Podcast:

In this video:

00:50  Andrew’s actual trading plan

03:06  The entries and exits with different entry criteria

04:17  Maximum risk per trade

07:01  A client with 7/7 profitable trades

08:14  Expecting non-farm payrolls next week

Today I’m going to talk about my trading plan but first of all, do you have one for yourself? If not let’s find out more about what a trading plan should have in it right now.

Hi it’s Andrew Mitchem here the Forex Trading coach. Today is Friday the 4th of October 2013. And that’s right I want to talk about having a trading plan. I want to explain my trading plan which I have right here and it’s something I talked about on my live webinar with my clients last night. And I also want to ask you, do you have a trading plan for yourself because if you don’t, it's something that I strongly advise that you should have and if you'd like a copy of what I have here, there’s a blank copy, you can fill in your own version then please email me [email protected].

So let’s get into it.

This is my trading plan and as I mentioned, I talked about this on my webinar yesterday. I split it up into different areas. I'm going to look down at my notes here and talk about what’s on my plan. Now I split it up to start with into the actual trading side of things. What I’m going to be looking at in terms of what currency pairs am I going to trade and personally for me I’m going to trade all twenty six currency pairs that my broker offers plus gold and silver. Because I’m not worried about what the currency pair is that I’m trading because I live in New Zealand, I don’t just trade NZD$, the NZD/USD or NZD/JPY, it doesn’t matter. I'll trade any one of the twenty six currency pairs that my broker offers it all depends on what the setup is and as long as the setup is good enough for validating what I see is a good trade. But that’s what suits me, you may say, “Well I’m only wanting to trade the major pairs or I’m only wanting to trade AUD pairs or the Yen pairs, whatever it might be but for me all twenty six pairs.

Days of the week that I’m looking at trading well again for me as a full time trader I'll look Monday through to Friday, it doesn’t matter to me what the day of the week although when I’m trading the shorter time frames as I mentioned further down into this, I am not trading on a Monday until the European session and I don’t trade after midway through the  European session on a Friday and Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays when I prefer to look at the one hour charts. The rest of the days I look at the four hourly charts and the daily charts. But again I've split it up into when I will trade, when I won't trade. Times of the day in times of the year that I don’t like to trade, for instance leading up to major public holidays like Easter and Christmas, New Year, etc. Just before non-farm payrolls, you know I won't trade that. Again on here when I won't trade the setups that I’m looking at taking: What exactly is it that I’m looking at does that change for different time frames or different pairs. Write it down so you can go and say, “Well does this setup that’s right in front of me now on the chart here does that meet the criteria of my trading plan?”

Different Entry and Exit Criteria

Then I’ve mentioned entries and exits so on different time frames I have different entry criteria. On some time frames such as the daily charts I split my position. I take some of the market and another part of my position at the retracement so I split that order. I do the same on four hourly charts but on the one hour charts I entered just at the market only. But I’ve got that written down step by step detail here. Now my stop losses,