10 Things You Can Do Right Now To Build Patience While Trading. #5 Will Change Your Life, As Well As Your Trading.

Patience while trading is one of the most sought after mental commodities for traders. We have compiled a list of 10 ways that you can reign in your impatience and develop more consistent behaviors while trading…

1. Take your finger off the trigger

Unplug you mouse for that matter, if you don’t desperately need it for your strategy to work then UNPLUG IT! Seriously, it will save you from scrolling charts, looking for ideas, flicking through different time-frames and pairs, reading the news. All those things that have nothing to do with your trading system and only serves as a distraction by putting “great new ideas” in your head.  Speaking of minds…

2. Give your mind a break

If you have your system, and you know what you need to do, then give your mind a new job. Give it something else to do like listening to relaxing music. Impatience breeds from an unoccupied mind. But give it a job that is not going to get you in trouble by increasing your impatience.

3. Wait until the close of the candle

If you can incorporate this into your trading system and plan then I highly recommend it. Waiting until the exact close of the candle allows you to focus for short periods of time and rest in between. If you are sitting there trying to watch every tick while trading on a 15 minute chart then you are going to be tempted by every sudden burst in tick action until the candle closes 15 minutes later.

Also If you trade based on candlestick formation, the candlestick doesn’t form until the exact second it closes, so why would you enter any earlier, entering earlier is gambling.

4. Trade a time-frame that suits a) your personality and b) your skill level combined with your personality

a) Some of us are just naturally patient. Some of us can sit and watch the screen and not take any trades during a session. For the rest of us we need to pick a trading time-frame that suits our natural inclination and mental capacity. If you and your brain operate at a hundred miles an hour then and you like immediate feedback then build your trading system off the lower time-frames.

By the way, that doesn’t mean if you like high paced action you should trade the 1 minute or tick charts with no foundation, system, knowledge or experience. Learn your trade.

b)If you are one of those people who love the fast paced action and you are just starting out then trading off the 1 min charts from the get go might not be the best way to develop your patience. It might be better for you to trade off the 15min, the 5 or 10 minute chart to begin with to understand and embed the feeling of patience into your subconscious. Once you have that down then incrementally move down the time-frames and continue to hone your skills and patience.  This will also have the added benefit of helping you to understand the market structure and price movement in relation to different time-frames.

5. Patience is holistic, not trading specific

If you are impatient in life outside of your trading sessions then you will never be patient in your trading business. Before you try to nail your patience while trading focus on how you behave outside of the markets. If you flip out when sitting in a queue, get annoyed at people, partake in road rage, if you cant control you ability to have patience in your day-to-day life then how do you expect to magically setup when your money is on the line? To be patient you must practice being patience in ALL areas of your life. By doing this you are building up new neural pathways and instilling the feeling of patience into your belief system. Plus your personal and family life will benefit greatly from you developing patience.

6. Notice your body language

When you are trading notice how you are holding your body. Is your jaw clenched, are you tapping your foot uncontrollably, are your muscles tense? These are all signs that you are finding the situation you are in as being unsatisfactory. It is like shaking up a soda can, it’s ready to explode. If you can be aware of how your body is reacting while sitting there then you have a spotlight on your behavior and the impatience building. This puts you into a position to be able to remove the sensation of impatience and therefore instilling the feeling of patience. But how…

7. Breathe

Good old fashion breathing. Once you notice unrest take a second and take a deep breath in and out. This simple action could be the difference between profit and loss. I highly recommend that you begin your trading sessions by taking in several deep breaths and focusing on the air going into and out of your lungs. This serves as a basic meditation before your session begins, grounds you to a more peaceful place, enabling you to operate from balance and intuition. If you notice unrest and impatience then come back to the breathing, re-center and re-focus.

8. Wait for your edge

You have spent all that time developing a trading system so that you have a particular edge in the market. So wait for your edge. This sounds logical right, no brainier, a fundamental aspect of trading. It should be but so many developing traders do not do this, they find a better way, convince themselves that their edge is there when it is something completely different. [Tweet “Know your edge and wait for it, that’s all we have to do as a trader.”]

9. Demo practice patience

Open a demo and go into the market and sit and watch your screen. Do not trade, do not fiddle around, sit and watch. Learn to know the feeling of sitting at your computer trading screen and just watching the market with no pressure to be entering trades.

10. Journal your inner dialogue

During your trading sessions take note of your internal dialogue and write down anything that you see as limiting thoughts, feelings or behaviors that come to the surface.  I highly recommend that you do this for every trading session, everyday as part of your trading journal.  You will immediately see what is holding you back in the patience department if you do this.

How do you deal with patience? Let us know in the comments section and if you found this article to be useful please share it with your friends and subscribe to receive free updates.

And in the words of Guns N’ Roses

Sometimes I get so tense
But I can’t speed up the time

You and I’ve got what it takes
To make it, We won’t fake it,

It’ll work itself out fine
All we need is just a little patience

About the Author
Forex Alchemy is your daily source of cutting edge information, tips, tools, articles, analysis from across the Forex trading industry. If you would like to guest post or contribute regular articles on Forex Alchemy then please contact us here.

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  1. Pete M Reply

    Great post Aaron – glad to have you back

    • Aaron from forexalchemy.com Reply

      Hey Pete, good to be back, been busy behind the scenes. Looking forward to bringing regular content so everyone can benefit. Hope to see you around the site.

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  3. forex fury download Reply

    Very educational, many thanks for keeping everyone up-to-date in relation to your investing success.

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