The reason why I decided to name my Forex education business Disciplined FX is that discipline is the trading skill that leads all other trading skills. Even if you have an extraordinary knowledge of candlestick patterns or indicators, your knowledge is worth nothing if you can’t stick with a strategy or take your stop losses.

Thus, I believe the most important thing you can do to become profitable is to hone your trading discipline and learn to navigate the emotions that arise while you trade. Be sure to subscribe below for more trading discipline tutorials, prop trading tips, and lessons sent to your inbox every week! every week.

So for today’s tutorial, I want to share with you the most important question you could possibly ask yourself while you trade.

By asking yourself this question daily, you can start to see the flaws in your trading mistakes and discover a path to profit.

This question is so powerful that I can’t believe I’m freely sharing it with you here.

So, are you ready to learn one of the most psychologically impactful questions you can ask yourself?

Okay, here it is.

Every day you need to ask yourself: “What am I resisting?”

A long-form of this question could also be: “As I’m learning about trading, what advice am I resisting?”

<<want more trading discipline tips and strategies? Read The Seven Habits of Successful Day Traders>>

A 2-Step Approach to Apply This Question to Your Trading

You might be wondering what this means and how to use it.

I’m going to give you a two-step approach to putting this question into practice. By the way, this 2-step advice is not only your path to forex profits but also to overcoming any problem you have in life. Here, let me show you how to survive not only day trading but also the postmodern world:

1. find out what the people who have what you want did to get it and what they continue to do to keep it.

You need to stop browsing for information and start studying for education.

If you want to day trade indices, find people who successfully trade indices and learn what they learned and do what they do to achieve and maintain profitability on those instruments. If you want to pass a ftmo challenge, then find traders who have passed the challenge and find ways to trade similarly to them.

The important outcome of step one is that you generate a structure in your mind of what successful people think and do to achieve success.

2. Start turning the focal point back on yourself and discover what you’re doing that is preventing you from thinking and doing those same things.

Maybe your favorite trader is telling you to journal your trades or limit your trades to only one a day and yet you don’t want to journal your trades or you keep sticking around the charts to take a second or third trade in a day.

If you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’re going to keep getting the same results which is basically the same as saying that you’re not going to change or make progress if you hold onto limitations that aren’t serving you.

So what I want you to do is to start noticing the thinking and actions that you’re resisting. If you cringe at the idea of performing a backtest on the 5th strategy you’ve bought online, despite every profitable trader and their french bulldog telling you to perform a backtest, then you’ve found something you should lean into and start doing.

Usually the actions we resist involve some kind of laziness and fear about performing the action.

Fear that we’ll put in all this work only to watch the strategy fail.

To overcome fear, you need to wedge a space between the emotion and your impulsive resolve to avoid action.

Psychologists call this activity of externalizing and reflecting on emotions “cognitive defusion”. We want to start seeing emotions as something that exists independently of ourselves, something we can learn from and choose to deny if it’s not helping us. Instead, we can choose to replace the emotion with courage.

When this happens, counselors recommend handling fear by counting down to action. This means counting down backwards from five and on one you do the thing you don’t want to do. So if you’re trading and you don’t want to take your stop loss and your hand is being drawn to your computer mouse as if by some magnetic force, count down, 5 , 4, 3, 2, 1, and sit still while you let your stop loss order get filled. 

The other thing that this question does is that it helps you activate a thoughtful speaking voice in your mind that says YOU get to run the show – not your feelings.

By starting an internal conversation with your emotions, by examining them first instead of just acting impulsively, you create enough space to make a choice.

One of my favorite movies of all time is V for Vendetta. The movie takes place in a dystopian universe where the fascist government is forcefully hauling people away. Natalie Portman’s character ends up in such a concentration camp and while confined in a cell, she finds a note left by a woman named Valerie who was taken away and unjustly killed for having a relationship with another woman. In her note she writes, “Every inch of me shall perish. Every inch, but one. An Inch, it is small and it is fragile, but it is the only thing in the world worth having. We must never lose it or give it away.”

