Whenever someone starts their trading journey, the temptation to join pump and alert rooms may be high. The intense attraction to them might stem from the ‘comfort’ you may think you have following someone who seems ‘reputable’ and is making money day after day.
In reality, you are just making your fear of losing on your own, and your lack of will to carve your own path and work hard to develop your own strategy.
When you rely on alerts to trade, you are not self-sustainable. If the alerts service goes down, you are screwed. Following alerts and signals does not make you an actual trader. In the long run, you will lose as you really don’t have a reliable edge to fall back on.
Today, we are going to cover why it is so important that you develop your own system and stick to it, and actually how you can start creating and piecing together a system and style of trading that suits you specifically.
Your Own Trading Strategy = Self-Sufficiency
If you are just trading alerts and they disappear, you are screwed.
We aim to create self-sufficient traders, who can sustain themselves on their own without spoonfed alerts or a mentor holding their hand while they trade. That is our end goal.
While it is nice to always trade with a mentor or a community, you have to be able to rely on your own instincts and abilities to be successful in the long run. Being able to trade solo and not rely on anyone else telling you plays and setups will allow you to have a safety net to fall back on and will give you a sense of real security. When you achieve that level of proficiency, it is a real job and a reliable source of income.
Natural Trading Instincts
Whenever you develop your own system and strategy, whether you realize it or not, you are piecing together a system that fits your natural instincts and personality traits.
Every human is different, and every mind thinks differently. As a trader, you want to play to your strengths. If you are super patient, then swing trading may be right for you, and as you learn you will naturally incorporate and gravitate towards longer swing trading strategies as a result. If you are a very impatient person, you will find yourself seeking out, trading better, and implementing scalping/day trading strategies.
If you take the time to create your own system as opposed to just following alerts, you will find that the strategies you incorporate will flow better with your natural abilities, meaning you will inherently trade those setups better since you aren’t forcing yourself to adapt to a different personality trait.
At Bulls on Wall Street, we teach traders a wide variety of strategies and help them incorporate the right ones that fit them into their system. That is what we do differently. Our student Kelsey adapted our strategies to her own trading style:
How Do I Develop My Own Strategy?
Developing your own strategy and system can seem daunting at first. But, that is what we are here for.
Before we dive in, save this graphic. It will come in handy soon.
To develop your own strategy, you have to break things down one by one. You have to realize that there are many different times of day to trade, types of stocks to trade, styles of trading, etc.
Let’s outline some of the key categories of trading and stock behavior you need to be aware of when making your decisions:
Times of Day To Trade:
- At the Open (Morning)
- Midday (Afternoon)
- End of Day (Late Afternoon)
Styles of Trading:
- Swing Trading
- Day Trading
- Scalping
Types of Stocks:
- Small Caps
- Mid Caps
- Large Caps
- Volatile Stocks
- Non-Volatile Stocks
Types of Trading:
- Short Biased
- Long Biased
- Mixed (No Bias)
Types of Stops:
- Mental
- Hard
These are just a few categories, aside from patterns, which we teach a bunch of.
Now, you really want to sit and look over that list, and think of what type of person you are.
Are you patient?
Are you impatient?
Can you sit through volatile price swings?
Does overnight risk make you anxious?
When you think about your end goal as a trader, how do you want to feel and what do you want to be doing? If you want to be as stress-free as possible and trade for only a few hours a week, then swing trading non-volatile large caps and using hard stops/entries is the way to go. If you want to be in front of the screen all day every day and are very impatient but can push size with no problems, then scalping/day trading volatile small caps and mid-caps may be your path.
Once you decide what type of trader you want to be, what stop methods you will use, and what types of stocks you want to trade, the next step is just learning pattern after pattern, which is where we come in. You’ll want to learn as many patterns as you can, backtest them, and test them in your system. Over time, you’ll find certain patterns that work best for you on the types stocks you look trade.
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