Case Study, Sofia: Two Hours a Day and a Plan That Fits

[Fairman]

Case Study, Sofia: Two Hours a Day and a Plan That Fits

Sofia is a composite character with a full-time job and two hours in the evening for trading. She tried five-minute charts during her lunch break, and missed setups and made rushed decisions. Her results were poor, with a rule-following rate of 70 percent.

Redesign her plan around her time. Step one, the analysis block: 30 minutes each evening on the daily and four-hour charts, marking zones, reading the calendar, and setting alerts. Step two, an execution block: 20 minutes when an alert fires, to check the setup against the checklist and place orders. Step three, a review block: 10 minutes after each trade, and 60 minutes on Sunday.

Choose the style. Swing trading on four-hour and daily charts, with stops of 40 to 80 pips, positions of 0.1 to 0.2 lots on her 8,000-dollar account at 0.75 percent risk, which is 60 dollars. For a 60-pip stop, risk per lot is 600, and 60 divided by 600 is 0.10 lots.

Pairs: two, EUR/USD and USD/JPY, to keep attention concentrated.

Limits: a maximum of two open trades, a weekly loss limit of 3 percent, and no new trades on Friday evenings.

Expected activity: three to five trades a month. With 200 trades needed to evaluate, she supplements with a historical backtest and replay practice, planning reviews at 30 and 60 trades.

What changes? Her schedule matches her strategy, her stops tolerate noise, and her costs shrink to a few spreads per month.

Lesson: a plan that cannot be executed in your life is not a plan.

Exercise: write your weekly schedule in blocks of time, and match each block to a task.