How to make the best of the New Year to improve your trading skills

Want to improve your trading skills? It’s that time of the year when resolutions are perhaps something everyone makes, regardless of whether they acknowledge it or not. It is an entirely different story about how many can stick to their resolutions during the year ahead.

For traders, the New Year can be a great opportunity to take time to improve your trading skills. Having resolutions as far as your trading is concerned can be beneficial and also help you to improve as a trader.

So what things should you focus on when making your New Year trading resolutions and most importantly, how do you go about making steady progress over the year ahead?

 

Have a goal

The most important aspect to start off with is to have a goal. A goal can be anything; from improving your trading returns by just 1% to developing new skills as a trader, or building your own trading strategy.

Having a goal and writing it down can be a great way to keep your focus, even during the middle of the year which, by then, the word resolution becomes a distant memory. A goal can also help you to carve your path and give you a plan of action to achieve your goal.

 

Stay consistent

Staying consistent in your resolution can be helpful especially when you feel like you are going nowhere. Staying consistent means, sticking to your new trading strategy, improve your trading skills, or for that matter, even staying consistent to improve your trading returns.

Most traders tend to hop from one strategy to another, or from one forex broker to another at the first signs of failure or no progress. While starting from scratch might seem easy, sticking to your plan and the tools available can give you better rewards in the long run.

 

Learn to be patient

There are times in a trader’s life when they end up over trading. Learning to be patient and trading when the conditions are right can be a great way to keep yourself from making any mistakes.

A slow and steady approach can help you to better calculate your risks and rewards. The markets continuously gives us many opportunities to trade. Just because you missed one opportunity doesn’t mean that you won’t get more. A good way to cure the itch of over-trading is to keep a demo account or a cent account handy. This trading account can be used as a fall back trading account when you feel the urge to trade or are excited to test out a new strategy.

 

Keep learning

Focus should also be given on learning something new about the markets. This can be either focusing on improving your skills on technical analysis or improving your understanding of the macro-economic factors that drives the markets.

No matter what, learning and improving your knowledge of trading can be helpful in the long term. It will also help you to become a more mature trader. For those who aren’t really inclined to learn something new, you can simply look back at various case studies from the past. There is always something to learn from history and reading from what caused the dot com bubble or the SNB’s removal of the CHF peg, which can help give you deeper insights into the markets.

 

Keep a record of your progress

A goal is only as good as the progress you make. Thus, having a log and marking important milestones can be a great way to see how you are progressing. You can also break down your goals into simple achievable tasks over a period of time.

Having a quarterly review of your progress can tell you where you need to improve or whether you need to step up to the game.

For most traders, trading is all about buying and selling. However, there is a lot more that goes behind the movements of prices. Trading is like business. If you have been putting off serious trading, what better time than now to become more focused to improve your trading skills.