Course 8 Intermediate

Developing as a Trader

Styles, strategies, plans, journals, psychology, testing and the performance numbers that tell you whether an edge is real.

0 of 14 lessons

Module 1: Styles and strategies

1
Trading Styles
A trading style is defined by how long you hold a trade: scalpers hold for seconds to minutes, day traders for minutes to hours and close before the session...
2
Building a Trading Strategy
A trading strategy is a fixed set of rules that says what market condition you trade, how you enter, where the stop and target go, how much you risk, and when...
3
Entry, Exit and Filter Rules
Entry rules decide when a setup becomes a trade, exit rules decide when a trade ends, and filter rules decide when the strategy does not trade at all. Of the...
4
Writing a Trading Plan
A trading plan is the document that governs everything around the strategy: what you are trying to achieve, how much capital you risk, which strategy you trade...
5
Keeping a Trading Journal
A trading journal records every trade with its setup, entry, exit, size, result and the reasoning and state of mind behind it, and it is the tool that turns...

6
Fear, Greed and FOMO
Fear, greed and the fear of missing out are the three emotions that most often override a trading plan. Fear closes winners early and stops you taking valid...
7
Revenge Trading and Overconfidence
Revenge trading is trading to recover a loss rather than to follow a setup, usually larger and sooner than the plan allows, and it is the single most...
8
Loss Aversion and Discipline
Loss aversion is the tendency to feel a loss roughly twice as strongly as an equal gain, and in trading it produces the classic pattern of taking small profits...

9
Backtesting and Forward Testing
Backtesting applies a strategy's rules to historical prices to see how it would have performed, and forward testing applies them to live prices, on a demo or...
10
Demo Trading and Sample Size
A demo account is where a strategy is forward tested before money is at stake, and sample size is how many trades it takes before the result means anything....

11
Win Rate, Average Win and Average Loss
Win rate is the share of trades that make money. Average win is the mean profit of the winning trades and average loss the mean loss of the losers, best...
12
Expectancy and Profit Factor
Expectancy is the average result of a trade, calculated as win rate times average win minus loss rate times average loss, and it is the single number that says...
13
Drawdown and Recovery
Every strategy with a positive expectancy still spends a large part of its life in drawdown, below its last equity peak, because losing streaks are normal....
14
Continuous Development
Trading is a skill that is never finished, because markets change and so do you. Continuous development means reviewing the journal on a schedule, changing one...

Every lesson's knowledge check plus a few extra questions, scored with feedback. Then continue to the final assessment.