Seven Habits of Successful Day

Traders: A Quick Guide to Profitable

Day Trading Practices
By Andrew Bloom
Founder of Discipline FX LLC
Copyright © 2021 by Disciplined FX LLC

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Disciplined FX LLC is not offering to Buy/Sell
futures, stocks, commodities, cryptocurrencies,
or forex. Futures, stocks, spot currency,
cryptocurrencies, commodities, and bonds come
with significant potential risks. You must be
aware of the risks and be willing to accept them
in order to invest in the futures, stocks,
commodities, cryptocurrencies, and forex
markets. Do not trade with money you can't
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trading are your responsibility alone and no one
else’s.
Table of Contents
7 Habits of Successful Day Traders: A Quick Guide to
Profitable Day Trading Practices
Introduction
Chapter 2: From Teaching Torah Studies to Teaching
New Traders How to Swipe Profit Out of the Markets
A Rabbi, A Chaplain, and a Zen Monk Walk Out of a
Bar...
A Person Plans and God Laughs...
“Fights Problems with Bigger Problems”
There’s Light at the End of the Tunnel
Looking Toward the Future...
Chapter 3: Eight Reasons Why New Traders Fail to
Make Money
1. Trying Everything
2. Jumping from Strategy to Strategy Without
Mastering Any
3. Trading Too Many Markets At Once
4. Letting Small Losses Become Account Wrecking
Balls
5. Failing to Take Profit at a Pre-Determined Target
6. Trading Without a Plan and Routine
7. Trading For Excitement
8. Tweaking The System to Death
Chapter 4: Seven Habits of Successful Day Traders
 1. Trade with a Plan
2. Lose Like a Champ
3. Be Organized
4. Take Responsibility for oneself
5. Love to Learn
6. Follow a System with Discipline
7. Reflect on trades regularly
Conclusion
References
Introduction
What analogies do you associate with day
trading?

Maybe you think of trading as a game of football,

with the bulls and bears (the buyers and sellers,
respectively) pushing up against each other for
control of the playing field.

Or perhaps you think of trading as a game of

roulette, a situation solely dependent on odds
and the ability to make complex, rational
decisions based upon probability.

For me, trading is a game of wrestling.

You might think it’s a match between you and the

market, but actually, it’s a game between you and
the impulsive thoughts and feelings that arise
while you trade.

So less like Hulk Hogan against Andre the Giant

and more like the biblical Jacob wrestling with an
unnamed angel - a metaphor for grappling with
self and responsibility.

These are some of your burly opponents:

Your urge to hold on to your losses.
Your urge to trade a spur-of-the-moment,
untested idea
Your urge to make just a little bit more money on
a single trade

At the heart of it, you are wrestling with your

desire to act impulsively - the reflex to do
something different because the market is
looking uncertain.

Spoiler alert: The market is always uncertain.

Not just for you and me. Markets are always

uncertain for top investment firms. For Wall
Street traders. For billionaires. For Warren
Buffett. For experienced traders and newcomers,
alike.

The goal isn’t to achieve certainty but to do what

we can to stack the odds in our favor with well
thought-out strategies and self-management.

Yes, you must learn how to use charts, read

candlesticks, trade with indicators, use a reliable
strategy, and other technicalities. But once you
have a basic understanding of these things, most
of the work in trading for profit revolves
around behavior management. Trading well
depends on your ability to see your
shortcomings, impulsive desires, and the inner
voice that wants to excessively scold yourself or
doubt your capability. You need to get to a place
where you can hear these thoughts and respond
to them with discipline, encouragement, and
confidence.

Think of a Zen master, calmly watching her

breath while meditating. Without getting caught
up in passing thoughts, she reroutes her focus
and returns to peace in the present moment
when those thoughts arise. Like the Zen master,
you have one job to do while you’re trading: Be
still while the market moves.

How does one stay still, at peace, while the

market moves? You follow your rules to wait for
your signal, take your stop loss, and take your
targeted profit amount. You are unmoved by your
opponents of fear, impulsivity, and greed. You are
disciplined.

How does one become disciplined?

You introduce new ways of thinking about

trading, which replaces thoughts that
stimulate fear, impulsivity, and greed. You
embody these novel thoughts by building
habits that reinforce trading discipline.
The beautiful thing about habits is that the more
frequently you perform them, the easier they are
to do. If you commit to a pattern for a long
enough time, you will find that the action
becomes reflexive, automatic. It requires no
effort to do daily.

But don’t get me wrong. You will continue to

wrestle with yourself each day. That match will
likely persist through the entirety of your trading
career. However, what at first seemed like a
complex, serious challenge will later become a
form of effortless play.

A playful game that you usually win.

“Watch your thoughts, they become your words;

watch your words, they become your actions;
watch your actions, they become your habits;
watch your habits, they become your character;
watch your character, it becomes your destiny.” -
Lao Tzu

A year before I was born, in 1990, a well-

spoken man with a wise heart published a book
that would become and stay a bestseller to this
very day. Its title is The Seven Habits of Highly
Effective People. Stephen Covey, who authored
this book and many others that followed, taught
that the path to success and good relationships in
life can be achieved through a handful of key
daily habits.

Stephen Covey organized these habits into

two categories: those that are internal and
conditioned through one’s way of thinking, and
those that affect how one relates to the external
world. Some of those beneficial internal patterns
include staying proactive and making a vision
and preliminary plan for outcomes before acting
on them. One of the external habits is to make an
effort to first understand others before trying to
get them to see your point of view. Focusing on
these habits can create unprecedented changes in
how a person navigates serendipitous
opportunities and overwhelming challenges.

Like Covey’s framework for the critical

habits of a successful life, a framework of critical
practices for successful trading can transform a
beginner trader or frustrated novice into a
profitable and successful master of trading
markets.

Such a framework involves both the ways

traders think and the ways they behave. For
example, it’s imperative to think of taking stop
losses as winning trades. Losses are an
unavoidable component of day trading. The
sooner one internally accepts this truth, the
sooner one can externally execute a stop loss
every time it occurs. This type of trading outcome
should be praised, not scorned. Perceiving your
pre-planned, losing trades as a win is the right
thinking and being able to take your stop loss
every time it’s hit is the right behavior. When
executed time and again, this way of thinking and
behaving becomes a habit.

John C. Maxwell once said, “You will never

change your life until you change something you
do daily. The secret of your success is found in
your daily routine.” Becoming a consistently
profitable trader will not happen because of one
or two extreme trading events. Instead, you will
progressively make minor surges in your
performance by committing to a pattern of daily,
habitual choices and actions. There will be slip-
ups, mistakes made yet again despite a steady
trend of following your rules, but you will see so
much improvement in the long run, so long as
you persist.

Making a living from day trading is life-

changing. Some traders see an income in one
month that is double and triple the amount most
people make in a year. Who you are now and who
you will become to make trading markets your
personal stream of income are two different
people, albeit with a similar core. Should you
succeed, how much would your circumstances
change if you could put an end to some of your
most pertinent money troubles? Align successful
trading with diligent personal finance habits, and
you will be golden.
And if you fail? Well, at least you won’t be
alone. Many traders lose thousands of dollars,
year after year, in the markets. If you’re self-
aware enough, you’d hopefully stop trading for
good at some point should your trading habits
reflect those of a gambling addiction. However,
suppose you are the highly resourceful person
that I think you are since you are diligently
reading what will hopefully be one of a handful of
trading books that will help you improve your
skills. In that case, I believe your persistence is
likely to pay off.
This book will examine the common
mistakes beginner traders make and seven habits
that successful traders use to return a profit from
day trading. Whether waking up with the NYSE to
trade stocks or aligning one’s trading day with
the close of the London Stock Exchange to trade
Forex (my personal market preference), the
habits that sustain a remarkable trading career
are interchangeable across various exchanges.
The majority of these habits have their roots in
the psychology of developing and maintaining
discipline for high performance. Consistently
reviewing and making adjustments to perform
these seven habits will help you profit from day
trading and grow as a confident and disciplined
trader.
While you may feel overwhelmed by how
much you think you need to learn and do to grow
as a trader, implementing just these seven habits
can help provide a solid framework for building a
successful trading career, no matter where you
are on your trading path. Let’s get started!
Test Yourself!
1. “Once you have a basic understanding of
[technical analysis], most of the work in
trading for profit revolves around _____.”
2. “You have one job to do while you’re
trading: __________.”
3. “It’s imperative to think of taking stop
losses as _____.”
Reflection Questions:
1. Whether “good” or “bad,” what are some of
the habits you currently do each day when
trading?
2. What is one of the “burly opponents” of
trading you find yourself wrestling with
the most often?
Test Yourself! Answers:
1. Behavior management
2. Be still while the market moves
3. Winning trades

If you’d like me to deliver more insights

into trading discipline and behavior to your inbox
each week, be sure to head over to
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e-mail on the newsletter sign-up form located on
the bottom of the home page!
Chapter 2: From Teaching Torah
Studies to Teaching New Traders
How to Swipe Profit Out of the
Markets
Contrary to the wise advice to only trade
what you can afford to lose, I began trading out of
sheer desperation for income and some sort of
work I could easily do from home. Let me explain.

