Patience Is A (Day Trading) Virtue

One of the most important things every trader should have is a goal. This goal can be anything—make a certain amount of money over a given time period, correctly identify a certain number of setups, whatever. The important thing is to have one.

However, it’s also important to understand that a goal is something to strive for, not something that you have to hit all the time.

Personally, I have standing goals of making $40,000 a month in trading profits and always staying in the green. I don’t meet these goals 100 percent of the time—and that’s the point.

To reach my $40,000/month goal, I’d have to average a profit of around $1,800 per day. Obviously, I don’t reach that number every day.

Take today for example. The market is in retreat mode following a breakdown in trade talks with China, and I had to walk away with a measly $129 profit. And yet, this dwarfed my Friday return in which I netted a measly $29. That’s $158 in profit over the course of two trading days. Hardly ideal.

But that’s ok. The way you survive in day trading is not to hold yourself to a hard daily goal. So what if your profit/loss ratio isn’t always where you’d like it to be? Sometimes, the best days are when you can limit your risk and simply live to fight another day.

I try to keep this in mind whenever I have a day that doesn’t quite live up to my expectations. Not every day can be a $16k bonanza (though that would certainly be nice).

I didn’t turn $583 into $1 million by pushing my luck on days when the setups just weren’t there. I did it by staying patient, turning up the heat when the setups were there, and dialing back the heat when they weren’t.

So while I make sure to never lose sight of my goals, I’m also conscious not to let the day-to-day volatility of the market affect my approach. That’s how I’ve managed to make this my career.