Winning Trades as a Newbie Trader

The fact of the matter is that trading the markets is not easy. Whether you are trading the stock market, the forex market, the cryptocurrency market, or anything in between, it takes the right skills, tools, and knowledge in order to be a profitable trader.

When you are a newbie trader, winning trades is not as easy as one might think. When I first started trading many years ago, I definitely wasn’t winning trades, but rather, was losing the vast majority of them. The simple reality is that when I first started trading, I lost as much as 50% of my overall budget period this is of course a huge loss, and it more or less forced me to stop trading for awhile.

However, as time went on, I refined all of my skills and I started winning trades. What I want to do today is to provide you with all of the tips that I had to learn the hard way in order to start winning trades. If you follow the rules and tips that I set out below, then your life as a trader should be much easier and you should start winning trades on a regular basis.

winning trades

Trading in the Right Environment

Something that is going to make a huge difference when it comes to winning trades is to be in the right environment. The worst thing that you can do is to feel extremely pressured to make money. If you feel pressured, then you are going to make bad decisions, especially emotional decisions that are going to cost you money.

The reality is that there are plenty of external forces that can affect your trading decisions in a very bad way. Sure, you might want to become a full time trader, but you also don’t want to lose all of your money, especially the money that you need to support yourself and your family.

If you feel pressured to trade, then you are going to focus only on the results, and this kind of pressure can actually lead to you losing trades instead of winning them. Having the right mindset and the right environment where you don’t feel pressure to trade, but rather have the time to learn, is very essential to your success.

Maintain a Stable Source of Income

Sure, winning trades is of course the main goal of being a trader, but you aren’t going to get to a place where you can win enough trades to support yourself within the first few weeks. A lot of people decide to quit their full time jobs in order to start trading, but this is a huge mistake as a newbie, because you are obviously going to lose a lot of trades in the beginning.

You need to remember that trading is a business and not a job, and this will provide you with the time and the relaxed environment that you need in order to learn all the skills that you need to start being a winning trader.

You don’t want to instantly quit your day job, because then you are going to feel a lot of stress and pressure to make a lot of money trading. You want to maintain a stable source of income so you don’t feel pressured when trading. Your trades won’t be nearly as emotionally affected because you already have enough money to survive.

Keep Risk Management in Mind

When I first started trading, one of the biggest mistakes I made is to risk so much money on a single trade. I had about $10,000 in the bank, and I put about $9000 of it into trading. This was of course a massive mistake because I lost all of it. The simple reality is that you never want to risk more than 50% of your net worth on your trading account.

This way, if you start losing some trades, at least you still have some backup money to keep you afloat. Risking more than 50% in your trading is not a good idea. Never put all of your eggs in the same basket and always engage in proper risk management techniques to make sure that you can still survive with the money that you have left.

Money Management Skills are Crucial

If you want to start winning trades, you also need to know how to manage your money. The reality is that all too many people have trouble managing their money. If you have trouble managing your money on a daily basis, then being able to manage a trading account is going to be a whole different challenge that you probably won’t be able to face.

Therefore, before you open a trading account, you first need to learn to manage your money. Risk management and money management are both absolutely essential when it comes to winning trades and being a successful trader.

The Right Trading Plan Helps

In order to start winning trades, a good trading plan definitely helps. Not only do you need to know when you want to buy and so, but you also need to know what kind of markets you want to trade in, why you want to trade in those markets, how to use risk management, and what your trading strategies are going to be.

In this sense, a trading plan is much like a business plan, a system that has to be in place so that all of your actions are always consistent, reasonable, and work towards the same end goal, which in this case is of course winning trades. The more focused you are on your plan and method, the fewer trading errors that you are going to make.

Always Make a Watchlist

If you plan on actually winning trades, something that you should never do is to just start trading random currencies and assets at the beginning of the day. You always want to take at least half an hour out of your day at the very beginning to create a market watchlist, which are all of the assets in securities that look like they will provide you with profits if you trade with them throughout the day.

You want to go look at fundamental news, the economic calendar, and you want to perform a bunch of analysis in order to determine what the best potential trades for the given day are. Random trading is certainly not going to result in winning trades.

Analyze Results and Make Im$provements

Another important thing that you need to do in order to start winning trades is to actually analyze your results at the end of the day. All too many newbies lose a lot of trades and then simply don’t look at what went wrong.

Well, if you plan on winning trades, you need to know why you lost trades in the past period therefore you need to compare all of your losing and winning trades to see if you can find any common mistakes that caused these losses to happen. Once you realize what you are doing wrong, you can then make the appropriate adjustments to start winning trades.

Winning Trades as a Newbie – The Bottom Line

If you are a newbie trader who wants to start winning trades, then following the tips and rules that we set out above is the first step to success. Remember that getting a solid trading education definitely helps too, so we recommend checking out one of the best trading schools in the world listed below.