A Rabbi, A Chaplain, and a Zen Monk Walk Out

of a Bar...
The first time I ever traded a security was
in 2015. It was through a recently released app
targeted for young and new traders, like myself,
who wanted a platform so simple that even Steve
Jobs would approve. Its name? Robinhood. This
was a fun and exciting hobby for me while I was
going to graduate school and earning meager
wages from a few part-time gigs.
During a hike in the woods where I was
living in Philadelphia, I told a friend about my
newly discovered interest in the stock market. He
mentioned the trending hype around 3D printing
as a viable option for a sector. So, I bought some
shares from a developer of 3D printers. In a
couple of weeks, out of sheer luck, I was up
$5,000. Woo hoo! This began my hobbyist
intrigue with stocks.
 Now, I wasn’t attending any ol’ graduate
school program.
Of all the possibilities for a career, I was
training to become a rabbi. From rabbi to day
trader? Yes, a bit of a big pivot, but I didn’t
exactly plan it that way.
I wanted to become a clergy person and
help people navigate their experiences with
Judaism. I am fascinated by and empathetic
towards those who choose to explore religion
and the challenging questions that come with
having a spiritual way of life while also wrestling
with the outright trauma and turmoil that comes
with being a human being.
My interest in and study of religion and
philosophy didn’t revolve around only Judaism
but also Buddhism, Christianity, and ethics. I am
intrigued by the core, overlapping beliefs and
principles of various religions that people follow
to find peace in existence.
During my college years, I went to a small
Jewish university in the Los Angeles area while
also attending regular group meditation sessions
and lectures at a couple of different Zen centers
around LA. I was drawn to Buddhism as a
teenager because of its emphasis on alleviating
suffering via a discipline of meditation, self-
reflection, and conditioning of one’s heart to be
respectful and compassionate towards others.
Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been attracted to
challenges that require strict, even stoic ways of
thinking and being. I find this funny because my
behavior and personality through my teenage
years and early twenties were outright turbulent
and impulsive.
A Zen teacher of mine once stated, “No one
comes to Buddhism because their life is fine.”
Its tenets and practices can offer a kind of
healing salve to the scars that come with life’s
difficulties. There were many scars and aspects of
myself I wanted to mend and change. As a
teenager lacking healthy coping skills while
wrestling with severe depression, I turned to
alcohol and drugs to numb myself.
I was living a juggling act, as I was going to
school and loving academia, but also routinely
making choices that drew me closer and closer to
trouble. In the morning, I could diligently work
on a research paper as I hit my daily writing
goals. Yet, at night, I would wind up in wild and
risky situations (while inebriated) like finding
myself getting a home-made tattoo in some
dude’s apartment. Or taking a piss on Sunset
Boulevard at four in the morning. I was balancing
between the pursuit of a successful future and
self-annihilation.
Some of you reading this may also have an
inner troublemaker. I think there are aspects of
trading that attract those of us who thrive on or
enjoy a bit of chaos. The trick is to make sure that
the troublemaker gets heard, but does not
dominate your life in harmful ways.
Meditation helped me to finally develop a
loving, wise voice in my head that could self-talk
my way into better behavior and more
compassionate thinking. Zen Buddhism, in
particular, is quite practical and can complement
other religious practices without the dogma that
most people fear from participating in religion.
Between the support I received from my rabbis,
teachers, friends, AA, and the sangha (the group I
meditated with), as well as the epiphanies that
came with “waking up” to my own sense of
responsibility (or the lack thereof) I was able to
get sober and completely change the trajectory of
my life.
Nearing the time of graduation, I had three
paths to choose from: I was accepted to a
graduate program in Comparative Religion. I
contemplated spending a few years meditating
and working at a Zen Buddhist monastery. Or I
could further my studies and pursue the path of
becoming a rabbi. In the end, I chose door
number three while also maintaining a
commitment to Zen Buddhist studies and
practices.
 It was my intention to become a university
Hillel rabbi, helping college students have access
to Jewish learning and support on campus. The
following years after my own college experience,
I lived in Jerusalem for a year and a half while
studying Hebrew and ancient texts. I invested all
of my resources into this career choice and, at the
advice of a professor, sought to spend at least a
full calendar year in “the Holy Land,” living deep
in the culture of halachic law.
Living in Israel was both life-changing and
complicated. I made a group of friends who were
more interested in having philosophical dinner
conversations and playing fun board or party
games than going to bars and clubs. Exploring the
ancient cities and adapting to the culture
cultivated a strong sense of adventure and
curiosity within me. I found new ways to enjoy
life, to process difficult emotions and fears, and to
develop social skills without the help of liquid
courage.
However, my stay in Jerusalem coincided
with war and political turmoil, although this is
not a rare occurrence for the region. This
experience forever changed my gratitude for
having an American passport and the privilege of
having citizenship in a relatively safe, free, and
prosperous country, despite its own problems
and need for change.
 Afterward, I was accepted into a rabbinical
school in the Philadelphia area and continued my
studies there. It takes about five years to become
a rabbi. I was also pursuing a joint degree with
another college to obtain a master’s in Nonprofit
Management. I felt like I had finally arrived at
adulthood.

A Person Plans and God Laughs...

I was on the path to becoming a
professional in the world of Jewish education and
chaplaincy when, in my second year of studies, I
started experiencing some alarming symptoms.
One fall evening, I woke up experiencing a hot
flash. I didn’t think much of it. I just popped some
Benedryl and promptly went back to bed. Every
consecutive night that followed for the next four
years, however, would result in the same
sensation of overheating and insomnia.
After the first few months, the flushing not
only happened multiple times at night but also
multiple times during the day. The insomnia was
so bad that I began missing my classes and the
sessions with the Torah studies group I led with a
cohort of senior citizens, as I needed the morning
hours to catch up on sleep.
The flushing episodes then increased in
frequency and duration of time. During the
winter of that first year, I could walk out in the
snow wearing only a t-shirt and shorts.
Something was seriously wrong. I started seeing
doctors and specialists, with nearly all my blood
tests coming back normal. I tried to maintain my
everyday existence as much as possible, but I
knew my health was too out of control to manage
multiple responsibilities. The stressors
increased: I wasn’t making enough money to
cover my expenses, (and thus, growing deeper in
debt), my girlfriend and I broke up, leaving me
with extra rent, and on top of all of that, I needed
to go back to Israel to take classes over the
summer to meet graduation requirements.
During that trip, I decided to make the
most of the experience and visit a few other
countries along the way. My first stop was
Reykjavik in Iceland. I slept maybe a total of nine
hours between the flight and my three days in the
country. I was so overheated and unable to rest.
Stops in Oslo, Norway, and Poland were just as
tricky. Oddly enough, I didn’t feel fatigued while
traveling, just anxiously concerned about my
health. When I overheated, I seemed to be
running on adrenaline and numb to my body’s
fragility.
Early signs of memory loss and confusion
percolated this experience, though. By mistake, I
arrived at the Philadelphia airport a day earlier
than my actual flight. I would have also missed
my flight from Norway to Poland if I hadn’t
decided to head to the airport in Oslo early
enough to find out that I was at the wrong
airport. Leaving Poland, I left my laptop in my
hotel, never to be seen again. This wasn’t like me.
When I lived in Israel, I did my fair share of
country-hopping (I have quite a travel bug), I also
consider myself a fairly organized person, and
never had I experienced problems like this.
In the end, I didn’t complete my studies in
Israel. Instead, I returned to my native Southern
California in an attempt to visit several doctors
while staying at my mom’s house. On my flight
back, I had a day-long layover in Berlin. During
the short flight from Tel Aviv to Germany, I
attempted to nap and then experienced my first
“half-awake” sleep - my heart rate slowed, my
body relaxed, I was all but asleep, but my mind
was awake and able to consciously monitor my
rest despite how exhausted I felt. From here on, it
would be years before I could tell whether I
experienced deep sleep at night or not. I’m sure
you know that sleep deprivation is used as a form
of torture - it was a living hell I couldn’t escape.
By then, I knew I needed to go on medical
leave and get expert help. I tried to stay with
some friends in Philadelphia just in case my
condition improved and I could continue my
studies afterward. Still, by the new year, there
was no progress, and I moved back in with my
family in California.
I saw more doctors and specialists, I
participated in an undiagnosed patient program
with a top hospital in Los Angeles. When these
endeavors failed, I met with nutritionists and
functional medicine doctors. While we found
tweaks to abate some of my symptoms, my body
and mind were still a wreck and there was no
final diagnosis apart from a vague case of
“Autonomic Dysfunction”.
After years of no sleep, I lost my ability to
drive, as I couldn’t properly focus on the road,
and my sight declined - I was stuck in constant
tunnel vision with minimal to no peripheral
vision, experiencing terrible fatigue, and
suffering short-term memory loss. I was even
interviewed for that one particular Netflix show
about undiagnosed cases but it never went past a
second interview. By then, however, I learned not
to be bothered by disappointment.
Now, who here in their 20’s has managed
to save a multi-year emergency fund, just in case
your health surprisingly falls apart and you’re
unable to work? No hands? Not one? There are
certain circumstances that one cannot prepare
for, no matter what kind of diligence you take.
This chronic health issue became my
personal Black Swan event, one of those
experiences that are unforeseeable, rare, and
capable of completely redefining what “normal”
looks like. Because I didn’t have a proper
diagnosis, a claim for disability seemed unlikely.
There are also financial restrictions as to how
much money or assets you can legally hold while
receiving federal disability. I wasn’t ready to give
up my car or my stocks. My illness is invisible: I
look like a healthy guy on the outside, muscles
still taut from years of maintaining a lifting
program. But on the inside, I live in a constant
cloud of confusion and fatigue.
Because of my unusual sleep patterns and
brain fog, I knew I couldn’t be trusted to maintain
a job, even if I worked from home. Whatever I
could do for income had to be done in my own
time and under my own decision-making power.
It felt like I was making “last resort”
decisions left and right. In order to avoid having
to make payments on my student loan debt, I was
able to continue and graduate with my MS in
Nonprofit Management since the courses were
offered online.
After that, I was accepted into a Ph.D.
program in Business, because my credentials in
nonprofit management qualified me for the
position. This gave me some confidence and
something to focus on besides my health. I
wanted at least one thing to feel like it was going
right in my life. I love academia and I am
passionate about research and writing. However,
I still needed to find ways to pay for my medical
bills and living expenses. That’s when I
discovered the world of retail day trading.

