Best Laid Plans

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Best Laid Plans

By Guest Contributor, Michele Hurlbut

Making Plans

When something doesn’t go as planned, I remember a phrase my grandparents used to say “Best-laid plans of mice and men…” Growing up I didn’t completely understand what that meant as I never heard the rest of the saying “…often go awry”. As an adult, I know all too well exactly what the saying means.

As humans, we like to make plans about all sorts of things. We like to plan what we are going to be when we grow up, what school we are going to go to, where we will live. We like to plan our vacations and our life goals.

And, sometimes those particular plans don’t work out. Something gets in the way of our “best-laid plans” and so we adapt and change our plans. This helps us grow (we hope.) That is what happened today.

Ready to Go Live. . .

I have been practicing my system (the one I shared with you in my last blog post.) Formulating and learning the rules around it. Successfully Sim trading it for quite some time, and I felt it was time to take the next step.

The plan was to get up this morning and move to trading my system in my live account with 1 contract and 1 target. Starting slow and ramping up is a solid plan for risk management and mental preparation.

. . . Or Not

When I wake up to trade, I do a morning routine. I do this without fail every trading day to get me mentally and physically focused and ready to take on the day. This morning, as I was doing my routine, I noticed I was having a hard time staying focused on my process. This routine has been my process throughout my trading career and I have noticed that when I am unable to focus on my routines, my trading day is not good.

So, although I was very disappointed, I decided not to start my live trading today. I did trade but it was in Sim. And again, I proved to myself that trading with live money on these unfocused days does not pay…I ended the morning negative.

I think I only made one trade that truly fit my rules the whole morning.

Best Laid Plans - example bad trades

Permission to Call It Off

As traders, we are our own boss. We can call in sick any time we want but we know it affects our bottom line. Unlike a J.O.B, we don’t have someone else paying for our time so we usually don’t ‘call in sick.’ As business owners, we usually power through these days and then wish we had stayed in bed. We forget that we are people and sometime need to take a day off when we are not at our best.

I hope you all give yourselves permission to ‘call in sick’ when you are not feeling/acting 100%, like I did today. It is important to protect our capital, not to mention our sanity, so we can be successful and live to trade another day.

Great trading everyone and speak with you again soon.

 


 

Join Randy in the next free LIVE Hawkeye Demonstration Room held every Wednesday at 9.30am EST US. You will learn more about volume and volume price analysis and see more examples and live trade setups. It is open to all.

Click this link for more information or to join us in class.

Learn to trade the Hawkeye way.

Randy Lindsey
Hawkeye Traders, LLC

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