Now, this feels a bit ridiculous to include such a powerful message in a comparatively inconsequential tutorial on trading discipline, but what Valerie means by protecting that inch is that we must never give up our integrity.

When you decide to become not only a responsible and disciplined trader but also a responsible and disciplined person in many aspects of your life, you need to be able to have enough integrity and choice over your values and intentions to put aside fear and do the hard but necessary thing anyway.

The way that happens is by not reactively acting on your emotions but instead creating a talking space in your mind where the best you can have veto power over impulsive instinct.

So by asking the question “what am I resisting?” you both examine the areas your fears have placed limitations and also begin the process of regularly reflecting on your own thoughts.

Reflection is the ultimate tool to be your own trading coach and learn from your unique trading experience.

You need to be able to ask yourself hard questions and act on what you discover, otherwise, you will never grow as a day trader.

So now that you’re fired up, take out a sticky note or piece of paper and write this down: “What am I resisting?” Place it somewhere you will see it when you trade, likely on your desk or computer screen. Ask yourself this question every trading session and you will discover far more useful information about yourself as a trader than anything I or other trading mentors can share with you on the internet.

I hope you can see just how valuable this activity can be. If you found this lesson motivating and insightful be sure to subscribe for more trading discipline tutorials, prop trading tips, and lessons on using mechanical strategies. I wish you all the best of strength and luck, and I’ll see you in the markets! Take care!

Why You Should Keep a Trading Journal

The reason why I chose the name disciplined FX is because this is the trading skill that leads all other trading skills. If you can’t follow your strategy’s rules, it doesn’t matter if it’s a winning strategy. If you change your mind a lot about what you see or what you’re going to do when you perform technical analysis, it doesn’t matter if you know how to use every single indicator or naked candle set up.

You only have a strategy and a system if you can perform it day in and day out in front of the charts.

So when we talk about discipline, we’re not referring to some kind of mean mindset where you have to mentally force yourself to act rigidly and never enjoy life. Instead we’re talking about discipline as the ability to understand the outcomes of your actions and be willing to stick with the behaviors that lead to long-term rewards instead of short-term ones that prioritize comfort or let your emotions run the show.

In this way, discipline is a habit we develop – a habit anyone can develop if you can stick with new behaviors long enough to rewire your brain and break that point at which you no longer need to force yourself to perform the behavior.

Instead, this behavior now happens almost automatically.

So to summarize, discipline is about knowing the long-term outcomes of certain behaviors and then choosing to stick with the positive behaviors long enough to let them become habits.

Now one of the most important habits you can do to develop yourself as a trader and improve your ability to follow your trading rules is to keep a trading journal.

Most people think of a trading journal as merely recording the data about your trades, such as what was the price of entry, what was the price of exit, how much you made or lost, and other statistics.

While this information is important and highly beneficial for tracking, your trading journal needs to be more than that in order to get the most out of the habit.

Most brokerage firms provide these stats for you, but the art of tracking our progress isn’t about just collecting our numbers. We need to know what we were thinking about during the trade. If we make mistakes, we need to know what happened in order to avoid making the same mistake again. Thus, when you keep a trading journal that not only covers the stats of the trade but also includes information about what you were feeling and whether you followed your rules or not, you create a resource you can come back to and reflect upon, so that you can turn your experience into articulated lessons.

Today, I’m going to show you how to make a forex trading journal that does precisely that.

Forex Trading Journal Basics

Okay, here are a few things you need to include at a minimum in order to create a journal that’s capable of turning you into a better trader.

1. Include basic stats about your trade. This is like the trade’s ID card.

You’ll want to include the date, day of the week, price of entry, price of exit, time of entering and exiting the trade, as well as how many pips were captured or loss, and your overall profit and loss in your currency.

I also personally like to include the percentage gained or lost and what the risk-reward ratio of the trade was.

This basic information helps you understand the parameters and outcome of the trade.

2. Include a section dedicated to recording your emotions

This is perhaps one of the most important elements of your journal that turns it into something more than just a logbook, is a section dedicated to recording your emotions and actions that you took during the trade.

