Hack Your Trading

A Green Shoot

Today a blip of green flashed across my timing signal. It's the first shade of green seen in a month, but I stopped trading long before that. If there is one thing I have improved upon in my trading it's avoiding the down turn and preserving capital. Having spent the past week going over my trades again looking for inconsistencies one constant has stood out repeatedly, giving too much back during down swings by trading through them and not having enough discipline to just step aside and let things work out. This time when my signals began to flip one by one I didn't wait for them all before stopping myself out of the market and sitting on my hands.

Suffice to say it's been frustrating being benched but instead of being demoralized by the thought that it may be weeks or months before the market aligns properly with myself I opted this time to put the energy into working on my weaknesses and spend more time improving my leaks and working on my analysis and planning, and process and method.

I also realized that I had reams of information scattered all over and that there was a lot of wasted effort and energy that could be streamlined so I started investigating Evernote and scoured Life Hacker and reading books about habit formation and modification to make critical changes to my trading plan. Instead of having notes flying around in journals and spread sheets and word documents I now have a central space to migrate the information so that is much more clearly presented, more easily accessible and mobile, and more focused and to the point.

Often there are things we know we do and wish to correct but the pattern is so ingrained we do so without thinking --habitually. We've heard the phrase “Practice makes perfect,” and Mark Minervini coined “Perfect practice makes perfect,” and I've gone a step further with “Perfect practice makes perfect permanent both good and bad. (completely pilfered from various sources)”  One of the patterns I wished to break was my improper use of a web browser. It is necessary when trading to have access to it, but one of my problems was I was perfecting and making permanent a bad behavior by distracting myself with sites I didn't need to view. I've known for some time this was an issue but never found a means to break the cycle since I had to use it, but how to wisely?

After checking out a Life Hacker book from the library I found my solution- site blockers. Now I have certain sites during certain times locked down and once they were no longer accessible I no longer even typed them in because I knew nothing would happen. Over night the input and stimulus that would other wise cloud my views, opinions and judgments, were dismissed because they were no longer accessible. Immediately one distraction that kept me from using my time more wisely disappeared and hopefully I'll instill a better habit of productivity and not avoidance of what I choose to be doing, but that's another life hack.