“Fights Problems with Bigger Problems”

(- Elliott Smith, Baby Britain)
One summer night, while I was
overheating and having a particularly severe case
of insomnia, I was reading a book of interviews
from different millionaires as to what skills and
habits helped them make money. Reading self-
help books has been a hobby of mine since my
college days, so it wasn’t unusual for me to pick
this book as a way to pass the witching hour.
However, I just so happen to come across a
chapter by a famous Forex trader.
I couldn’t have stumbled upon a more
inspiring trader than Rob Booker - he’s
entertainingly sarcastic, can dish out a little
tough love, but his actions are tremendously
humble in the ways he runs his trading business
and donates his time and money to charities.
Something about the way he described dropping
his legal career so he could trade currencies
resonated with my own drastic turn in life and
career circumstances. The following morning, I
started researching and using free educational
resources to learn as much as I could about
Forex.
When I started trading, I felt then as you
do now: excited, eager to find a quick and be-
your-own-boss way to make money, yet also
overwhelmed by the variety of advice and
information available. My first actions included
picking a YouTuber whose track record and style
seemed reliable, watching as many videos as I
could while gathering notes, and taking
immediate action on anything important he said.
I also bought a few books that were more
structured than a mishmash of videos.
In the beginning, I couldn’t quite wrap my
head around Forex. I found a free course that was
highly comprehensive but very dense. I took
notes and made my way through the curriculum,
only to find myself overwhelmed by all the
different indicators, price patterns, and lingo. I
ended up moving back and forth between stocks
and Forex since I had more familiarity with the
former than the latter.
“Okay,” I thought to myself, “I got this - it’ll
just be a few months until I work out the kinks,
get a feel for the process, and then make at least
40% a month as I build up my account to that
$25,000 goal for ultimate day-trading status. I
probably have an advantage because I know I’m
decent at keeping a routine and doing as much
research as possible to figure out DIY projects.
This should be a piece of cake, right?”
So young, so naive.
During my first year of trading, yes, I
collected a lot of research and information about
what top day traders do to maintain a consistent
profit. But I also held onto losses with such
pugnacity that I kept losing money week after
week. I watched in horror as potential profits
turned into losses when I held past a take profit
target, thinking I could squeeze a little bit more
out of the trade. I tried out other people’s pre-
made trading strategies, followed the rules for a
week or two, but then gave up during the first
string of losses, arrogantly telling myself, “They
don’t know what they’re doing. This strategy is a
dud.”
Name a trading mistake, and chances are
that I’ve committed it. I couldn’t see how much I
was causing problems for myself by acting on
fear, greed, and impatience.

There’s Light at the End of the Tunnel

With time and further education, I stopped
holding onto losses. I stopped trading with
impulsive, made-on-the-spot plans. A big game-
changer for me was actually paying for courses
instead of trying to gather an education piece-
meal from free videos. The information offered
was often more organized, detailed, and reliable.
Despite how much my life became
disheveled and upended by my invisible chronic
and undiagnosed illness, there were some
important changes in my personality that I could
consider a silver lining and were of great use to
my trading beliefs.
For one, this was the most focused I’ve
ever felt - even before the pandemic, I was stuck
at home and had to make do with what I had in
my bedroom to find meaning and joy in life - I felt
a strong intrinsic motivation to learn and create
out of pure enjoyment and need for purpose.
Second, as many of you who have suffered
greatly in life know, sometimes hardships give
you thicker skin and help you learn to recognize
the difference between a real issue from an
inconvenience. My ability to put up with
problems and seek to solve them skyrocketed. I
felt surer of myself, more confident, and less
inclined to let others make decisions or think for
me. Being dismissed with “I don’t know” by many
doctors made me realize the limits of human
thinking, no matter how well-educated or
experienced a person is.
I became obsessed with reading
biographies and memoirs by those who suffered
atrocities and somehow managed to find
meaning and joy in life. Viktor Frankl (a
psychotherapist who survived multiple of Hitler’s
concentration camps, including Auschwitz),
Eugenia Ginsberg (who survived multiple camps
and prisons of Stalin’s Gulag), and Chris Gardner
(who, with his son, went from homelessness to
wealth by finding work on Wall Street during a
time when black men and women were even less
welcome in the industry than nowadays) are a
few that come to mind. Their stories taught me
just how much maintaining a commitment to
personal values, as well as sheer perseverance,
can see a person through horrific experiences.
I realized that suffering illness is
something that connected me to the plight of
humanity, not deprived me of participating in it.
And most important of all - listen carefully,
as this is key to good trading and perhaps any
great accomplishment in life - I stopped believing
something or someone was going to come to save
me. Not a doctor, not the government, not a
charity, not a family member. I took more
responsibility in seeking solutions rather than
dwelling on the problem.
As it turns out, there are many more
options when taking the road of assuming
responsibility for yourself. Changing external
factors is a much more difficult (albeit often still a
necessary) step that should be taken after first
creating a foundation within yourself.
 Perhaps the most life-altering realization I
had when my illness first spun out of control was
this: There are some things that you and only
you, alone, will have to face. Even if someone was
there to lie in bed and hold me while I lay
perpetually awake and burning, they couldn’t get
inside my brain and feel this with me. At best,
they could express empathy and try to
understand, but if I was going to tackle and
overcome this thing, I needed to be okay with
being misunderstood, willing to do the work to
carve out my own path back to health and be able
to allow myself to feel a grab bag of emotions
while being my own primary source of comfort.
When your life falls apart, you will fall back
on your habits (however helpful or hurtful they
may be) as well as whatever emotional
management skills you’ve developed up until that
point. It was already in my habit to keep a
calendar and planner, to journal, and to meditate.
Commonplace as they seem, they’re a big part of
what helped me stay organized as my life, my
thoughts, and my body became disorganized,
forgetful, and out of control. It’s crucial to work
on building beneficial habits long before you fall
back on them during times of unusual stress. This
applies to trading habits, as well.
To accomplish what I wanted to
accomplish, I needed to become even more
disciplined. Combined with persistence, this is a
key characteristic for surviving the learning
curve of any endeavor, and all the more so with
the Big Boss Dungeon of trading for profit - let
alone the problems that come with human
existence.

Looking Toward the Future...

Disciplined FX, the business I’ve created to
help others on this rewarding and challenging
path, is so aptly named for this skill that leads all
other skills. Successful trading has far more to do
with a strong mindset than a perfect combination
of indicators and technical analysis tactics. Sure
enough, as I became more organized and
ritualistic in my trading preparations, reviews,
and tactics, I started to actually make money
after being in Forex for a little more than a year. I
had posted some trading tips on Reddit forums
and was personally asked by users to be their
mentor. Creating a resource to help beginner and
novice traders find a way to earn an income
through day trading became my next logical step.

