Vital Components of Open Trade Management

There are a lot of techniques in play in open trade management.
Based on my experience, they make a huge difference in terms of trading results.

On the fly, in the face of non-stopping flow of the movement of instruments,
interweaving with news and events hitting the wire, how to manage your open positions can be very intense. Not to mention that changes your account balance.

Four important skills to train:

1. Initiative profit taking

Don't passively waiting for your target to be hit.
set a target zone and scale out.

Expecting to exit at precise top/bottom can be poison to traders.
If you hold that unrealistic expectation, your mind is anchored to some precise location.
If you miss it, chance is, you will want to wait for it for too long till you are wrong.


2. Exit before stop get hit

Before you build position, you need to have conditions attached to your positions.
When X happens (or does not happen) at Y time, then you will exit or reduce.

Waiting for stop getting hit and proven to be totally wrong is mentally damaging.
Often you will miss the time to re-evaluate market and good chance on others,
not to mention the extra loss.


3. Multiple Strikes in planned direction

Depend on multiple timeframe analysis, you can get a good idea on the rhythm of different  groups of market players. Thus making odds in your favor.

Enter/Exit positions (partially) multiple times can reduce your mental stress and improve the winning.
Don't sit still unless it is proven strong trend in the making. 80% of time market stays in range.
Striking multiple times reduce your risk to a large extent.

Improving your entry price in this way will keep you in the right trend without too much cost of mentality.



4. Mentality of re-entering position

Wanting/Planning to enter and re-enter your positions is different from actual EXECUTION.
Often it means re-enter an instrument which you have win or lose money on.

Neither case is easy.

After winning on one instrument, you will get torn between two opposite feeling depending on your personality.  One is that you are afraid of it taking back your gain. The other one is that you worry that you are too confident and become careless.

After losing on one instrument, you will have flashing memory of past losing on same thing again and again.

All the right mentality comes from your training. When you are in the market, you always focus on the basic sizing rules, patience to control entry, open positions. And most importantly, treat it as another new trade.  Nothing more, nothing less. Just one trade. Win or loss, as long as it fits in all your trading criteria.

Training makes all the difference, but it is easier to say than to do.