Well-defined and ideal day trading plans help a trader trade easily and conveniently and make more objective decisions. It also enhances better trading discipline and makes room for improvement. It allows you to invest in a strategic and structured manner while taking advantage of daily trades. Intraday trading is all about booking profits and maximizing returns and an ideal trading plan acts as a means to this end.
Now that you understand the importance of creating a useful trading plan, let us discuss some tips on how to build one:-
- Assess your risk tolerance
Only you can systematically define your risk tolerance and doing this is highly important because it will impact your trading strategy, risk management strategies, and other related aspects of your trading. Thus, before you start intraday trading, assess your risk tolerance level and ask yourself to what extent are you ready to take risks.
You must decide whether you prefer a high potential return against a higher risk of losing your money or if you would be fine with lower potential returns with lower risks.
- Define your entry and exit levels
Defining entry and exit levels of a trade are very important for a well-defined trading plan. Once you decide your entry and exit rules, it is easy for you to identify the possible levels at which you can enter into a trade, make profits and minimize losses.
As a trader, one must always remember that sometimes that market sentiment can benefit whereas, at other times, you may incur losses. Hence, setting entry and exit rules will help you keep your trades pace-driven and not sentiment-driven
- Maintain a Trading Journal
Stock markets are a place of immense learning and maintaining a trading journal can be very useful in improving your trading performance and spotting regular mistakes. If you win, you would know which process to replicate and if you lose, you would know what mistakes to avoid. A trading journal also helps you in understanding which strategy or approach worked for you in the past and whether you need to improve on any aspects for successful trading in the future.
- Define your Trading Strategy
Day traders adopt various trading strategies and defining such trading strategies is an important step in building an ideal trading plan so that you can assess the strengths and weaknesses of your trading plan easily. There are various intraday trading strategies like momentum strategy, breakout strategy, reversal strategy, scalping strategy, and gap and go strategy.
Many professional traders are known to use more than one trading strategy depending on the market conditions as some strategies work better when the market is trending while others work better when the market is not performing well.
- Use Risk Management Rules
Risk management is arguably one of the most important aspects while preparing a trading plan. Hence, traders must keep a close eye on risk levels, potential losses, free margin, etc.
As a day trader, you will have to make decisions at every moment and you will have to determine the risk-reward ratio so that you know how much risk you are willing to take for a specific amount of reward. This will also help you in defining a stop-loss position. No trader can have a consistently profitable portfolio without having strict risk management rules in their trading plan.
As an investor, it is easy to be confused about where to put your hard-earned money for the best returns at least risk. Therefore, you need mastertrust as your investing partner to help you make prudent decisions. To know more about intraday trading, margin trading, options trading, connect with mastertrust.
Our purpose is to help investors take informed decisions with timely knowledge and guidance and create customized solutions for each one of you so that you can get maximum benefits.