I wish I could give a better happy ending

regarding my health issues, but I’m still wrestling
with what appears to be a form of autonomic
dysfunction. I will eagerly report, however, that
I’m doing far better now than when I first started
trading. Most of that progress came from keeping
a whole-food, plant-based diet, and
supplementing with vitamins and minerals for
which I have a deficiency. I believe there is still a
deeper root to these problems - my hunt is not
over.
Just to get to this point took years of
research, reviewing and contemplating on my
medical test results, learning about functional
medicine, experimenting with diets and
supplements, and not giving up every time a
doctor told me that I would probably never get
better. I hope to take some of the profits I’ve
made from trading to afford intensive functional
healthcare in order to make a lasting recovery.
In this way, failing at trading is not an
option - it is an important tool on my path to
finally reclaim freedom, and now that I’ve come
this far, I don’t want to give it up. I don’t doubt
that some of you reading this book have a similar
drive for earning enough money to solve the
biggest problems in your life. I made Disciplined
FX specifically with you in mind.
I’m okay with letting go of the rabbi path -
in some ways, I believe my proactive personality
is a bit better suited to the grittier, high-risk
problem-solving that comes with trading and
running a business. There is something about
independently trading and being an entrepreneur
that feels like a true calling, in contrast to the
ways in which I often felt like an imposter when I
was called “Rabbi”.
I think I avoided for-profit endeavors for a
long time because I had a limited belief that only
nonprofit and counseling-based work could
meaningfully contribute to the world. When I
first started trading, I felt guilty for making
money without giving much in return.
I now realize that there are many ways
people completely change their own lives with
paid-for resources and services. “Doing good”
isn’t restricted to the world of philanthropy.
Incredible technology, services, and resources
have increased the quality of life for so many
people in this world. Not all businesses behave
this way, and instead contribute to violence,
environmental destruction, and economic and
social injustice, so there’s still work to do, but
overall, I have a lot of gratitude for the various
ways many businesses have shaped the world in
helpful and meaningful ways.
Teaching people how to trade with
success, especially anyone who wasn’t born into
wealth, can tremendously help a life, too.
Successful traders also have the power to donate
and further invest their earnings into
organizations, businesses, and people who are
better equipped to change the world for the
better.
During my undergraduate orientation, I
was required to read a wonderful collection of
essays on social justice and change that’s titled
The Impossible Will Take a While. I love that
statement. Because often, the most life-altering
changes can occur with time and persistence,
even if they seem unattainable.
This is true for trading and achieving
financial freedom, as well. If I could learn to make
money trading Forex while sleep-deprived, with
a head full of fog, and limited vision, then you can
trust that you can make it, too, regardless (or
with motivation from) the circumstances you’re
in.
However, loss will be a big part of your
trading experience - it’s part of the admission fee
to playing the trading game. Not everyone will
succeed, but your chances will skyrocket the
more you are disciplined and willing to learn
from your mistakes. I fully believe you are
capable of surviving the learning curve because
good trading and discipline are acquired skills,
not inborn characteristics, and there are more
and better resources to learn how to develop
these skills that are available now than ever
before. You can learn to trade well and to
exercise discipline just like you were able to learn
any other skill that is a mainstay of your life. It
takes time, persistence, and willingness to face
risk through the ups and downs. Believing in
your capability to learn is a big first step towards
your success.
Before we can uncover the key habits for
trading success, we need to first explore the
behaviors, harmful habits, and ways of thinking
that lead to chronic money loss when day trading.
Taking an honest inventory of your decisions that
lead to trading issues will help you gain clarity on
the areas of your trading that you will need to
replace with habits that lead to success.
Test Yourself!
1. _____ will be a big part of your trading
experience - it’s part of the admission fee
to play the trading game
2. It takes _____, _____, and _____ to face risk
through the ups and downs
Reflection Questions:
1. There are many ways to make money.
Apart from how lucrative trading can be,
what’s one of the biggest reasons for your
decision to learn how to trade?
2. What do you hope to achieve by making a
profit from trading?
3. Before reading the rest of this book, what
do you think are some of the reasons why
most traders fail to make money? What do
you think are some of the habits successful
traders do that unsuccessful traders fail to
do or maintain?
Test Yourself! Answers:
1. Loss
2. Time, persistence, willingness
Chapter 3: Eight Reasons Why New
Traders Fail to Make Money
Acclimating to the ups and downs of
trading will take some time. It’s inevitable that
beginners will make mistakes, but remember that
the goal is not to be perfect but to get better at
trading over the long term.
There’s a mantra in Zen Buddhism that one
does not seek to be Buddha but to become
Buddha. (In Pali, the ancient language of the early
Buddhists, a Buddha is an “enlightened one”)
Similarly, you won’t become a perfect trader who
never loses. Still, on your path to becoming
consistently profitable, you will continue to learn
more about the markets and your own thought
process as you make better trading decisions that
lead to profitability.
It’s a wise goal to make sure your
mistakes cost you less and less with every month
your account stays alive. Be grounded in your
commitment to becoming a better trader, but
don’t berate yourself into low confidence if you
make a mistake. As the great Yogi Bera said,
“Baseball is ninety percent mental. The other half
is physical!” Taking care of your thoughts about
yourself will go a long way in improving your
trading skills.
 In the game of day trading, you will need to
go above and beyond what’s required to succeed
if you want to become consistently profitable. But
this doesn’t mean that you need to learn every
indicator or candlestick pattern. Most of what
will help you grow as a trader comes from
developing discipline and using mental hacks
that help you make wise decisions.
However, the way to strategize this isn’t all
about doing more, but rather doing less:
particularly making fewer trading mistakes. It’s
so common in our “Go-Go-Go!” contemporary
world to handle issues by trying to add one more
productivity tool, take another class on becoming
your best self, try yet another diet, and add to our
already overflowing plate of daily activities.
While taking action is crucial to making
deliberate change in life, it’s also important to
step back and let go of certain activities and
behaviors that actually overwhelm us and
muddle our clarity. Only then can we replace
those actions with new ones, if necessary.
The following list includes eight of the
most common mistakes made by new traders
who want to make money but can’t understand
why they fail to profit. The sooner you overcome
these, the quicker you will shed your beginner
day trader status.
 1. Trying Everything
There’s a time and place to learn as much
as you can and that’s during the beginning before
you have any idea what an indicator is or where
to put a stop loss. However, you only need to
learn a few indicators, strategies, and market
concepts to actually make money. Anything
beyond that will be information overload.
Sometimes traders will want to
“download” as much trading information onto
their brain’s hard drive as they can fit - I know
because I’m that kind of person who tends to
research things to death when first learning
about them, and trading was no different for me
from any other geek-able topic. In the age of
Google, it’s pretty easy to consume endless
quantities of information without much ability to
decipher between what’s useful and what’s
unfounded or inapplicable.
Nearing the end of my first year of trading,
I thought it would be lucrative to study for a
Certified Financial Technician (CFTe) certificate.
In my logic, I believed that if I had the same
knowledge as professional traders, I would
finally be able to profit each week. After two
months of daily studying, however, I realized that
this was a serious case of information overload
for someone who was just getting started.
 While it was helpful to learn about
technical analysis that was relevant to the
strategies I used, getting through all the other
information was drudgery. It came to a head
when I had a particularly stimulating epiphany. I
realized I already have enough information to
make money; I just need to make sure I apply it. I
was putting too much emphasis on details of a
theoretical plan over proper execution. I dropped
the study routine and focused on my behaviors
while I was trading. I also made sure I did a
proper review of my trades each day and week.
New traders tend to learn about a trading
strategy, often one that uses moving averages,
and immediately take it live. Maybe it profits a
bit. Maybe it only results in loss. Then, they learn
about the MACD and stochastic indicators and
decide to smack those on their charts, as well.
Next, someone on Youtube mentions that
multiple entries and exits are a good idea, so they
implement that tactic on the following trade. I
think you see where this is heading.
The critical element in becoming
consistently profitable is consistency. You cannot
get an accurate understanding of your trading if
you’re doing something different every other day.
You also have minimal experience to compare the
efficacy of one indicator over another to know
which will help you more in the long run.
 Solution: Learn only a handful of trading
tactics at a time and start with a pre-created,
back-tested strategy. Trade the strategy well
before learning other techniques. When the time
comes to explore a new technique or indicator,
before trying anything out with real money, do a
combination of backtesting, demo or paper
trading, and experimenting with a very small
amount of live cash first. If you’d like to try out a
simple, free day trading strategy I created, you
can find its instructions on the Disciplined FX
blog by clicking here.
Anything new needs to go through a cycle
of validation testing before you use it in your live
trading. Be patient and stay focused on your
strategy.
 2. Jumping from Strategy to Strategy
Without Mastering Any
Beginners will be advised by experienced
traders to learn to perform discretionary trades.
This is when each trade has its own uniquely
crafted strategy based on what the market is
currently doing on that given day. Discretionary
trades tend to use a set of base rules created by
the trader, but overall there’s a lot of room for
improvisation. It can be a highly profitable
approach to trading and it has the potential to
help a trader eventually develop an intuitive feel
for the markets.
However, for a trader first starting out,
trying to build an account with only discretionary
trades can become an expensive mess. You will
likely make impulsive decisions because you lack
the experience to know what to look for in a good
trade. Not understanding market movements and
impulsivity combined is a big part of what makes
the learning curve kind of...nasty.
Instead, I think it’s a good idea for new
traders to pick a reliable mechanical strategy and
master it before trying to create a portfolio of
strategies. Mechanical strategies have a strict set
of rules that you follow no matter what the
markets are doing. If you get a signal for your
trade, you take it. Depending on the strategy,
mechanical ones may not always make as much
money as discretionary trading, but they’re much
easier to understand for the new trader. Instead
of needing to figure out what to trade each day,
your one job is to build discipline by following
your trading rules.
Once a trader is familiar with a mechanical
trade, they’ll be better equipped to apply their
discipline to discretionary trading.
Some people understand this early on and
will even willingly pay for a strategy that works.
It saves a lot of time and money in testing and
creating a new strategy while knowing next to
nothing about trading technicalities.
I did something similar when starting out. I
bought a good strategy off of a Youtuber and used
it as a way to find my footing in Forex. However,
within a couple of weeks of trading this strategy,
I tossed it for something else. That was a big
mistake! Why did I, and most other beginning
traders, take the time to learn a strategy yet toss
it within weeks? Here are a few reasons:
1. We have yet to internalize the
necessity of taking small losses -
most often, beginners will think a
strategy doesn’t work once it hits its
first big string of losses. However,
it’s not uncommon for highly
profitable strategies to lose five or
more times in a row. Seasoned
 traders know to hold through and
wait for the strategy to work itself
out.
2. Lack of confidence in the strategy -
By using someone else’s strategy
without backtesting it for yourself,
you know next to nothing about how
it performs. When a trader backtests
a strategy, he can get a big enough
sample to see how the amount of
loss is outweighed by profits over a
month’s worth of trades, or learn
that something like a string of five
losses was followed by a string of
ten wins. By gathering this
information and seeing how the
strategy profits in the face of routine
losses and entire sessions with no
trading signals, he can develop a
sense of trust in the
strategy. Trading someone’s
strategy without testing it is like
buying a used car without driving it
first or haphazardly renting an
apartment without seeing it in
person. If trading will become your
focused means of making a living, be
professional and responsible about
the process
 3. Unable to decipher a bad strategy
from bad trading skills - Some folks
are quick to trash a strategy,
blaming it for being ineffective,
when in fact, they were never
following the rules in the first place.
This isn’t just true for trading but
also true for organization
techniques, fitness programs, and
diets. It can be due to making
seemingly insignificant tweaks (“I
know it says to trade this only with
a trend, but this chart almost looks
like a trend..”) or making
unconscious mistakes, like trading
the USD/JPY chart on accident,
thinking it was the EUR/USD. Before
giving up on a strategy, do a
thorough check of whether you are
completely following the rules or
not. If you’re not, try again with
100% compliance before deciding
whether it’s time to move on to
something else.

