3 Actions That Lead to Becoming Consistently Profitable with Day Trading

After two years of day trading, I’ve finally achieved consistent profitability with scalping Forex markets and have gone on to pass prop trading challenges.

If you’ve dipped your toe into the day trading lifestyle, then you probably already know just how difficult it can be.

Most beginners need to just focus on learning the basics of technical analysis and trading psychology.

But once you can read charts and find a strategy that matches your personality, I don’t believe the way to get to profitability is to find even more information about technical analysis.

Instead, I think all of your issues with trading revolve around lacking trading discipline.

Once I had this epiphany, I changed my game plan and spent more time figuring out ways I could redirect my mindset and control my trading behaviors.

There were a few key things that I did that finally led me to become consistently profitable. 

Today I’m going to share with you three things that likely led to this big shift in my performance. Of the three, the last one I will share with you was probably the most beneficial of them all so be sure to stick around to the end to find out one of the easiest things you can do daily to get yourself profitable. 

So, ready to dive in?

3 Actions That Lead to Becoming Consistently Profitable

1) Take ONE Good Trade Per Day

One of the first big actions I took that got this profitability ball rolling was to stop trading multiple times a day and just focus on taking one good trade a day.

At that time, I was struggling with following my stop loss and take profit rules. I would frequently shift my stop-loss if the price got too close because I was afraid of losing on a trade that could turn around. With every trade I took during the day I increased the odds of breaking my trading rules.3 actions to become consistently profitable

So I reviewed the strategy that I was using, gave it a backtest to see if it would be profitable if I only took one signal instead of the three or four I would usually get, and sure enough, it was!

Thus, for about a month, I focused on taking one perfect trade a day.

During this time, I wasn’t worried about the money, I just wanted to finally know I could trust myself to follow my rules.

If scalping or day trading is feeling overwhelming, maybe dial it back a bit and see if you can take just one good trade a day or even per week before trying to ramp up the intensity again.

2) Create a Reward System for Following Your Trading Rules

The next important change that I made was to implement a reward system for performing the rules of my mechanical strategy. So when I followed my strategy rules, whether that meant winning or taking my stop losses, I would reward myself.

I go into how I did this with more depth in the Disciplined FX Scalping Course, but here I’ll summarize and say that I made sure that I reserved special treats for the end of my trading session which resulted in me following all of my trading rules. This helped to direct my focus away from the account balance and towards developing trading discipline.

There’s a saying in day trading that if you forget about the money and just focus on trading well, the money will eventually come on its own. 

Lastly, there was one more big shift I made that was probably the most powerful trick I’ve ever used to stop making trading mistakes and finally get into profit.

Now, I’m going to share this with you but before I do so, I want you to make a promise to yourself that you’ll give it a shot. I’m absolutely serious when I say that this will be the habit that helps you become profitable.

3) Track the Cost of Your Mistakes

The most important action I took to change my trading was to track how much my trades were costing me.

Some of you may be familiar with this kind of habit like when keeping track of your expenses when you want to get out of debt, sticking to a budget, or saving for a big purchase. When you record every one of your expenses, you start to notice where your money is going and can make a conscientious effort to cut back on the areas you splurge most, such as buying takeout too often or paying too much for a lofty car payment.3 actions to become consistently profitable

Because the real issue isn’t that you’re willfully losing money.

It’s not like you’re going outside and dropping money on the ground.

It’s certain actions and choices that you’re making which lead to loss over time.

This is true of trading as well. We need to be able to track and find out which behaviors are costing us the most money so we can prioritize what to improve first.

So to track how much my mistakes were costing me, every time I made a mistake, I would write on my trading log spreadsheet what mistake was made and how much it cost. If my mistake was pulling a winning trade too soon, I would write how much money I missed out on between where I exited and where my planned take profit was.

If I took a trade that wasn’t part of my signal criteria, then I would record what was lost. If I made money on any of these mistakes, however,  I would just record the mistake cost as $0. This helped me generate some data about my mistakes.

Each week I would look over my trades and calculate how much my mistakes cost me in total, as well as what feelings or impulsive behaviors were causing the most damage. 

After about a month of doing this, I started making money in the markets with the same strategy I was using while I was still consistently losing money.

Sometimes all it takes to turn your life around is a big epiphany combined with simple action. Again, if this is the first time you’re hearing about tracking the cost of your mistakes, I highly recommend giving this practice a shot. Your brokerage account will thank you.

That’s it for today folks, I wish you the best of strength and luck and I’ll see you out there in the markets!