I like to remind students in the Disciplined FX Scalping Strategy Course that when you record your emotions, you actually need to make sure you’re naming emotions and not just logging what happened play by play.

If you were to write in your forex trading journal that you cut your profit earlier than your planned target, that’s not naming an emotion.

You want to know whether you got out early because you were feeling anxious about the target being too close to a resistance level or because you were afraid this trade was going to turn around and plummet because that’s what happened to you last week.

I’m underscoring the importance of recording your emotions because ultimately the number one thing that’s going to make you break your trading rules is an emotion getting inside your head and tricking you into thinking it’s logic.

If you don’t know what they are or what they feel like, you’re going to get tricked every time.

So your goal is to start recognizing what you’re feeling while you’re feeling it and writing it down in your journal even before it happens.

You could write down the time and say something like “price is moving towards my stop loss and I’m afraid I’m going to miss out before price turns around”. By writing this down, you can stop yourself in the moment and choose to follow your rules instead. In this way, your journal is a tool to help you stick to your discipline.

When you go back later to review your trades for the day or for the week, you can easily reflect on what your biggest emotions you need to watch out for going over the trades you made mistakes and noticing which emotion seems to appear the most.

Can you imagine just how powerful this habit is?

3. Include visual documentation

If you decide to use a free digital journal such as a google doc or even a Trello board, you can take screenshots of a marked up chart, showing where you entered and exited, as well as any other drawings from your trade, which can give you a much clearer idea of what you were looking at when you made your trading decisions.

This step is a must-do if you are a trader who uses candlestick patterns to perform your strategy.

Another visual tool you can use is to create journal sheets with your strategy’s rules already written on them with checkboxes so that you are certain to follow each step of your trade.

This is a particularly useful thing to include if you are like me and you use purely mechanical rules to perform your strategy.

Here’s an example from the free Disciplined FX 5m scalping strategy. (You can download your own free copy of the pdf by following the link)

There are definitely other things you can add to your journal depending on your personality as a trader and the strategies you use.

However, please remember that your journal is only as effective as you are willing to make it a habit in your trading routine.

It’s also important to make time to regularly review your journal, such as every night or on a Saturday evening before your next trading week, so that you can turn your experience into lessons that help you put a stop to bad behavior or make better decisions as you trade.

I hope you found this information helpful, be sure to sign up for the Disciplined FX Newsletter to receive more tips and notifications. I wish you all the best of strength and luck, and I’ll see you in the markets. Take care!

When I first taught myself how to day trade, I needed to be very strategic about how much time and effort I put into developing this incredible skill.

I needed to have enough time to also do my course work, write, sleep and take breaks to help my fatigue, as well as perform other daily tasks to keep my life managed.

I expect that you have your own priorities and responsibilities that you need to take care of while also giving enough time and attention to learning what you need to know to make money from the markets.

To make the most of the limited time I had in a day, I created a study routine for myself that follows the 80/20 rule.

What’s the 80/20 rule, you ask?

This is also known as Pareto’s Principle. Pareto was an economist in Italy during the 19th century and through his fieldwork and research, he concluded that 80% of land in the region was owned by 20% of the individuals. Now, the principle itself isn’t actually attributed to Pareto. About a century later, a management consultant developed Pareto’s observation into a theory known as the law of the vital few.

This implies that often in nature, 80% of results are gleaned from only 20% of efforts. It’s a principle that can theoretically be applied to any endeavor.

What this means for us as trading students is that often 80% of information or experience that actually makes us into effective and profitable traders will come from only 20% of the resources and activities we pursue as we learn.

Thus, when I sat down to make my study plan, I wanted to ensure that every moment I used to develop myself as a trader would be effective and worthwhile.

So I’m going to share with you a plan and routine you can keep to make sure you’re making the most of your trading education while also achieving profitability in the markets earlier than you would have if you just haphazardly watched youtube videos and tested the markets with half-baked trading ideas. Let’s get started.

How to Create a Forex Study Plan in 5 Steps

Okay traders, we’re going to create a study routine that can get you trading for profit in just five simple steps.