Solution: Find a strategy created by a trader you

trust and test it for yourself. If you want to use a
strategy I created and personally use for my own
trading, go to https://disciplinedfx.com/scalping-
strategy/ to see if it’s the right fit for you! Get at
least 100 samples of how the strategy performed
in the past. Manually backtest the strategy to see
how it plays out and be willing to stick with only
this one strategy for at least two months. Using a
trading journal and logbook, you’ll be able to
determine whether this strategy works for you or
if it’s no longer applicable for the current market
or your preferred trading style.
3. Trading Too Many Markets At Once
What’s the biggest difference between the
required classes of a bachelor’s degree and those
of a master’s? Undergraduate courses tend to
span over a variety of topics rather than focusing
on depth of research within a topic. For graduate
programs, the material covered is usually highly
specific to a unique subject. The higher you go in
academia, especially to the doctorate level, the
more detailed the research becomes. The
beginner sees the universe through a wide-lens
camera while the expert examines a singular
subject under a microscope.
This undergraduate approach can work at
first when trying to get a feel for what constitutes
the markets. For example, it can mean exploring
both stocks and FX or learning about all of the
major FX pairs. The trader can play with different
indicators and time frames on charts (such as the
daily, four-hour, or five-minute charts).
But trading is more like Wonderland than
reality. Everything is a little upside down here.
Instead of getting a survey, my advice is to save
yourself time and begin by focusing on only one
market and one instrument. In Forex, this means
focusing on only one or two currency pairs while
leaving the others to wait. And forget about
trying to learn to trade stocks while also learning
Forex. Even though the study of charts is
ubiquitous to all markets, the personalities of
each market and the information moving the
markets are unique.
It can be really confusing for a beginner to
try to understand multiple markets. This is true
for individual stocks or individual currency pairs
in Forex, as well. Every instrument has its own
patterns and tendencies. Some markets are more
susceptible to false breakouts or others tend to
develop more reliable triangle patterns. Some
move over 140 pips on a good day, while others
may move less than 80 points. Furthermore,
some strategies will work really well on one
currency pair, such as the EUR/USD, but keep
you in the red on another, like USD/CAD.
When it comes to live trading, if you’re
having to focus on multiple positions on different
charts, you’re going to inevitably trip yourself up.
Expanding your repertoire of currency pairs can
come later when you have trust in your
performance as a trader, if you choose to take
that route at all. There are professional Forex
traders who specialize in one currency.
Personally, I only trade the EUR/USD during the
overlap of the London close and the New York
open. Sometimes, depending on my schedule, I’ll
also trade the EUR/AUD at the Tokyo open. If you
want to have the skills of a professional, trade
like a PhD, not a bachelors.
4. Letting Small Losses Become Account
Wrecking Balls
There is no other bad habit in trading that
is as dangerous as failing to take predetermined
losses. This is the big stinker - if you freeze and
hold onto a losing trade well past the amount you
intend to risk, your fear may keep you petrified
longer than it takes for this one trade to hit a
margin call. If you couldn’t emotionally handle
losing the couple hundred bucks or less that you
intended as a stop loss, then you definitely won’t
like the feeling of blowing up an account.
It tends to play out kind of like this:
You’re gearing up to place your first trade
of the day. You know you want to risk at most
fifty dollars on this trade and your take profit
amount is about three times as much as that. You
follow your rules and enter at the right time and
price, feeling pretty confident this one is going to
be a winner since you’re doing all the right
things. Price is moving in the direction of your
favor and you watch as the profit amount
increases. You’re getting pretty pumped as you’re
only two pips away from your exit goal. But then,
something happens. The trade starts to fall apart
and nears your entry price, leaving you with no
profit if you were to exit now.
“Uh oh,” you say to yourself, “Come on,
baby, hang in there!”
 Next, the price moves back in your favor
again, and you feel a pleasurable sigh of relief as
your hope returns. You watch for a few more
minutes, as the price seems to hover in one place.
But then comes the big, bad move - all of a
sudden the price takes a plunge and is two pips
away from your stop loss. You panic!
“It wasn’t supposed to pan out like this!”
At this point, you know you’re supposed to
gear yourself up to take that loss. But your mind
begins to rationalize a justification for staying in
the trade - maybe you got in too early and it’s
going to turn around any second, maybe you’re
trading the wrong kind of pattern and should
hold out for this other one you’re starting to see
develop, maybe, maybe, maybe…
Meanwhile, the price is now at your stop
loss. If you had an automatic stop-loss set, your
panicky rationalizations already tricked you into
canceling or moving it out of the way. If you take
mental stop losses, you might be frozen and
unable to click the button to close the trade.
Either way, you’re stuck and now you’re at a
bigger loss than you planned.
“Fine, since I’m losing anyway, I’ll just hold
through.”
As you are consumed by a wave of fear and
anxiety, you also fail to see that on this particular
trade, the strategy wasn’t going to work as the
market is about to do something that you didn’t
anticipate. While there are probabilities in
trading, there are no hard, fast rules that any
pattern or strategy will always work out as
planned.
The way this story ends usually involves
finally taking a loss at a significantly bigger
amount than you planned to risk, gutting out a
big chunk of your account, or worse…
The price turns around and you actually
profit.
Good trading is not always about making
the most money, especially during the beginning
months. The problem with profiting on a mistake
is that your bad trading is rewarded, and
therefore, reinforced. This time you might have
been lucky, but the next held-through loss may be
the one that drains your entire account and
extinguishes your dreams of becoming a
professional retail day trader. Also, the next time
you trade your rules, you are less likely to follow
them, because you are associating your strategy
with losing. It’s only time before you’ll be
throwing this out in search for another non-
existent, holy grail strategy.
Good trading habits produce money in the
long run. A big part of good trading is taking your
planned stop loss every time it hits. To make
money in FX, either you need to win more often
than you lose or the frequency of your wins need
to significantly outweigh your losses or some
kind of distribution between these two outcomes.
Regardless, you will lose sometimes. Better get
comfortable with losing.
Solution: Become comfortable with losing
a controlled amount of money on trades and
honor your stop loss as you would honor
someone who saved your life. Your stop losses
save you from blowing up your account. This
habit alone means the difference between
surviving and burning out in the world of trading.
This is where discipline plays the biggest role in
your trading.
5. Failing to Take Profit at a Pre-Determined
Target
If failing to take a loss can blow up your
account, then failing to take a profit can
affect your win-to-loss ratio.
This mistake can occur in two ways.
The first involves the feelings of elation
and greed. When you’re first starting to trade, the
phenomenon of making what looks like “quick”
money can be pretty exhilarating. It’s hard to be
unmoved by the concept of easily clicking a few
buttons and suddenly having more money than
you did before.
Since beginners don’t always know where
to exit a trade, they may let the profit continue to
rise and think it will keep going in the same
direction. At some point, it can potentially fall
apart. And fast. If you’re too fixated on hitting it
big, then you might freeze and spiral down a
decision making process where the amount
you’re willing to profit continues to decrease. If it
enters your stop loss territory, this is yet another
way to drain an account and ruin your
confidence.
The second mistake is a bit more situation-
specific - it involves failing to take profit at your
predetermined target. Let’s say you recently
learned your lesson about failing to take profits
and watched as a couple of trades skyrocketed in
your favor, only to crash and leave you with a
meager profit or even a loss. Now you’re feeling
Greed’s fraternal twin, Fear.
This time, instead of failing to take a profit,
you exit your trade too soon. Great, you made
some money, but you didn’t follow the plan and
your profits may not cover your losses and the
cost of commissions and slippage. It feels like
you’re winning more than losing, but at the end
of the month, you may take account of your
trades and realize you barely break even.
Solution: Again, make sure you’re
following a trading strategy you have back tested
for profitability clearance and trust that the
return of the wins will outweigh the return of the
losses. I often aim for a take profit target that is
1.5-3.5x the amount I risk. Once you’ve manually
backtested your strategy, you can get an idea for
what a reasonable risk-to-reward ratio looks like
and know you can wait to take your profit with
the same kind of discipline you use to take your
loss. There are also other risk management
strategies for taking profit that you can research,
such as letting a trade run as high as it can go
while taking profits along the way.
6. Trading Without a Plan and Routine
Forex markets are open almost six days a
week. This added availability may lead the new
trader to take trades whenever they like, whether
during the bustling activity of business hours or
the quiet and fickle movements between the
close and opening of different stock exchanges
around the world. New traders, especially, may
feel tempted to dive into a trade at any time, no
matter what’s happening on the charts. When
you don’t have a plan, you are depending on your
thoughts and feelings at any given moment to
guide your decision-making.
J.R.R. Tolkien, the imagination and
wordsmith behind the Lord of the Rings, wrote,
“It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your
calculations if you live near one.” When trading,
danger lurks around every corner. We just talked
about the risk behind not taking small, pre-
calculated losses. If you have no idea what is safe
to risk, you’ll hold onto those losses for whatever
amount you can withstand at the moment. Such a
decision is based on emotion, not discipline.
We know by now that trading based upon
emotion alone is a big “No-No.” When you trade
without a plan that tells you when and when not
to trade, then the fine line between trading and
gambling is crossed. With no plan or set time to
trade, without a routine of recording and
reviewing, you’ll be gambling with a
sophisticated-looking slot machine.
At the very least, you need to know what
percentage and dollar amount you’re willing to
risk on a single trade, your take profit target, and
the size of your order (how many lots or shares)
all before you take a trade. It’s a good idea to
write this information down beforehand.
Solution: We need to make our own rules
to protect against chaos. Instead of trading a
thousand different possibilities, we need to focus
on trading only a few we can count on to usually
work in our favor. Develop a trading plan and
stick to it.
7. Trading For Excitement
Why are you trading?
To make money, you tell me.
To achieve more control and options over
my life, you say.
And yet, even though you know how
important it is to take your small losses and stick
to your strategy, you might jump into trades that
don’t follow your rules because there’s a big
market move that looks like it’s screaming,
“Profit!” You just can’t seem to fight the itch to be
a part of it.
If this sounds familiar to you, then you
might have a bad case of trading FOMO.
In moments like these, you aren’t trading
just for money - you’re also trading for
excitement. Other behaviors that are indicative of
trading for entertainment include taking
impulsive “all-in” positions, getting excited by a
news headline and taking a trade in the direction
of that news, getting bored and taking a trade
without a signal, unplanned scalping, and inviting
people to watch you trade like it’s a game show
and you’re the star. These are all terrible ideas.
Instead, you’ll know you’re trading well
when it feels boring.
Boring trading is when you’re using the
same strategy (or set of strategies) day after day,
week after week. You’re unphased by your wins
just as you are unphased by your losses. You
know this is a churning process, so a single trade
is insignificant. You may even come to a point,
like me, where you actually look forward to your
trading session ending so you can get on with
your day.
As a reminder, I like to say to myself, “Just
doing business as usual, just doing business as
us-u-al! Nothing to see here, folks,” throughout a
trading session.
Solution: Following your plan comes
before anything else. If you are able to use alarms
on your brokerage account, you can set sound
notifications to alert you when the price hits your
entry point, stop loss, and take profit. That way,
you don’t need to be watching every single
movement of the charts and won’t be tempted to
jump into something that goes against your plan.
Personally, I like to read and do other little work
tasks that don’t require steady focus, so that I
only have to interact with markets for brief
moments over a couple of hours. The more you
can control your environment to sustain good
trading habits, the better.
8. Tweaking The System to Death
Andrew of FX Signals, and a popular
resource of FX education on Youtube, calls this
the “Cycle of Doom”. (Is it just me or does it seem
like there are a lot of trading mentors named
Andrew?)
What is the Cycle of Doom? It’s the
seemingly intelligent decision to trade a strategy,
notice that it works better if you make a tiny
change, trade that newly tweaked strategy until
you notice another possible hack, then proceed to
trade that newly tweaked strategy...over and over
again. You’ll be lucky if you make profit, but
what’s particularly damaging about this bad habit
is that you lose sight of your strategy and become
fixated on finding a perfect strategy instead of
trying to develop discipline - the ultimate skill for
trading success. Also, oftentimes than not, these
tweaks lead to losses.
Make those kinds of tweaks with nearly
every other trade, and it becomes a Spinning
Vortex of Cyclical Doom. With trading, sometimes
you need to fight the urge to always be
improving. Like many other decisions in trading,
your tweaks to your strategy need to be planned
and spread apart long enough to gather enough
solid data to determine whether the new strategy
works or not.
 Solution: Like returning to your breath
after getting caught up in thoughts during
meditation, keep coming back to your strategy
and system, over and over again. Review your
strategy at a designated time, like every twenty
days or every three months, depending on
whether you use a shorter or longer time frame
to trade, and if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Test Yourself!
1. “... the goal is not to be _____ but to
get better at trading over the _____
_____. “
2. “_____ _____ _____ trading habits
produce money in the long run. A
big part of good trading is taking
your _____ _____ _____ every time it
hits.”
3. “I already have enough _____, I just
need to make sure I _____ it.”
4. “Seasoned traders know to _____ _____
and wait for the strategy to _____
_____ _____.”
5. “You’ll know you’re trading well
when it feels _____.”
6. “ ...trading based upon emotion
alone is a big _____.”
7. “The key element to becoming
consistently profitable is _____.”
Reflection Questions:
1. If you could wave a magic wand and make
yourself never make one of these trading
mistakes again, which would it be?
2. What’s one thing you can do to implement
a solution for that trading mistake?
Test Yourself! Answers:
1. Perfect; long run
2. Good trading habits; planned stop loss
3. Information; apply
4. Hold through; work itself out
5. Boring
6. “No-No”
7. Consistency
Chapter 4: Seven Habits of Successful
Day Traders
There are two types of pain you will go through in
life: the pain of discipline and the pain of regret.
Discipline weighs ounces, while regret weighs tons.
- Jim Rohn

