I always tell my friend about my trading strategy is “wake up in the morning, and collect profit”. Of course, that’s a joke.

The basic idea is, once the order is submitted, executed, with stop loss and profit-taking or exit orders are in place, I normally do not stare at the screen too much.

This is especially important if you are trading from Asia, or a little bit worse, from Australia. Staying up the whole night to watch your profit fluctuates doesn’t really do anything good for your overall trading performance.

H/T to Eyal, who is trading from Thailand. He listed out some points about this “strategy”. Good read.

Trading routine

1. It is easier mentally, I don’t really need to watch what’s happening throughout the day anyway. It serves no real purpose to watch P&L or even price action for my open positions as my trading plan doesn’t have any action steps for the afternoon.

2. Flowing from point 1, it makes it easier to actually follow my trading plan of letting positions play out and not getting tempted to tweak and play around with stops and targets. P&L is better off this way. This became evident using Stocktickr’s backtesting tool.

3. It makes it easier to wake up at a more normal time during the day when other people are awake. This also means I’m in a better mental state to trade the European session.

If you are feeling stressed because of your trading activities, you should be considering tweaking your trading routine.

If you are interested in learning more about trading, check out my Back to Basics of Trading series.