Ten Principles to Carry Forward

[Fairman]

Ten Principles to Carry Forward

After four hundred and fifty briefings, a handful of ideas matter more than the rest. Here are ten that hold up.

First, risk comes before everything. Survive first, because survival is the condition for any edge to matter. Second, size from the stop, never the other way. The market sets the stop, and your risk rule sets the lot size.

Third, costs are real. Spreads, commissions, swaps, and slippage decide whether a small edge exists. Fourth, expectancy beats win rate. Judge strategies by average R, drawdown, and sample size.

Fifth, evidence beats stories. Test ideas, record results, and distrust screenshots, slogans, and certainty. Sixth, process comes before outcome. A good decision can lose, and a bad one can win.

Seventh, simplicity travels well. A few tools you understand outperform a crowded chart. Eighth, context matters more than patterns. Levels, trend, volatility, and events give meaning to any signal.

Ninth, you are the variable. Sleep, stress, and discipline show up in the numbers, so manage them as seriously as the strategy. Tenth, protect yourself. Choose regulated brokers, secure your accounts, avoid hype and shortcuts, and be wary of anything that promises easy money.

Underneath all ten lies patience. The skills compound slowly, and the traders who last are usually those who treated trading as a craft, with records, routines, and humility.

Use this series as a reference, not as a script. Test what applies to you.

Practical step: pick the three principles you break most often, and write one concrete rule for each.

[Fairman]

You are the variable is the one I'd underline. Most of my worst weeks lined up with bad sleep or stress outside trading, not with the market doing anything unusual. Once I started logging sleep hours and a simple stress rating from 1 to 5 in the journal, the pattern was hard to ignore. Rule breaks were much more common on days after less than six hours of sleep. Now I have a rule: after a bad night, half size or no trading, especially for the US session in the afternoon when I'm already tired. It's not exciting advice, but it probably saved more money than any strategy tweak I made that year.

[PTScalper]

You are the variable is the one I'd underline. Most of my worst weeks lined up with bad sleep or stress outside trading, not with the market doing anything unusual. Once I started logging sleep hours and a simple stress rating from 1 to 5 in the journal, the pattern was hard to ignore. Rule breaks were much more common on days after less than six hours of sleep. Now I have a rule: after a bad night, half size or no trading, especially for the US session in the afternoon when I'm already tired. It's not exciting advice, but it probably saved more money than any strategy tweak I made that year.

Time to time you need to take vacation and rest from trading.
Thats why i trade in forex trading series in 4-6 weeks and after that i relax.

Its not possible to trade everyday all day long.

Plus sport works greatly (Running, Mountain biking or just pure walk)

[Fairman]

Picking the three you break most and writing one rule for each is a great way to end. Ten principles is a poster, three rules is a plan. Make the rules specific enough to check. Instead of manage risk, write no position larger than 1 percent and no more than 3 percent open in total. Instead of costs are real, write skip any trade where the spread is over 15 percent of the stop. Then check them in the weekly review with a simple yes or no for each. After a month, the three rules either become habits or show exactly where the problem is, which is useful either way.