The power of habits is by no means a

secret. More than ever before, mindfulness of the
use and influence over personal habits is
becoming a part of common knowledge. James
Clear, author of the popular book, Atomic Habits,
emphasizes habits as the deciding factors for
whether we progress in our endeavors or fall by
the wayside. Whether moving towards better or
worse health each day, getting closer to financial
freedom or digging ourselves deeper in debt,
habits include both the good and the bad actions
executed day in and day out that create our
present-moment circumstances.
What’s particularly powerful about habits
is their way of becoming automatic over time.
They require less energy to perform as they
become entwined in daily or weekly routines.
Think of how easy it is to brush your teeth
without struggle or thought each day because
you’ve performed this habit nearly every day of
your life. Yet think about how hard it is just to
consider going to the gym every day if you’ve
never had a membership or exercise routine
before.
There’s a famous saying that “We are what
we repeatedly do.” We may have aspirations
about who we want to become, but the evidence
for whether we succeed or not lies with the
choices we make day-to-day.
While goals have their place when aiming
for success, Clear punctually argues, “Goals are
good for setting a direction, but systems are best
for making progress.” Furthermore, he writes,
“True long-term thinking is goal-less thinking. It’s
not about any single accomplishment. It is about
the cycle of endless refinement and continuous
improvement.”
It is fun to fantasize about the kind of
money or success one can enjoy when making a
full-time living through day trading. We can print
out a big banner with the dollar amount of the
account size we are setting as a goal and put that
over our trading desk, but desiring an outcome
will not ensure its culmination. Instead, we need
to align the vision with a plan of action that’s
organized into a system. The majority of those
actions will take the form of habits.
There are habits that separate profitable
traders from those who, time and again, lose
more than they earn and continue to make little
mistakes ad nauseam. We’ll explore seven
powerful habits here that have the ability to put
an end to weeks and months of consistent losses.
1. Trade with a Plan
Before a professional retail trader starts
her trading day, she already knows exactly what
she’s going to do. She has a strategy or a set of
strategies she has tested for reliability, which she
consistently uses for months or even years. She
also has clearly defined beginning and endpoints
for her trading day, whether it’s determined by
the time of the markets, her schedule, or goals
governing her maximum amount of loss or profit.
She isn’t jumping into the markets because she
saw a piece of news that sounded promising, nor
is she scrambling to enter an order because
someone on a trading forum suggested she buy
into the EUR/JPY, a currency pair with which she
has little familiarity. Ultimately, she has a system
that governs what she trades, when she trades, as
well as when she should change her strategy, and
she has a set routine for reviewing her trades so
that she can learn from her mistakes and track
her performance.
Trading coach Van K. Tharp, like many
other trading mentors and teachers, encourages
professionalism and the use of business-like
structures and formats when trading.
He writes in his book, Super Trader, “The
business-owner traders I have met are total
systems traders...these traders constantly look
for ways to make everything automatic...The
systems might not be perfect. They might not
make huge returns, but they work consistently
within the parameters for which they were
designed.”
Disciplined FX is all about systems trading.
Trading a system is much like implementing a
business plan.
If you were to take a new business idea to
an angel investor or venture capitalist, you would
need to show a plan indicating what the business
does, what its ultimate goals are, how it will
become profitable, and what systems and
procedures it will use to make that happen. A
thoughtful and thorough business plan helps to
inspire the investor to have faith in the success of
the enterprise. While the reality may diverge
from an initial plan, it’s good to start with an
outline of a system that can be adjusted for future
change and growth.
Successful businesses, whether a medium-
sized start-up app company or an online
solopreneur business, utilize Standard Operating
Procedures. These are documents that tell the
owner, employee, or even a virtual assistant how
to accomplish a regular business task, like
posting the latest article to social media
platforms or replying to customer concerns. They
are easy to follow because they include all the
relevant instructions and information and can be
updated over time as the process improves or
changes.
To succeed in trading, you will need a plan
showing what your goals for trading are, what
strategy you’ll use to achieve profitability, your
money management rules, as well as what your
“Standard Operating Procedures” for your daily,
weekly, and monthly trading preparation and
review sessions. By following a plan, not only will
you stay cognizant of what you need to do on a
daily basis to succeed, you’ll also inspire
confidence in your ability to succeed as a trader.

