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Step 4: Ongoing Development

A crucial part of your whole trading business is to spend time on your ongoing development. This includes all of the first three steps, periodically looking at yor business goals and increasing them if necassary, continuously working on your personal development especially on areas you know need work, and always looking to tweak or fine tune your system where needed. But I have left the most important part to last because I know that the most serious will have made it here, and this is to make your list of golden rules. These are your rules, and your rules alone. They will include rules for trading, living, sleeping, eating, social, spiritual and so on.

What are your Golden Rules? Even though going through all the steps you have written down things of importance, it is a very good idea to write down the most important rules of all and place them in a prominent spot. So go back through the last 3 steps and write down the most important parts of each. For example, in your business plan you have written a business mission, and it might be rule of yours to read this out to yourself before trading, without fail. You might also have a rule to read out your goals and visualize achieving them.

As part of your self analysis, if you have found that there are some issues you need to work on, especially if they require some daily attention, then one of your golden rules might be to make sure you have seen to that need before you even turn on the computer. Your trading plan is bound to breed plenty of golden rules, but one of the most important of all sholud be 'no signal, no trade' and this goes without question. Another would be 'I will never risk more than $x per trade.'

Some examples could be -

I will exercise before trading
I will eat before trading
I will not trade until I have seen to the kids
I will not trade until I have made up a plan for how I'm going to trade this trade
I will only look for trades after the the European open
I will not move my stop loss unless my plan says so
I will never close out a running position, the market will always take me out
Before and after each trade I will analyse with extensive notes and charts
I will never blame the market
I will not trade if I feel tired or ill

These are just examples, but if you have done the first three steps properly, you should have a very good idea of what rules are most important to your success. Make yourself accountable to a trusted friend or loved one and share your rules with them.

How will you record your trades? In step 3, you will have made a list for analysing your trades. Now you need a systematic way of filing them. Date your trades and then file them for easy access.

How will you monitor your trading? Are you going to check on your past trades daily, weekly, monthly? There is no right or wrong answer, but what is right for you will be determined by the amount of time you have available and also the level of belief in your own trading as a trader, and in your own system. If your just starting out, you will find that you may need to check on your past trades daily until it becomes a habit that requires less and less effort. You should also monitor how often you follow all of your golden rules, all of your trading rules and so on. It's a business, so treat it like one.

Where will you get inspiration from? I love inspiration. Whether it's listening to an inspiring teacher, world leader, music, mentor or even watching an underdog win in sport, I love it. It fuels me, and if you get a buzz from the same sort of thing, you should make a habit of exposing yourself to inspiration as often as possible. Whatever gets you going, keep letting it. Life is meant to be enjoyed and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. We were not put on this planet to struggle, and if people spent half their time realizing this, people like me wouldn't have to write pages and pages of stuff like this. Not that I don't enjoy of course as I do, but I think you get my drift. If your feeling lousy at the minute, then right now is not the time to trade, but rather the time to do something you love. Get your feel good juices flowing first and then trade.

How often will you seek mentorship? Seeking mentorship doesn't mean calling up your hero, the market wizard. Most of my mentors I haven't met yet. If you have books, CD's, DVD's, any forms of training materials on trading that give you more insight, inspiration and education, then they are an important part of your arsenal. These are the materials you turn to from time to time, especially when you need to fine tune your method, plan or even yourself. It's important to actually set your self some medium to long term goals that involve reading, watching and even attending seminars for the purpose of keeping your mind sharp and also nourished.

If you'd like to find out about a program that takes you through every step of creating a profitable trading business, including the assistance of the traders who created the program visit: Pentagonal Trading

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