Hello, this is an – automated – message for you! Golden Rule 3 – Do what you said you are going to do! One big problem with automated trading is that there are no strict rules. You can trade any kind of entry, use any kind of Expert Advisor and trade any amount you want. You can create the best trading plan – and break your own rules at any time. Jim Rohn once said: “The problem is not that it is hard to do. It is easy to do – and it is also easy not to do…”. Each and every trading system I have created – yes, it’s really over five years now – has seen good and bad results. When the results are good it is not so hard to stick to your trading rules, because you make some progress. When you are in a sideways phase nothing happens – now you get bored and you think about ways to make things more “interesting”. Every time when you notice that an emotion becomes the reason to do or don’t do something it gets dangerous! When you are in a draw down, the pain starts to hurt! Now you make losses, often you see losses that are causing your account to go far below your initial deposit! And now you desperately want to change the reality. That might cause you to “bend” your trading rules. Maybe you start to take smaller profits now to speed up the recovery. Or you start to trade more positions than you wanted. You might also decide to trade bigger lot sizes to cover your losses quickly. You might have a trading plan, but who is going to see those few little tweaks, anyhow? Now you change something that you said you wouldn’t change and it is easy to do. There are three possible outcomes from your action Outcome 1: Things improve When you change something and things improve, you first feel some relief. You have saved your account! But some time later the next crisis occurs, this one might even cause a bigger draw down! Now what? Go back to the original version and admit that your changes didn’t have any effect? Changing something else without knowing if your former change caused the second draw down? And what if something goes wrong again? Now you don’t trust your “system” anymore, because you subconsciously know that it isn’t a system anymore – because you have manipulated it – and you probably will manipulate it again and again… Outcome 2: Things stay the same When you change something and nothing happens you start to ask yourself the following questions: What would have happened if I didn’t change anything? Would my system have recovered? Is it the wrong time, the wrong currency pair, the wrong time frame or the wrong chart? Does automated trading even make sense when I don’t make enough profit? Or is it that I am not the right kind of person? Should I be more courageous or is that to dangerous? Now you start to doubt, that automated trading works and that you are doing the right things. You will probably start to look for other solutions, that promise bigger profits with less pain… Outcome 3: Things get worse! When you change something and things get worse, you feel like you have made a big mistake! Now you might try to desperately save your account from being flattened. But hence you thought that you have changed the right thing and it made things worse, you now ask yourself what to do. You see your account equity go down each time you check your Metatrader and now you are in panic mode. Most likely you will close all your open positions at the worst time and get out with a big loss… How do I know? Because I have done all these things before! Today I know that the only way to withstand is to make rules how to deal with everything BEFORE I am in one of these situations! That is the reason why people train! A fire fighter needs to know how to behave in a real fire and a doctor needs to train how to do surgery BEFORE the first person needs his help. So what I need to do is to build a system and train it in backtesting. These days I trade real money only after I have done the exercises most people don’t want to do!