By the way, if you’re looking for a trustworthy,

easy-to-trade strategy that comes with its own
trading journal and trading log, I’ve made a
combo Forex scalping course and strategy with
you in mind. Check out
disciplinedfx.com/scalping-strategy/ so you can
focus on building trading skills without having to
worry about whether your strategy has potential!
2. Lose Like a Champ
Professional traders and successful retail traders
can take a loss with minimal to no damage to
their ego. They understand that it is a key part of
surviving in a market based on exchange.
Because they trade with a plan that is tested for
profitability, they trust that they can survive the
losses and still profit in the long run.
The profitable trader can take a loss with
barely a shrug of the shoulders. They fully accept
that this is part of the business of trading. Their
relationship with money and risk has changed -
they understand the trade-offs that come with
being in the markets and also trust in their own
ability to figure out solutions in the face of
challenges. They are focused on long-term profit.
Therefore, losing a planned amount of risked
capital on any given trade is insignificant to them.
They can smile at a loss and be grateful it wasn’t
the sum of the entire account.
Notice the art of exchange in your life and
the world around you. When you go to lie in bed
at night, watch your breath move in and out of
your body. You cannot take in oxygen without
releasing CO2 gas from your lungs. If you only
wanted oxygen without giving up CO2 gas, you
would die from the buildup of carbon dioxide. We
have to accept the give and take that comes with
life in order to survive.
 Consider the actions, favors, words of
sentiment and support, and physical actions of
comfort that are exchanged among lovers or
family members. Even though there are many
different kinds of personalities in the world and
just as many different ways to have a relationship
(be it friendship, parenting, partnering, etc.) the
ones that survive often have some system of
exchange - whether the means of exchange are
spoken or unspoken. Many relationships in life
are transactional.
When one person depends too heavily on
the generosity of the other, beyond
circumstances and the assumed role of the
relationship (for example, it’s understood that
children will have greater needs and demands
from their parents than the parents should have
for the children) then the relationship suffers.
The overextended party may even pull away
from the relationship entirely. Some people are
far more generous than others, but for most,
some kind of exchange is involved, even if only
for time, communication, and acknowledgement.
If your trading is an endless string of large
losses that transpired from your refusal to take a
small stop loss, then you may need to reconsider
participating in markets until you learn better
trading skills or as a permanent decision to
protect yourself from significant financial loss.
 However, you are not a child in this
relationship with the markets. You cannot expect
or demand a string of endless winning trades.
You are an adult who should seek to befriend the
market. You graciously accept losses because
they are what you exchange for greater profit.
You are contributing not only your money but
your time, your discipline, and your effort to
learn from and correct your mistakes. When this
happens, the markets will pay you for your
commitment. Maybe not in an equal exchange,
but in a proportional one to your ability to do
these key things with consistency. Learning to
lose is the most important habit for the new
trader!
3. Be Organized
Peter Drucker is famous if only for the
quote, “You can’t manage what you can’t
measure!” Maintaining records of how trades
unfold, what your thoughts are while you trade,
and the outcomes of your trades is a habit shared
by all successful traders. In practice, this looks
like keeping a journal of each trading session,
tracking your profit and losses, as well as
recording your reflections during a weekly
review of your trades.
Organized traders go beyond keeping
records, though. Staying organized is perhaps
one of the most underrated qualities of managing
a profitable trading desk. There are two areas in
which a trader can be organized: 1) Physical
organization 2) Thought organization.
Physical organization means maintaining a
clean desk and space where you trade. Ideally,
you’re trading at the same location each time and
can prepare the space to stay clear of clutter.
That way, you can easily focus on trading and
stay aware of whether you have all your tools or
not, such as your trading journal, sticky notes
with calculated share sizes or dates and times of
the week’s economic calendar, and any other
work material you may want to focus on while
you’re waiting between trades or between
trading orders.
 Keeping a clean desk also encourages a
level of professionalism in your trading.
Remember, it’s often suggested to treat trading
like a business. Even if you’re the boss, it’s
important to maintain a high expectation for
organization since you want your business to
succeed. You will feel less anxious and more in
control of your trading when your space and
mind feel orderly.
Another important location for physical
organization is your computer. If you are using a
laptop or desktop that is slowed down by unused
software, uncleared downloads and trash, or is
compromised by excessive apps or issues, your
trading software will be affected.
This means that you increase the
likelihood of the software crashing or responding
slowly. When you’re trading, this could mean
missing your signal, getting entries or exits
different from where you intended, or losing
control of the trade.
While you should always have a
contingency plan for what to do when your
computer isn’t working (such as switching to
your broker’s phone app while you reboot), it’s
important to do everything you can to avoid
unnecessary issues. Staying on top of your
computer’s organization and maintenance is part
of your trading business’ janitorial requirements.
 Being organized often extends beyond
physical organization and includes the way we
preplan habits, processes, and expectations, as
well as manage emotions. When you combine
your vision with a detailed plan for success, you
are forging a greater probability for reaching
your trading goals.
Organizing your thoughts means that
when you’re asked what you’ll be doing next
during a trading session, you have a quick answer
already formed from the trading plan you
created. You can list the steps you take to start up
your trading day. You have memorized the rules
of your trading strategy. You’re methodical and
disciplined in keeping a routine. You know what
you’re aiming for and what you need to do to get
there.
One of the best ways to keep your thoughts
and intentions organized is by keeping a planner.
This can look like making a list of all the things
that need to be accomplished each week,
alongside all of your appointments and events,
and then each day, spending a few minutes in the
morning to decide what you’ll tackle over the
next handful of hours.
For example, when I was first learning to
trade, I would choose a book on trading and
determine how many chapters I would need to
read each day if I wanted to finish the book in the
next three weeks. Then, I made a point of adding
the chapter amount to each of my daily to-do’s.
Using a planner system to achieve my goals has
been a mainstay of my daily habits and a tool for
my success for over ten years.
While I don’t recommend creating goals
based on how much to profit each day or week, I
do recommend setting goals for the tasks you
need to do to either learn how to trade or to
maintain your trading system, such as planning a
weekly trading review session on a Sunday
evening or making an ongoing task of entering
your trading journal entries into your overall
profit/loss spreadsheet after each session.
When you combine this with a system of
regularly asking yourself questions like, “What
went well today? What went well this week?
What didn’t?” or “What do I need to learn or
focus on next week to make sure I improve my
frequency of mistakes,” you are bolstering an
effective system for achieving your long-term
goals in trading.
In what ways can you improve your
organization and habits of keeping your physical
and mental space clear?
4. Take Responsibility for oneself
The successful trader is one who takes a
stance of responsibility in the face of the
unstructured environment of online markets. He
knows that he must trade with a plan and his
profitability depends on following its rules. He
accepts that there will be losses, slippages with
entry and exit orders, and the risk of any market
making a sudden and sharp turn for the worse.
He can’t be mad at the markets because they will
do what they will - always unpredictable.
Furthermore, no one forced him to open a
trading account and trade in the first place.
Therefore, he focuses on what he has
control over and can take responsibility for:
actions like backtesting to ensure a strategy
holds merit; Following his trading rules exactly
as outlined in his strategy; Accepting ownership
over his emotions and behaviors; and in tandem,
staying responsible for his own self-care and
habits so as to avoid certain tempting emotions
while trading.
Moreover, he stays on top of his routines
for recording his trades in a journal and logs their
metrics in a spreadsheet. If he fails to do any of
these things, he reevaluates his progress at the
end of the week and makes a plan to do better
during the following one.
 Taking responsibility is a mindset, one that
benefits the trader. The market is going to do
some wild and wacky things, whether it satisfies
your strategy or not. You can’t blame the market
for your problems. You need to internalize the
fact that trading is inherently risky.
When you take a loss, you accept it, even if
you would have been profitable if your stop loss
was just a little wider. You don’t jump back into
the market at a time you usually don’t trade or
with a new trading idea because you’re upset
with your day’s losses.
However, when you do these kinds of
reckless things and make other mistakes, you
don’t blame the market. You also don’t harp on
yourself with mean words and criticism. You
recognize you made a mistake, you accept
responsibility for going against your rules, and
you learn from the experience. You realize that
the mistakes you make are indicative of where
you are on your journey to becoming a profitable
trader - if you’re brand new to trading, you’re
going to make mistakes, there’s no way to
altogether avoid this, although doing your
research and starting slowly with a demo account
first can prevent your mistakes from costing you
a lot of money.
Many traders consider these losses as
trading “tuition.” The cost of your tuition
coincides with your ability to learn from your
mistakes. The more you become emotionally
intelligent, consistent with learning about
trading, and willing to become disciplined, the
more “scholarships” you’ll receive. In the words
of one of the greatest poets who ever lived, Maya
Angelou:, “Do the best you can until you know
better. Then when you know better, do better.”
Some information about trading you will learn
online. A good chunk you will only learn through
experience.
Some folks grow up in a world, whether at
home or in society, being told every which way
that they aren’t welcome or worthy. Maybe they
had emotionally abusive parents who regularly
criticized them and withheld empathy. Maybe
they were subject to racist, sexist, xenophobic,
homophobic, transphobic, and/or ableist hatred.
Without a doubt, we live in a world full of
injustice and a pursuit of justice that doesn’t
always hit the mark. External barriers exist that
are unfair and cause problems, no matter how
much a person takes responsibility to make their
own situation better. These kinds of traumatic
situations stay with people throughout their
lives. The sense of being unwelcome and
unworthy seeps into their inner thoughts and can
influence a negative sense of self.
 Victims are by no means responsible for
the behavior of the abuser(s). External problems
need to be dealt with externally and that will
require a change in thinking and behavior across
all of society. However, taking full responsibility
for oneself while fighting injustices are not
mutually exclusive actions. We can work on
smashing the glass ceiling between wage gaps
while also maintaining a responsible personal
finance budget. You can maintain a high standard
for your own self-care, personal needs, and
lifestyle while also living or working in a toxic
situation. It can take a lot of effort, be stressful,
and feel unfair, but there is empowerment and
relief in beginning with a stance of taking full
responsibility for making your personal situation
better.
In her powerfully influential book,
Everything is Figureoutable, personal
development and business coach, Marie Forleo
writes:
Taking responsibility doesn’t mean staying
silent about injustice. It doesn’t mean blaming or
shaming yourself. It doesn’t mean beating yourself
up or living with constant guilt. Instead, taking
100 percent responsibility for your life means
recognizing that you’re in charge of deciding how
you feel and who you wish to be in response to
what happens now and in the future.
 Forleo speaks with passion and empathic
truth. Whether with therapy, associating oneself
with positive and caring people, or utilizing self-
help books and media to infiltrate your mind
with new beliefs about yourself, your inner world
can become a truly wonderful and positive place.
When you make decisions as you trade,
you will be in constant conversation with
yourself. With making an effort to replace harsh
self-talk with words of endearment (“It’s okay,
buddy, you can do better next time,” or “You got
this, honey, you’re right where you’re supposed
to be''), it’s definitely within your power to put an
end to inherited negative self-talk and sense of
unworthiness. You can replace that noise with
loving, upbeat, and encouraging words. It may
not seem like it at first, but taking responsibility
for all areas of your life, especially your mental
health, will exponentially benefit your trading
skills. You can’t check your body and memories at
the door, you will be taking all of you to your
trading desk. Take good care of yourself.
Lastly, consistently looking for ways to
take responsibility can be a meaningful and
healing way of thinking. Mark Douglas, author of
the trading classic, The Disciplined Trader, also
picked up on this reality. He wrote:
Taking responsibility is a function of self-
acceptance. You can measure this degree of self-
acceptance by how positively or negatively you
think of yourself when you make what you perceive
as a mistake. The more negatively you think of
yourself, the greater your tendency to avoid taking
responsibility, so you can avoid the pain of your
harsh thoughts...the greater degree of self-
acceptance you have for yourself, the more positive
your thoughts will be and the greater the degree of
insight you will be able to extract from an
experience, instead of generating fear.
Thus, when we’re self-accepting and able
to take responsibility for any possible role we
may have in a situation, we stay observant of
information that could lead to solutions and
improvement. Make a habit of asking yourself,
without harsh words or unnecessary emotional
judgment, “What did I do that resulted in failure
to follow my rules? What can I do next time to
prevent myself from making that mistake again?”
You will be rewarded with insights that fail to
inspire the begrudging trader and you will have
greater ease in overcoming the inevitable
mistakes that come with learning how to trade.
5. Love to Learn
A profitable trader loves to acquire
knowledge. Especially during the early months of
first learning how to trade, she recognizes that
there is a lot of information out there on how to
trade and how markets and economies change,
most of it at times daunting. However, she is
patient and focuses on acquiring enough
information to trade well - learning some
indicators (not all), trying out two or three
strategies (not every single one she comes across
on Youtube), and she’s curious about her
thoughts and behaviors, open to learning some
uncomfortable insights into her own tendency to
panic or expectations to only win. She spends
time with trading books, articles on meditation
and self-awareness, and courses on key trading
skills or strategies. She knows to focus on
acquiring information where it matters. She is a
straight-up geek about the markets she trades
and is invested in developing high-performance
habits.
Trading is a skillset. Like other skill sets,
such as playing an instrument, learning to play a
sport, or mastering a game like chess, trading
requires a time commitment to understand the
key movements and practices that lead to
successful outcomes.
 Furthermore, to achieve a level of
professionalism, the trader is ready to practice
and learn how to advance their performance with
determination and reflection on personal metrics
and behaviors. Learning about yourself as a
trader is just as important as knowing the
mechanics of trading.
How do you cultivate a love for learning?
First, focus on your natural disposition for
curiosity. Also, return to the mediums that work
for you - if you like to read like I do, keep looking
for books and blogs on trading and sources that
teach the cultivation of discipline and habit-
building. If you prefer audio or visuals, seek out
resources through podcasts, audiobooks, or
Youtube videos.
Learning is also a habit. This can mean
pausing your book, article, or video to look up a
trading term you don’t know as soon as you come
across it. This also means making a practice of
regularly reading a book on trading or following
trustworthy and knowledgeable traders on blogs
and other forms of social media. If you haven’t
already, be sure to check out and subscribe to
Disciplined FX on Youtube for new tutorials
every week.
There will come a time when the quality of
the information you receive will likely depend on
how much you pay for it - not every free article or
video is written by an experienced or profitable
trader nor is it particularly complete or life-
altering information. However, you shouldn’t be
paying a month’s worth of income or more to
access a basic course series or receive “signals”
for which you have no idea how they are
generated.
Furthermore, it’s vital that you do your
own “due diligence,” a phrase you’ll see flung
about trading forums. This means that at the end
of the day, you do your own research and make a
final decision as to how you’ll trade based upon
your own critical thinking. You’re not taking a
trade because some Joe Shmo on StockTwits
thinks today is the day that price is going
astronomical.
Lastly, you’ll want to consider your own
self-awareness as part of your trading education.
Like an anthropologist or psychologist, you’re
going to get in the habit of examining your
behaviors, as if from outside of yourself.
Become curious as to what goes on in your
head when you make mistakes - were you getting
antsy, bored, fearful, greedy, or another kind of
emotion? Are you able to talk to yourself when
you’re in the quick of these emotions? What can
you say to yourself in order to choose your rules
over your impulsive thoughts? It’s like that
Byrds’ song, or rather, as its ecclesiastical
reference quotes: Turn, turn, turn! Keep turning
your trading experiences and inner thoughts over
in your mind, and you’ll discover priceless
knowledge and wisdom no one else can hand to
you.
6. Follow a System with Discipline
Top traders keep rules for a variety of
situations, not just the strategy. They have rules
for when to take a break from trading (for
instance, when facing a large drawdown on their
account after a long series of losses), rules as to
what strategy to trade in the face of certain
market conditions (such as staying out when
price is choppy), and rules as to which strategy is
appropriate for any given day or instrument (like
trading a scalping strategy with the EUR/USD or
a multi-hour day-trade for the USD/JPY during
the release of an economic report).
These rules are formed from their research
and education in trading, as well as their own
experiences. A good trader will also have a
routine in evaluating the efficacy of rules, such as
once a quarter, or after a certain amount of
trades. They know that following these rules is
the foundation of their success. If one is broken,
increasingly other rules will become irrelevant.
Therefore, discipline in rule-following (so long as
the rules are founded on good-evidence) is a
crucial skill.
Many professional traders and trading
educators insist that trading needs to be treated
like a business - it needs organizational practices
and the same respect as any job. Some go as far to
say that if a professional, like a surgeon,
accomplishes years of study before ever using a
scalpel on a patient, then it’s ludicrous to believe
you will make consistent profits by reading only
one book during your first year of trading.
While I agree with the logic that it will take
time and more than a book to learn to trade for
consistent profit, I don’t think it’s neither fair nor
accurate to compare the work of trading with
that of surgeons or doctors, which is a
comparison often made in trading forums. First
of all, far less knowledge and time is needed to
make money at trading than becoming a doctor.
Second, the risks are not the same - money can be
lost and gained again, but human life, once gone,
cannot be reclaimed. I believe sayings like this
are from traders who had to learn the hard way,
on their own, without resources like this book or
free YouTube videos to show them a distilled and
simplified path.
Instead, more than any other profession, I
think trading markets is like running a start-up as
an entrepreneur. The father of modern
management practices, Peter Drucker, asserted
that, “The entrepreneurial mystique, it’s not
magic, it’s not mysterious, and it has nothing to
do with the genes. It is a discipline. And, like any
discipline, it can be learned.” I think Drucker was
diligent in his choice of vocabulary - trading, like
entrepreneurship, is a discipline because you
have to go back to basics over and over again in
the face of much failure and obstacles.
The timelines to success are often similar.
The first three to five years are the hardest for
the new entrepreneur or trader, but some who
are strategic and learn a system from successful
mentors who provide a framework can become
profitable within the first year. So too, both
trading and entrepreneurship require a level of
personal risk-taking that’s not expected in a 9-to-
5 job or traditional corporation.
Right now, we are living through what
Indiana University’s top entrepreneurship
researcher, Dr. Donald Kuratko, is naming the
Entrepreneurial Revolution: a time when the
creation of ventures is driving lucrative effects in
the global economy similar to what the Industrial
Revolution did for the late 19th and 20th
centuries. Because cutting salaries and jobs have
become the corporate standard for saving money,
jobs are no longer the secure panacea that our
parents and grandparent’s generations
experienced. Folks nowadays are going solo and
finding ways to freelance, build side-businesses,
or make money from other gigs, such as learning
to day trade. If you haven’t already, I encourage
you to think of yourself as an entrepreneur!
Furthermore, when you trade like a pro, you may
need to legitimately form a business to make the
most of tax breaks, so your trading, your start-up
business, can be capitalized as a self-serving
enterprise.
As with entrepreneurs, this business frees
the trader from the monotony, meaninglessness,
and tiresome routine of working a 9-to-5 job and
instead empowers them to be their own CEO,
COO, CFO, and human relations manager all
wrapped into one - and for a fraction of the time
any one of these roles demand in a corporation.
Entrepreneurs are familiar with discipline
- perhaps Drucker used this root word because
any skill that takes time and persistence to
achieve results requires discipline. To trade like a
start-up, you’ll need a framework to face the
same grind that comes with any entrepreneurial
incubation project.
7. Reflect on trades regularly
To continue the discussion of organization,
any professional trader will tell you about their
record keeping. They keep track of their
thoughts, their winning and losing trades, their
more profitable versus less profitable trades, the
statistics of their strategies, and more. They do
this with the same audacity of a committed
distance-runner using a Garmin watch and
MyFitnessPal to measure their workouts and
nutrition.
There are two main areas for at-minimum
record-keeping while trading:
1. Your mindset while you trade
2. Your trading outcomes after the
trade
Many profitable traders keep some kind of
written account of their mental performance
during a trade. If they’re feeling impatient or
restless and pull out of a trade because of an
emotion, they’ll note this. Depending on how
much their behaviors are causing mistakes, they
may write more or less on the kinds of thoughts
and reflections that occur during trading
sessions.
Of equal importance are immaculate
records of trading outcomes. On a given trading
day, this could look like a spreadsheet including
each trade’s time of trade, entry and exit, profit
or loss, commissions, and grade for how well they
followed their rules. You can also take a snapshot
of the chart and circle or highlight your entry and
exit. At the end of the week or the month, another
spreadsheet can be used to track your account
equity over time, as well as any withdrawals or
deposits into your account. You can download a
free trading log from the Disciplined FX
Homepage.
Once you’ve acquired data, the next step is
to analyze it. Personally, I like to use Sunday
evening to go over all of my journal entries from
the previous week and fill out a reflection prompt
on paper to discuss what went well, what
mistakes were made, how I might fix them, and
any other observations I may have had about my
trading and the current behavior of currency
pairs. Afterwards, I’ll prepare myself for the
trading week ahead with this information fresh in
my mind. I will do a similar exercise at the end of
the month, quarter, and year. Remember how
good trading habits mirror good business
practices? Keeping records of your trading is
good bookkeeping and accounting practices, and
just like a business, you’ll be submitting your
trading records at tax time!

