Don't trade like you're at an all-you-can-eat buffet
By Boris Schlossberg at BKForex
Is there anything more quintessentially American than the all you can eat buffet bar? The idea that you can just eat an endless supply of food until you finally give up out sheer exhaustion is bewildering to most people across the world.
Don't get me wrong. I love an all you can eat buffet bar as much as the next guy. There is a chain in the south called Golden Corral that is a guilty pleasure for even the snottiest of New Yorkers. I dare you to have their fried chicken without going back for seconds.
The all you can eat buffet is perhaps the clearest cultural symbol of American ingenuity and technological prowess in conquering agriculture. It is, in its own goofy way, the personification of the American spirit that tells us that there are no limits in life. But is has a dark side. Take look around. We have become a country of lardasses. So overweight that taken in totally 300 million of us probably weigh more than 600 million Africans or Asians. We have indulged our appetites to such an extreme that they have turned to gluttony.
So what does all of this have to do with trading?
Quite a lot actually.
Much like it did with agriculture, technology has turned trading into an endless buffet of opportunities for anyone with a computer and a connection to the Internet. Costs are miniscule, instruments are endless and -- especially in the market that we play in -- the clock literally never stops. In FX we can trade 24 hours a day, 5 1/2 days per week without ever taking pause or a break. It's an amazing achievement of human civilization, but it is also a recipe for disaster.
As a day trader I interact with the market a lot. In fact you can easily say that I am the poster child for "all you can eat" trading since I stare at my screens 20 hours each day.
But this week I discovered something extraordinary. Back testing all of my various strategies that we trade in my chat room I realized that if I simply restricted my trades to just one trade per day for each strategy and traded only the highest probability currency pairs, my win ratio would literally skyrocket to 90%. I would be able to double and some cases triple the amount of pips made without doing anything new.
That's right.
Just one trade per day per pair. If you day trade like I do -- I dare you to try it. It is amazing at how many fewer stops you'll incur because you will be taking only the best possible trades during the given day.
I know it's not easy to practice this "one shot, one kill" approach. Very often you feel like you are leaving money on the table (kind of like that succulent drumstick of fried chicken left on your plate), but I beg you to try it. If you are doing 15 trades per day cut them down to 5. If you are doing 30 trades cut them down to 10.
Just.
Do.
One.
Trade.
Overtrading like overeating is just gluttony. No matter how good it feels in the moment you will pay for it in the end. More importantly this is a very simple way of radically improving your profitability.
So eat one plate and leave the f-ing table -- both your stomach and your wallet will thank you in the end.
