Long Term Conviction

There are many differences in our approach to short term and long term trading.

When trading short term you can start your day 3-4 hours before the start of the trading session, do your analysis, check the calendar, prepare the trading plan for this session and then follow it. You are only interested what the Market will do in the next couple hours so you only need to remain confident in your plan for this short period of time.

If you are not seeing the Market well today or just not feeling particularly well, you can simply skip the trading session and start over the next day – one trading session is not that different from another, so you will not miss much.

The main difficulty in long term trading is that we are preparing the trading plan for coming weeks and months and the trick is to maintain your conviction in this plan over a long period of time. No matter what the Market will do today it can hardly cancel your long term trading plan. It will gradually update your view with new information and it is up to you to keep the original scenario in your consciousness throughout many weeks until it plays out or is canceled.

How many times I would prepare the plan – a result of careful analysis over many days – just to find myself losing confidence in it over the next couple days. The Market does not cancel my scenario per se, it is just not confirming it yet, and yet sometimes it is easy to lose the sight of the big picture over the course of a couple days.

Two trading styles cannot be compared in terms of being better or worse – they are just different. Interestingly enough, they are not so different in their technical approach – the analysis methods and price action patterns can be very similar. Their main difference lies in psychological demands.

Long and Short term trading will affect our lifestyle differently, require our attention span to be very different and will present us with different psychological challenges every single day.

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