Habits can be acquired with creativity,

persistence, and discipline. By mirroring the
habits of successful traders, your trading
performance will improve in time. Even before
you become consistently profitable, coming back
to the key habits over and over again will develop
your confidence and weed out expensive trading
mistakes.
Test Yourself!
1. “‘_____ weighs ounces, while _____ weighs
tons.’ - Jim Rohn”
2. You graciously accept _____ because they
are what you exchange for greater _____.
3. “Organizing your _____ means that when
you’re asked what you’ll be doing next
during a trading session, you have a quick
answer already formed from the _____ _____
you created.”
4. You can’t blame _____ _____ for your
problems. You need to internalize the fact
that trading is inherently _____.
5. “...trading requires a _____ _____ to
understanding the key movements and
_____ that lead to successful outcomes.”
6. “Many profitable traders keep some kind
of _____ account of their mental
performance during a trade.”

Reflection Questions:
1. Quick! Without looking back at the
sections of this chapter, what are some of
the seven habits of successful trading that
stand out the most to you?
2. Which of these seven habits do you already
keep? Which are new to you?
3. Are there any habits that you read about
that you immediately found yourself
thinking “Nah, that doesn’t apply to me” or
“Nope, not going to do that!”? Just for fun,
what would it look like if you pretended
you were interested in the habit and
enjoyed doing it?
Test Yourself! Answers:
1. Discipline; regret
2. Losses; profit
3. Thoughts; trading plan
4. The market; risky
5. Time commitment; practices
6. Written
Conclusion
If you’ve made it this far, your commitment
to becoming a profitable trader and your
diligence in furthering your trading education is
quite remarkable! Despite the highest literacy
rates the world has ever known, most folks read
one book a year or less! The fact that you’re
finishing this one is evidence to your drive for
knowledge. I want to congratulate you for
following through on the beneficial habit of
loving to learn.

Let’s take a moment to review what we’ve

covered.
Beginning traders especially need to be
mindful of minimizing and avoiding these eight
mistakes:
1. Trying everything
2. Jumping from strategy to strategy without
mastering any
3. Trading too many markets at once
4. Letting small losses become account
wrecking balls
5. Failing to take profit at a predetermined
target
6. Trading without a plan and routine
7. Trading for excitement
8. Tweaking the system to death
 Then, we covered seven habits that
counteract these trading mistakes and set up a
trader for long-term success:

1. Trade with a plan

2. Lose like a champ
3. Be organized
4. Take responsibility for oneself
5. Love to learn
6. Follow a system with discipline
7. Reflect on trades regularly

Reflecting back on what you’ve read, what

mistakes feel most relevant to your trading issues
right now? What are three habits you can
introduce to your trading routine to win the
wrestling match with your trading mistakes? It’s
time to get to work!

Here's the thing.

Most folks read a book and feel a lot of
inspiration to make adjustments and do better
while the information is fresh. This can be really
useful for instigating change! But once they are
finished with a book, within a couple of weeks
they stop doing the new things they learned
which made a difference. Slowly, and often
mindlessly, their behaviors creep back into old
patterns and they’re right back where they
started. For those people, this book is a form of
entertainment, at best.
You’re not going to be that kind of person.
Instead, you’re going to use these two
hacks to make sure you internalize and act on the
habits discussed in this book:
Hack #1: Pull out a calendar, be it on your
phone or your planner. Create an event
one month from now to re-read this
book. Leave a note, either on the event or
the day slot in your calendar, of the three
habits you decide to introduce, and be sure
to set a notification reminder! Those three
habits are now your focus list. When it
comes time to re-read, before you start,
reflect on what has changed since you
introduced those habits. Hopefully you’ll
be ready to introduce three new ones. If
any of them need further work, keep them
on your focus list and try again. It’s okay to
make mistakes so long as you keep
addressing them over and over. I promise
a breaking point will eventually come,
even if it takes three times longer than you
thought it would.
Hack #2 You’re going to keep learning.
Whether you decide to find advice from a variety
of mentors or you want to keep learning with me,
be sure to sign-up or subscribe today to regular
trading content that keeps you motivated,
reflective, and teaches you effective ways of
thinking and behaving at your trading desk.

We have come to the end of our brief time

together, but the guidance you’ve received need
not stop here. We can keep working together in a
few ways, depending on where you are in your
trading journey.
• If you’re new to trading and
interested in trading foreign
exchange currencies, I recommend
downloading my free visual guide to
forex! You can access it here
• If you want to receive weekly
insights and newsletters from me,
you can sign-up for the Disciplined
FX Newsletter here
• If you want to watch weekly
tutorials and join me on my journey
to building a 75k account, subscribe
to the Disciplined FX Youtube
channel here
• Lastly, if you’re looking for one-on-
one support and guidance while
working through one of the trading
mistakes or habits in this book, I
would love to help you out! You can
 find more information about my
coaching service here

I want to sincerely thank you for taking the

initiative to persist and improve with your day
trading career. While we haven’t necessarily
picked an easy path, it is most certainly a
rewarding one given the right effort, discipline,
and humility. I wish you the best of
determination and diligence in your day trading.
May luck be the catalyst once those factors are in
place!

See you in the market!

Andrew Bloom
 References
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Chapter 2: From Teaching Torah Studies to Teaching

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Chapter 3: Eight Reasons Why New Traders Fail to

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