How a busy schedule helps your trading

Most of us lead busy lives with lots of commitments. It’s not always easy finding time to develop other goals and areas of interest. So the idea of developing skills as a foreign exchange trader, on top of everything else, sounds at the very least improbable. The fact is however that trading can be done very successfully with only a small amount of time each day.

It is really not necessary to sit in front of a computer scanning charts through out the day. The FX markets open each day in Asia and Australia and end at 5pm New York time. It is the ‘End of Day’ closing price, which gives the important information needed to trade the daily charts, telling you whether it is the buyers or sellers who have won the day, or whether they’ve been locked in a stalemate. Thirty minutes to an hour is all that is required to scan the end of day results on the daily charts and discover the winners and losers in your favourite currency pairs.

The daily charts have the advantage of distilling the day’s movement in one bar. These means you are not glued to the lower time frames trying to anticipate and catch trades amongst the noise of erratic movements. You really can relax knowing you only need to check the charts once at the end of the day to see everything you need to know to inform yourself of whether to trade or not. This approach really does give those with time constraints an opportunity to trade; and time constraints are a good thing in trading. There is nothing more likely to encourage impatient over trading and frustrating losses than spending too much time searching the charts for that ‘must take’ trade. Trading, as we all know, requires discipline and a consistent approach. End of Day trading, with its ‘set and forget’ style, helps prevent bad habits and ill discipline instead offering a simpler and much more detached approach. This is far more likely to yield results.

So, let’s just sketch out a hypothetical time schedule and how trading an ‘End of Day’ strategy might affect it.

8am: Briefly scan the market in the morning after you have woken up, showered and eaten breakfast (don’t do it until you’re fully awake and ready to roll). You are going over what happened while you were sleeping, looking at how the price action of your favorite markets reacted near key chart levels or if any price action setups formed in-line with the trend. If the markets aren’t doing anything meaningful and there are no obvious setups from key levels or with trends, then close up your charts and get on with your day.

9am – 5pm: Work, business, gym / daily activities, etc.

Around 9pm or so spend another 20 or 30 minutes scanning the 4 hour and daily charts, essentially doing the same thing you did in the morning; go over the price action that occurred during the day while at work, see what happened. Did any obvious setups form at key levels or in-line with any trending markets? If the New York close occurred while you’re at work, be sure to check and see how the daily chart closed, or if this happens overnight for you, be sure to check it in the morning (depends on your time zone). Again, we are doing the same thing as in the morning: checking the price action in our favorite markets and looking for any obvious price action signals that may have formed, with a focus on the daily and 4 hour chart time frames.

This is an example of how a typical trading day can go for you if you adopt this laid-back style of trading. Of course, the above example presupposes that you have a solid understanding of how to trade with price action and that you have mastery of a few solid price action trading patterns in your trading toolbox, but once you obtain that knowledge, you can easily implement a daily trading routine like the one we just discussed.

Moving forward, it is no secret that I am a huge proponent of end-of-day trading methodologies and trading the higher time frames (4 hour and daily charts). I have traded end-of-day strategies successfully for more than 12 years, so it’s no surprise that my trading courses and tutorials are focused on end-of-day price action analysis and trading daily charts. Trading in this manner will give you clearer and higher probability signals with more free time, and help you achieve complete mental clarity. After studying my trading strategies and philosophies I have witnessed many transform themselves from ill disciplined trading addicts with nothing but a losing track record, into professional minded traders who trade a low-frequency end-of-day trading model.