Excitement and Greed are both very common emotions when taking that first handful of trades. Most new traders are motivated from hearing stories of incredible trading success like how a good mate at work made 76% in 8 days trading some speculative stock. With visions of turning his $10,000 into a small fortune the new trader hits the markets with no fear, only to find that turning $10,000 into $8,000 is much easier than doubling the account.

1. Trading with absolute confidence 1% at a time

Initially your priority is to take very small trades where risk is miniscule compared to your overall account. By risking 1% or less of your overall trading capital it will ensure you can learn the lessons of trading and keep you account intact at the same time.

Winning and losing is usually closely correlated to your confidence as a trader. Suffer a large number of losses or take 1 big loss and confidence sinks, rendering you hopeless at taking the next trade. On the other side of the coin, those experiencing a large run of wins find no difficulty in taking the next trade as their confidence is soaring to all time highs.

Failure to take the next trade due to lack of confidence means your system is useless. No matter how brilliant your edge is in the market, if you don’t take action and make that trade, then no profit will result. It’s as simple as that.

2. Setting aside your ‘learning capital’

What is the time and financial cost of graduating from a degree in economics? You’ll find it’s around 3 years full time and kiss goodbye a good portion of $20,000. That’s your tuition fees and with trading it shouldn’t be any different. The major advantage of learning the skill of trading is that your earning potential is unlimited, whereas even the economist has limitations on what they can earn as a salary.

Establish your ‘learning capital’ of around $2,000 in your first year (cheap compared to a university degree) and commit to learning the essential elements required to become a profitable trader. Your mindset will be rock solid when you realize that you are just paying your tuition fee, whereas most new traders get bitterly disappointed when they haven’t tripled their trading account in the first 3 months.

3. Establishing clearly defined goals

Leading on from the above example of setting your ‘learning capital’, it is vital to set some clear goals with your trading. Initially your goal is NOT to burn through your ‘learning capital’ of $2,000 but instead you want to experience as much of the market as you possible can whilst minimising losses and maximizing gains.

The golden rule of stock market success is to let your profits run and to cut your losses off short. In other words make sure your wins are on average bigger than your losses. So in your first year establish a goal of completing 30-50 trades with an average win at least 2 times the size of your average loss. In addition to that another goal is to ensure your trading account is at break even or better by year’s end.

4. Keep the leverage to a minimum

Having watched literally hundreds of trading accounts over the years and witnessed a good portion of those wipe themselves out, it is plainly obvious that over leveraging your trading account is the quickest way to the poor house.

Leverage is incredible when the stock markets are moving in your favor but devastating when they are moving against you. We have seen one trader go from $100,000 to over $3million and back down to $50,000 in the space of 8 months. Leverage is a double edged sword and until you have a well defined trading plan based around a clear edge in the markets don’t trade at more than 3 times your starting balance.

5. What is your true trading account balance?

Traders and investors should be aware at all times that their account balance, as it reads on their daily statement, is not how much money they have. A trader’s true net position is what we describe as ‘at stop loss valuation’. This means your true account balance has taken into account all your current positions with regards to your stop losses. If the market turned against you and all your stops got hit, then that is a closer representation of your current account. Keeping in mind stock markets can gap so it’s hard to determine this figure perfectly.

Understanding your true current account balance helps you determine the next point.

6. Always know your worst case risk

What would happen if all your positions turned against you and hit your stop loss? How much would you stand to lose as a percentage of your overall account?

Trading safely is largely about minimising worst case scenario’s so a trader or investor needs to have safeguards in place to ensure maximum risk in any one month is kept to a minimum.

Remember recovering from losses is much harder than banking small wins so set a maximum loss in any one month, a point where you simply stop trading. For example, when trading stocks with no leverage you may decide to stop trading when your monthly loss as a percentage of your overall capital reaches 6-10%.

When trading stocks with leverage you may decide to stop the hemorrhaging when your monthly loss reaches 15-25% of your trading capital.

7. Backtest your system to determine worst drawdown

Losing 10,15 or 25% of your capital is never nice but a good trader can recover from that. The problem starts when losses get in excess of 30%+ and traders typically resort to gambling in order to recover the losses. Hopefully the term backtesting is not foreign to you and specifically what we are talking about here is backtesting your trading system to determine your worst drawdown.

By finding out your worst drawdown you can then plan your money management to ensure your maximum loss at any one time does not exceed say 25% of your total capital. For example if your backtesting showed total consecutive losses of 20 in a row then you can tie your position sizing to ensure that 20 consecutive losses does not erode more than 25% of your trading capital.

8. Keep good records and chart your equity curve

Are you the type of person that when you are on a winning streak, keeping records is a breeze and after a string of losses the record keeping gets too hard? If so then you are not alone! Nobody likes to record and analyse the losing trades but if you are to preserve your capital and win in the long run, then you and record keeping are going to have to become the best of friends.

Having an up-to-date record of all your trades will allow you to plot an equity curve and monitor your drawdowns visually. This is a powerful tool and will serve as a constant reminder to reduce position size when you are on a losing streak, thus preserving your capital for that purple patch.

Excel is a powerful tool that will allow you to keep great records and you most probably already have it. If the thought of paying Microsoft money send chills up your spine then considerwww.openoffice.org , www.thinkfree.com  or  google’s attempt as an excellent free alternative.

If running professional portfolio management software is your thing then check out Stator-afm with their free 30 day trial.

9. Advanced portfolio tracking

A useful trick which you might find handy involves a little bit of computing or utilizing the services of portfolio management software like stator AFM. The idea here is to plot your equity curve and then plot a 20 day moving average of your equity curve.

The goal behind this is to actually stop trading when your equity curve moves below your 20 period moving average of your equity curve (ie you are in drawdown). Once you stop trading you continue to monitor each trade your system would have generated and begin trading again once your paper profits get your equity curve out of drawdown and tracking above your 20 period moving average.

Whilst this is a little complicated it is nowhere near as complicated as having to explain to your significant other the reasons the family can’t afford to go on that 7 day Pacific Ocean Cruise!

Learn CFDs.com is dedicated to helping traders of all levels discover simple and effective trading strategies. We primarily focus on developing a solid trading foundation that sets the platform for long term trading success.