[If you’d like to download a free pdf of these instructions with an additional list of my most preferred Forex resources and books, click here.]

First, before diving deep into a book or course on trading, you’re going to want to state your trading goals and preferences.

In his book, Talent is overrated, Geoff Colvin distills some of the performance and excellence research conducted by Anders Erikson at Florida State University. It turns out that for many fields, including athletics and music, as well as business and medicine, excellence isn’t a genetic trait but rather a skill that anyone can master given the right kind of effort and mindset.

However, just showing up and putting in the hours every day isn’t the approach that separates the greats from the common.

Erikson and his colleagues discovered that high performers make use of something they call “Deliberate Practice.”

This means that the practice sessions of the people who best excelled in their field were highly intentional – they focused on key movements or skills that were unique to their goal and position.

So when you’re looking to learn more about Forex, maybe at first you’ll want to explore a general survey of what people do when they trade Forex, but you’re going to want to dwindle your focus to a key couple of types of trading and skills in order to perfect your style.

For example:

• Are you looking to day trade, swing trade, or include forex as part of an investment portfolio?
• Do you want to use purely technical analysis or some fundamental analysis in your trading?
• Do you want to learn how to trade a variety of different candlestick patterns or do you want to stick to a mechanical, clear-cut strategy built from indicators?
• Do you have just an hour or two to spend in front of the charts or are you able to spend forty hours a week following every move the market makes?

If you’re not sure as to what you’d like to do, you can start by watching brief tutorials on any of these trading styles and begin with the study material I mention under Trading 101 on the resource list. [Need a copy? Click here]

Step 1: State Your Trading Goals and Preferences

Once you have a clear idea of what you’d like your trading to look like, create a couple of goals that can help guide what kind of content you’ll want to study.

For example, I like short-term trading on the 1-hour or lower time frames. I prefer mechanical strategies that let me trade for an hour or two during the crossover of the London and NYC session.

Therefore, I’m going to want to focus on resources that cover scalping strategies, technical analysis with price action and indicators, as well as non-trading-specific resources that teach me more about discipline and emotional and behavior management so that I can follow my mechanical rules to a T each day.

Step 2: Gather Resources

After you’re able to describe what you’re looking for in a trading practice, you can move on to the second step and begin to gather information on your specific style, as well as reviewing material that covers trading psychology, risk management, and general forex and trading principles.

This is where the 80/20 principle is going to come into play.

You want to focus on resources that teach you key skills that support your style of trading.

It’s also highly beneficial to seek out sources that cover personal development and personal finances, as your discipline and character in these two additional areas will have an effect on your mindset as you trade. Whether consciously or subconsciously, we tend to bring our full selves to the desk when we trade.

If you have trouble controlling your behavior around your family or friends, then you’re going to have issues controlling your behavior in front of the charts.

Profitable traders tend to exhibit a degree of discipline and organization in their lives and wealth management outside of trading, so it’s highly encouraged that you work on these areas as part of your forex education.

If you’re brand new to forex, I recommend starting with free resources like Babypip’s education series and looking up basic tutorials on youtube. I will warn, however, that some of Baby Pip’s material can get really dense and may feel slow when all you want to do is just start by learning an easy strategy and build from there.

You can also look for authors, bloggers, and social media creators who either have what you want or teach in a style that resonates with you. When I first learned how to trade forex, I got through about midway of high school level of baby pips before losing interest.

I ended up getting a lot more out of reading books that I could easily reread and mark up or highlight the information I found most beneficial. I encourage you to make reading or listening to audiobooks a part of your study approach, since authors may put more research, reflection, and editing into their published content than you get with a quickly crafted video on youtube or blog.

While I believe Big Publishing companies have their own gatekeeping methods and agendas they like to protect, they also create a more rigorous editorial process so that the information you receive is more accurate, reliable, and responsible in its promises and suggestions.

Wiley is a popular publisher of books on markets, investing, and trading, so you can expect a level of professionalism with books that are published through them.

Some of the first books on trading that I ever read were Alexander Elder’s Come Into My Trading Room and his other book The New Trading For a Living.

