up or down, page-9

Hiya Harry,

No I have never served, 'though my father did and his father before that and for some strange reason, many of my friends have served as well.

Once you blokes hit civvy street, you're a force to contend with. :)

I know now what you are getting at, regarding standard operating procedures, and in that lies the rub.

For me, I've been trained to write instructional stuff, and I actually make my living at it as a technical writer. When I am trading, now, and because I am used to it with many trades, good and bad under my belt,I don't have a list of stuff to check off physically, but I do have mental lists, an procedures that are now fairly strongly ingrained in my head.

When I first knuckled down though, I wrote down my trading signals and printed them out a sheet of paper, and as each signal went off, I moved to the next item to check off, and performed the appropriate actions based on that... now it is fairly ingrained and particularly with this fading methodology I allude to, it comes pretty naturally... eg, I just now closed a trade of 10 mini contracts on the AUDUSD pair, short position, that I had built up over the last hour, each with a target price of .6930, and altogether an average open price of .6954, based on divergence signals on 1 minute and 5 minute charts... done with confidence as I have performed this stuff so many times before.

BUT to get to this stage of confidence... I had to write down what to do for myself, as I found/find it too easy to get distracted by monetary figures and emotions when I am in a trade, and need the external discipline of following procedures to keep my trading on the straight and narrow.

THis is not the easiest thing to do, to write procedures, but You CAN do it.

Start off simple, and keep things simple... Very much Like This Do That...

Have a look at the trading system outline I pointed to in my email, and you'll see in the later half, how I initially approached writing this instuctional stuff down

Hope that helps mate,

;)