If you are new to trading or are simply thinking about joining and have spoken to another trader, they most likely would have asked you what strategy you are using. While for many it is quite a straightforward question to answer, for others it is not quite so simple. There are thousands of different strategies out there, and some traders even trade a hybrid of more than one strategy at the same time. What is important though, is that you have a strategy, no matter what it is, it is imperative that you have one, and we are going to be looking at why it is so important to have a strategy, no matter what it is.
Gambling Is A Loser’s Game
If we are to trade without a strategy, we are effectively just gambling. There is no other way to describe it. You are taking a wild guess at what the markets will do or you are using a hunch, but that hunch is based on no real facts or figures. Due to this, you are simply placing your bet and hoping that the markets go the right way. The problem with this is that the markets like to move how they want to move and they do not always move in one direction for long enough for a gamble to be effective. What’s worse is that if your first trade losses, you will simply place another trade with no real reason behind that one either. You need to lose a strategy, the strategy gives you rules to follow and ensure that your trades have the best opportunity to profit, rather than simply placing trades and hoping that it is a loser’s game through and through.
Strategies Give You Rules
One of the things that a strategy will give you are rules, house rules are there to ensure that your trades are consistent and that the trades that you are putting on have the best opportunity to be profitable. When we have a strategy in place when we place a trade that is not in line with the rules that we have set out we consider it a bad trade. We are trading outside our strategy and so the profitability factor or risk and reward ratio of that strategy is no longer accurate making it far harder for us to keep track of how well the strategy is doing or how well we are doing as traders as a whole. Once you have set rules, stick with them, this is the best thing that you can do in order to ensure that you remain profitable.
Strategies Give You Stability
The rules that we set out above are there to give us stability. Those are the main reasons behind them, and due to that, using a strategy gives us a lot of stability when it comes to our trading. It makes us consistent in the trades that we are making. It ensures that we are always placing good trades and ultimately it can make our profits and overall capital a lot more stable.
Strategies Protect Us
A major part of any strategy is the risk management that comes with it. The risk management part of strategies are there to help protect your account, they include things like your risk to reward ratio, stop loss locations, and other elements like that. All designed to limit the amount that you can lose with each trade and to ensure that you do not blow your account too quickly. We need to trade with risk management within our strategies, if we don’t, no matter how good a strategy actually is, a single trade can actually cause you to completely blow your account.
Strategies Help You to Focus
One fantastic thing that strategies help us to do is to focus, they help us to avoid distractions and they help us to concentrate on what it is that we need to be doing, rather than looking elsewhere. We know what we are looking for in the markets, and exactly what we need to do. This really helps us to focus on what we are doing which in turn can make us a lot more efficient in our trading.
They Can Save You Time
When you use a trading strategy you will know what you have to do. This will help to save you time from analysing or looking at things in the arts that you certainly don’t need to. Much like when we mentioned keeping focus above, using a strategy can help you to save time as you are focused on what you are doing. It also helps you to avoid some distractions. There have been plenty of times then we have wasted a lot of our time by looking at things that are completely irrelevant to our actual trading, the strategy helps you to avoid doing this. At least not all day like we have been guilty of before, ending up with no trades for the entire day.
They Help You Learn
Many people think that strategies are only there to help us to trade, but they also help us to learn. They help us to better understand why the markets may be moving the way that they are and they help us to better understand the way that we trade. The more strategies that you learn and understand, the more of an understanding of the overall markets you will have. Multiple strategies also give you more of an opportunity to trade in different trading conditions, allowing you to be far more profitable throughout the year than you would using just one or even no strategy at all.
Those are just some of the reasons why you should be using a trading strategy, they can be relay helpful in your trading, your results and overall they are what make us traders, as long as you are using one you should be on a positive step towards being profitable, just try to avoid trading without one, that is simply gqambling and will only lead to losses in the long run.