When it comes to building up discipline and understanding the psychological forces not only in the markets but also in your mind as you watch your account balance fluctuate, I find reading self-help books incredibly beneficial. Combined with a strategy I created, James Clear’s Atomic Habits is one of the most useful texts I studied to build my own profitable trading system and rules.

If you’d like to see my full list of recommended resources, again, be sure to use the sign-up link in the description box to receive a free pdf of this syllabus.

Step 3: Create a Study System and Schedule

So now that you have your goals, and a list of resources that can help you develop your skills as a trader, your third step is to create a study system and schedule. I’m going to make some recommendations from the world of efficient study methods and hacks.

So when we’re learning something new, it can be really beneficial to engage with content and material about the topic on a daily basis.

Ideally, you’ll want to aim for 30m to 1 hour of time each day devoted to consuming content from your list.

The goal is to make this a regular routine that is consistent and frequent. One of the best ways to develop a study habit is to select a time each day that you feel the most energized and can easily block off for this commitment.

For many people, that can be during the morning before work or school and for others it could be after dinner or your kid’s bedtime when you know you are done with other priorities for the day and can focus without interruption.

One of James Clear’s suggestions for creating a habit that lasts is to stack a new habit on top of a current one.

So if you have a habit of drinking a cup of coffee every morning, you can make reading about day trading part of your coffee routine. Ideally, only tack it on to other habits that let you stay focused on learning and keep your hands free so you can write or type notes.

Furthermore, if you don’t already, it is highly recommended to use a planner to keep your tasks organized and to make sure you have the time you need to invest in your forex education.

When you know what resources you want to study, you can even plan out when you study each item and schedule a deadline so you don’t end up spending five months trying to finish one book. I’m going to guess that you want to develop your skills as a trader as fast as possible, so getting the right information as soon as you can is going to benefit your progress.

For example, when I was learning how to trade, I would include the books and courses I was using as part of my tasks list. I would take the book, look up how many chapters it has, and then decide how many weeks I want to commit to reading this book.

So if the book had twelve chapters, and I wanted to finish it in four weeks, then I would make a weekly goal of reading three chapters of the book. Then, during each weekday, I could read half a chapter or a chapter, depending on how much time I had to commit to studying. Sometimes things don’t go according to plan, so having a weekly goal helped to give me some wiggle room in case I needed to move most of my reading to one particularly free day of the week.

I would do this for each resource. The same thing for baby pips, I would give myself a weekly target for the number of lessons I wanted to finish.

While you may not hit your target exactly, the point is to create a visible plan you can tweak and adjust to make sure you regularly get the information you need to develop yourself as a trader.

Success Hack: Use a Planner

I’ve been using planners for over twelve years and finally found one that is perfect for me.

It’s the Effic planner, named for the productivity method crafted by Dave Ruel and taught in his book, Done by Noon, which aims for that ideal combination of efficiency and efficacy that can be hard to achieve without staying organized.

It comes with incredibly clear instructions for how to use the Effic method to create a system of goals but one of its features I find particular useful for us traders is that there a space to not only plan your day, but also pre-plan your week so you can make sure there’s time for every important task you need to complete.

It also has a convenient notes section that is useful for when you want to create new tasks based on what you learn from your trading or your studying, but don’t want to try to plan out all at once.

For example, today when I was responding to some traders on Instagram, I got an idea for a checklist I wanted to make for myself for when I start my next prop trading challenge. I was able to quickly jot this down in my notes before continuing to write my message.

At the end of the day, there’s a box I check off for the process of reviewing notes and turning them into future tasks. It’s so useful! After reading Dave’s book and using his planners this entire year, I reached out and asked to be an affiliate.

So if you want to learn more about this special style of using a planner, you can use my affiliate link to explore the Effic homepage and get a set for yourself. So actually creating a plan and routine for my day trading studies made the process more efficient and systematized.

(If you’ve been following me for a while, you may know that I am a sucker for systems-building.)

I also made a point of watching youtube videos made by forex traders while I ate meals.

