Planning your first Profitable Setup

I’ve had a few people recently tell me that even after they went through the bootcamp, they still didn’t have a trading plan put together.

So I wanted to change that today and help you get started with yours right away.

A trading plan is basic fundamental and simply can’t be ignored.

While it’s great to experiment as you do trading drills and get a feel for trading, as you grow and improve, we need an objective way of measuring just how successful our attempts have been.

Hence the plan.

So what I want everyone to do, is to make sure they are able to clearly outline and quantify a few key areas:

1. Why are you trading?
2. What are your trading goals? Daily and longer term.
3. Outline your daily routine.
4. What’s your daily stop loss – the maximum you lose in a day before you switch off the screens.
5. Build a timeline for your success.
6. And of course… outlining your trade setups.

Usually it’s the last one of those that people are most interested in, but they all need to work together.

Becoming a profitable trader is a process and you need to continue to set goals, improve and then reset them once again. It’s always on-going.

Only when we know what we are hoping to achieve can we outline our setups.

So hopefully you’ve all been through my bootcamp – if not you can start with week 1.

From there we have a pretty good outline of what might be our first profitable trading setup.

This is how I would outline it in my trading plan.

Range Play

Scenario – A Market Profile range has developed and we have a clearly defined, ‘ledge’ in place. The ledge is at least 5 ticks away from the sessions high or low. And we see size printing into the area around the ledge and the bid or offer holding.

Stop Loss – 3 ticks – scratch if it comes back to you after being +3.

Profit Target – Ideally 5-6+ ticks, but we can accept a minimum of 3. Our target should be the highest level of volume profile, or the opposite side of the MP range. But we trade until price is printing in the opposite direction.

Comments – Avoid entering close to the current high or low of the session as there is a good chance of price testing those levels, especially if there is volume around. We ideally want our correlated markets to be confirming the direction of our trade.

This is an actual trade that you can go out and start using.

It’s what we’ve developed through the bootcamp exercises and should form the foundation of your trading.

But it’s important to just not use this example.

You need to go through the planning yourself and write down your setups, for your markets, in your own words.

As always, please don’t hesitate to get in touch if there’s anything I can help you with.

Good Trading.

Rowan.