The Risk of Trading: Mastering the Most Important Element in Financial Speculation

CREATING A DEVELOPMENT PLAN

Your development plan consists of all the skills that you need to learn or improve in to enable you to reach your trading goals. As your knowledge and skill base improves, so should your results. At least, that is what the objective of the plan is. Many can argue that your development plan is equally as important as your trading plan, since a trading plan is meaningless if it cannot be implemented effectively. Both plans go hand-in-hand with the development plan activities aligned with a trading plan objective. Successful development simply reduces risk in the ability to implement your plan.

How do we find the areas worthy of the need for further personal development? There are several. The most common source of potential development is derived from your trade journal. In addition to allowing you to make better trading decisions, your valuable time spent assessing trade data also shines a light on areas that need improvement. Consider an example where you had an easy time detecting a particular setup when back-testing but find it hard to do during the live session. One might consider an action plan to investigate the nature of the setup and the possible charting alert tools that can help warn you that a setup is looming. A Fibonacci entry at the 0.618 retracement level might warrant an audio alert set at the 0.50 level. Perhaps you need additional training with your trade journal software or the advanced features that it offers. Placing these items in ...