Just Follow Your Trading Plan

If you’re one of those traders who keep deviating from your plan, then it could be that deep down… You don’t really believe in it.

Because if you did, you wouldn’t waver.

Think about it like this.

Imagine I said to you, “I guarantee, if you follow your rules to the letter, you’ll double your account this quarter.”

Assuming you trusted my word… you’d just get on with it.

Win or lose on any individual trade, you wouldn’t care. Your only job would be sticking to the plan, because you’ve got a guarantee.

But trading doesn’t come with guarantees.

Probabilities aren’t static. We’re not running a casino where the edge is locked in, and that lack of belief is the real reason we drift from the plan.

Think about the early Bitcoin guys. or the silver bugs.

Right or wrong… they had a belief, a real belief.

And that belief is what kept them in the trade when everyone around them was calling them mad. They weren’t second-guessing every dip. They weren’t jumping out at the first sign of pain. Their conviction did the heavy lifting.

Now, we don’t want to build a stubborn view on the market. But if we could harness some of that conviction in our own strategy, that would make life easier…

So how do you build that kind of belief in your own plan when you’ve got no track record of gains to anchor it to?

Start with a belief, not a setup,

Build your trading plan on a foundation you already believe in.

Eg:

• Equities have an upward bias.
• Forex mean reverts.
• Headline spikes often overshoot.
• Big trend days tend to start with a wide opening range.

Pick the one that resonates with how you see the market.

Then keep the plan simple and built around that belief.

So…

“If I see a wide opening range, I’ll get long, because I believe equities have an upward bias, and wide opening ranges yield big trend days more often than not.”

Every rule you add from there should complement that belief, not fight it.

No guarantees, of course. But if belief is one of the biggest reasons traders stick to a plan… why not stack as much of it as you can?

Just until the P&L takes over.

And then the confidence starts coming from performance AND your market beliefs.