Where you should spend your time in trading

Most professional traders do not look at the chart every hour unless you are hired into a trading firm and it is your job to trade for them. You will become an employee and your trading style is very restricted in those environments.

For the retail trader, you can choose your trading style and determine your own goal. Most people thinking that for a trader he needs to sit in front of the computer during the market open until market close. This is unnecessary and most traders just look at the market when their setup happens. The trader normally will run through a daily routine and already have their action plan well before the price or opportunity comes about.  The monitoring of the chart is mainly checking if your setup occurs. This will depend on your strategy.

After you have entered a trade, you cannot do anything but just have an exit plan. Therefore, monitoring the market is unnecessary and in fact, it will hurt your psychology. The exit plan is mainly having a define take profit and stop loss. You must be wondering if traders do not need to spend much time in by looking at the chart and trading the market then where do you spend their time? The answer is the research of strategy. Most of the time and hard work is spending time researching strategy, testing the strategy, and analyzing the strategy rather than trading the market.

Before you commit your real money, you need to have a well define a probability-based strategy with supported data that show your strategy have an edge and will win over a long time. Many people too focus on the strategy which they adapt to the strategy too early without knowing its drawdown, wining rate, etc.

Analyzing all these data is the most tedious part and if you are willing to do the hard work it will be rewarded otherwise you will need to depend on other people’s research and have an immediate result.

Conclusion spending more time analyzing the strategy is what a trader should focus on it, trading and looking at the chart it just 10% of your time.