If you ask anyone who is learning a language, they’ll say an important factor in their ability to achieve fluency is exposure. You’re going to want to expose yourself to a wide array of information when you’re first starting out and then incrementally focus on content that is specific to your preferred style.

However, not all content is created equally. if you find yourself falling asleep through a suggested book or questioning its validity by fifty pages, it’s okay to dump that resource for something else.

So this is how Pareto’s principle will work for us.

You’re going to have a process of searching for resources, studying the content, and then when you’re done, you’ll look for a new set of resources that will be influenced by what you found useful from your last list.

This is what’s known as a reiterative process, one that you perform over and over again but make important tweaks along the way that lead to overall improvement.

Step 4: Create a Master Notebook

This brings us to our next step, which is to take notes that you reflect upon to make your own trading system and regularly review these notes so that you can internalize the information.

There are two ways I like to take notes.

One is to first read the material or consume the material without taking any notes, but instead, try to comfortably focus on what the person is talking about.

If I’m reading a book, then I’ll highlight sentences that I want to remember later. After this first round, I’ll go over the material a second time and take notes, or if it’s a book, I’ll go back to my highlighted sentences and take notes from those passages.

The other method is to take notes as you go, taking time to pause the video or put a bookmark in your book so you can focus on writing down the information.

Other note-taking methods include using a recorder for your voice instead of writing something down.

I find notetaking beneficial for avoiding needing to re-read or re-watch the entire resource when I just want to quickly collect that information again in the future.

Remember, we’re looking for a select 20% of resources that will give us 80% of our improvement in our trading skills. So when you find that golden content and information, you’re going to want to regularly review it.

I like to share what I’m reading each week in the disciplined fx newsletter and 70% of the time I share books that I’m re-reading for the fifth sixth or even seventh time. I leave that 30% for new books that may approach a similar topic with some nuance or share a new method. Reflection is key for developing reflexive best practices.

Think about how martial artists will drill the same move over and over and over again.

Your notebook should become your ultimate 80/20 resource.

By reviewing your notes regularly, such as every month or returning to the material that originally helped you become profitable when you’re hitting a slump, you create a pattern of review.

Step 5: Apply What You Learn

This leads us to our last step, which is to take what we learn and put it into practice.

When we want to get good at something, it’s often encouraged to try to put in as many repetitions as we can.

That was another feature of the deliberate practice methods Erikson discovered in his study of master performers. They would focus on practice that required many repetitions and could give immediately feedback so as to make adjustments and improvements quickly.

We want to fail fast so we can learn from the process and improve as quickly as possible.

It’s easy to determine such practice activity when you’re a musician or an athlete, as you can focus on playing the same couple of bars of sheet music or throw the same swing over and over again, but It can be difficult to find ways to practice trading without being irresponsible and overtrading.

Demo trading is useful for getting started, but it cannot replicate the added layer of emotional distress that comes when trading with real money. I usually recommend traders start by using a small account of a hundred bucks or less instead of a demo, so that you don’t have to worry about learning with unrealistic simulators.

Again, You want to expose yourself to charts and taking high probability trades and performing diligent risk management without overtrading.

So to avoid losing money, you’re going to need to mix in some added simulated practice time with your regular trading and I think backtesting a strategy is one way to do this well.

By using your broker’s charts or a tool such as Trading View’s backtest bar replay or even Thinkor Swim’s simulated trading replay, see if you can find ways to put in some practice time each day. If you don’t know what strategy to use, there are many forex education materials that also provide simple strategies.

You can begin with such a strategy and run it through a series of manual backtest sessions.

Remember, this isn’t about getting quick data about your results so much as it’s about getting exposure to the charts for when your strategy does and doesn’t work.

So with these five steps of determining goals, gathering useful educational materials, making a studying schedule and system, as well as taking notes and practicing what you learn, you can create a study routine that’s organized, systematic, and effective. Many traders, myself included, use a mix of self-lead study and courses to achieve profitability with refined day trading skills.

Your journey to profitability will likely take time, effort, education, and lots of reflection on your performance as a trader.

I wish you all the best of strength and luck and I’ll see you in the markets! Take Care!