Podcast:

You Must Have Patience as a Trader

In this video:

00:23 – The importance of having patience

00:48 – Examples from this week

02:02 – Don’t take trades just to undo your good trades

03:06 – Less is more

03:46 – What will happen next week?

I'm going to explain the importance of patience as a Forex trader and why you should not chase trades. Let's talk about that and more right now.

Hey, Forex traders. Andrew Mitchem here from the Forex Trading Coach with video and podcast number 338.

The importance of having patience

I want to talk all about having patience as a Forex trader. It's really important. You see, we work in this business, this industry that's online, that's high paced, that's open 24 hours a day, five days a week, and we're always there looking for traits, or that's what most people think they should do. In fact, it's the opposite. You need to be patient, you need to wait for those high quality setups, and often doing nothing is the best thing you can do.

Examples from this week

I'll give you a great example. Just this week, we've got leading into the US non-farm payrolls, which is the US monthly job release later today. But up until now, this week's been quite a difficult week to trade, being a lot of quiet market conditions, not a lot of very good price action there.

And so for us personally at the Forex Trading Couch, we've had a fantastic week trading the weekly chats. We've got a pound year in trade that's up 3.4 to one right now. It's a 1.7% account gain. Trade's still open, and we've closed on a weekly chart trade from last week, which was an Aussie US dollar trade, 2.8 to one or 1.4% account gain, and also we've got a New Zealand yen trade open at about a one-to-one right now. So just on those three trades, fantastic gains, yet we've done hardly any trading. We've had a few trades on the dailies and other timeframe charts, but it's been particularly quiet, but we're still in very good profit and that's the important thing.

This week it's been and last week it's been the weekly trades that are done very well. Other weeks it's different timeframes.

Don’t take trades just to undo your good trades

But the important thing is it comes back to that being patient, don't ... think of it this way. What's the point in taking lots of trades this week that end up losing just to do and give back to the market all that good results that you've had from just two or three trades? Why would you do that? It just doesn't make sense. And so patience is key. Wait for high quality setups. Don't feel you have to be in the market all the time in order to be a trader and to do well. It's about the high quality, A, A-plus grade setups, having all those things in your favour according to your strategy.

Like I said, you know, some weeks you'll get nothing. A lot will happen. We've had indecision candles, we've had some very big moves, but not really good setups. Other weeks you're just going to get trade after trade after trade, and when that happens, take them. That's the thing. You've kind of got to make hay when the sun shines, to use a phrase like that from my early agricultural days. But it's really important that you do that.

Less is more

But don't go forcing trades. At the end of the day, if you can make two or three percent in a week, it doesn't matter if you made those from a hundred trades or from four or five really good trades. It doesn't really matter apart from I know that if I can make that on four or five really good trades, I've paid less spread, I've had far less work to do, far more enjoyable trading week, less stress, less time, everything else.

It's which way you want to go. Do you want to be in the market all the time constantly being stressed, constantly looking for new trades all the time, just being constantly looking for new things, getting tied to the screens, getting tired, getting frustrated, or do you want to sort of look for just a handful of...