Congratulations, you have just made your first ever forex trade, that is a fantastic milestone. Unfortunately, your work doesn’t stop there. Regardless of the outcome of that trade, there are a number of things that we need to do afterward in order to ensure that the trade counts as a good and successful trade, and ways that we can build on what we have just done. So let’s take a look at some of the things that you can do next after placing your first trade, these are not in order of importance or order of when you should do them, just things that you should be thinking about after that first trade has been placed.
Write It Down
The first thing that any trader should do after placing their first trade is to write everything about it down on awesome paper in a trading journal if you have one. This will include things like the opening price and time, the closing price and time, how long the trade was open for, the profit or loss of the trade, what analysis you did beforehand, which of your trading rules you followed, and any other relevant information that you can think of. It sounds like a lot, but it will be worth it, this sort of information will then allow you to analyse the trade that you made (our next point) which in turn allows you to ensure that you are making even better trades in the future. This is only possible though if you remember to write things down. It does take a little extra time, time that is definitely worth it, so don’t skip this step just to save yourself a few extra minutes.
Analyse It
You can do this regardless of whether you did our previous point of writing things down, however, it is far easier to do if you have all the relevant information written in front of you. We now need to analyse the trade that we made in order to work out whether it would be classed as a good trade or a bad trade. A good trade is one that followed all of our trading plans and rules, you can then probably guess that a bad trade is simply a trade that did not follow all of our rules, a trade placed outside of our strategy, regardless of the outcome. If we placed a bad trade we need to work out why, what part of the trade went against our pre-planned strategy? Work that out and you will find it far easier to avoid making the same sort of bad trades in the future. The result of the trade in regards to profit or loss is not important at this stage, what is important is that you get used to trading in line with your strategy and that you gain experience with placing trades with your platform and broker.
Remember Your Feelings
When we place our first trade, we will have a number of different emotions flowing through us which is completely natural in this situation. We will feel nervous beforehand, during the trade we may feel a lot of adrenaline, afterward, depending on the result we may feel a high or a low. It is important to remember these feelings, however, the reason why we are remembering them is not so that we can try and recreate them, it is to show us that we need to try and get them out of our trading. The nerves that you get at the start should go with time, but if you allow them to remain it can become increasingly hard to actually place trades, the same with the highs and lows, they can become addicting or even bring on other emotions that can affect our trading like greed or overconfidence. So remember those feelings, if you then, later on, feel them becoming quite strong, that is a good time to take a break and clear your mind.
Change Things
If we did our analysis properly, we will most likely have a few things to think about, did you follow your strategy? Did you place a good trade or a bad trade? These are things to think about. If things were not entirely perfect which they probably weren’t, then we can start to think about things that we need to change. When starting out there will most likely be a lot of different things that we need to change on our first, second, third, and more trades. They may be very few things, but each change that we make is an improvement that will ultimately improve our overall trading in the long run. Remember, these changes do not need to be big, any changes are also helpful, no matter how small they are.
Place Another
So we placed our first trade, after looking at that trade, analysing it, working out what we need to change, we can then think about placing our second trade. We need to take into account anything that we previously looked at, so if we needed to make a change, this is where we can implement it, of course, if it is a huge change, then it will be good to test it on a demo account, but for very small changes it will be ok in our live account. It should be slightly easier and quicker to place this second trade as we have done one before and the majority will be exactly the same. Place the trade and then do exactly the same again, write down what you do, the same information as before, so you can then analyse the second trade to ensure you are still in line and that any changes that were made are working well. Then do the same for the third, fourth, and any other subsequent trades that you make.
Your sift trade is a huge milestone, it is the start of your trading career, it can be daunting, it can be exciting and for many, it won’t go the way that you want but that is all part of trading. Analyse it, change it and keep working and writing down everything that you do. With each and every trade you will see small improvements until you get to your 100th where you will be a much better trader than you were for your first trade.
