signal.
Another trader said they were giving various analysis techniques and strategies a good amount of time to see if it worked before switching to a different approach. However, this person also expressed that they were still losing money with the various approaches. The first question is, if a methodology isn’t working and you’re unprofitable, were you in fact following the strategy consistently and also applying consistent risk management? By going through past trades, having a checklist, using a journal; one can identify mistakes that were made in executing their strategy or game-plan. Perhaps you are following a strategy with good discipline, but using inconsistent trade size, thus leading to inconsistent results. So, before ditching one way of trading for another you need to be honest with yourself and find out if it’s the strategy or the execution of the strategy which is the problem.
For the full conversation, please see the video above…
Looking for Ideas? Check out our Trading Guides.
---Written by Paul Robinson, Market Analyst
You can receive Paul’s analysis directly via email by signing up here.
You can follow Paul on Twitter at @PaulRobinonFX.
