Developing A Successful Stock Trading Plan4241546
Before you start trading stocks you need to understand the basics of investing, but you also need to develop your own personal trading plan. Having a well-defined plan will help you make better decisions, including those sometimes necessary quick decisions, and it will help keep you on your defined path. If you stray from this path and let emotions or some other unplanned factor involved you may start making mistakes.
Research
There are a variety of different stock trading strategies, but it is important to find one that fits your personality and style if you really want to succeed. Do some reading and research the different strategies until you find something that clicks. Read about things like risk management, technical analysis and the psychology of trading so you have some knowledge in all of these areas, then focus on an area that you enjoy and refine your skills in these areas.
Back Testing
Use back testing to refine your plan. Here you can alter factors like risk or go points on a trade. Here you can use your plan to experiment on different sectors of stocks. To get the most benefit from back testing don't consider more than three different factors or you may not get very useful results. Keep your plan simple as you do this.
Practice Trading
Practice with paper trading. To get the most accurate information from your practice trades it is important to be diligent about tracking everything. You may be tempted to skim over some things here, but this can skew your results and make this important part of the process far less useful.
Take notes of all of your practice trades as well as the trades you pass on. When you find something that matches your plan and your criteria but you decide not to execute a trade, note why you didn't go with it so you can see if you made a wise choice down the road. Even though you didn't choose it, monitor this stock to see how it performs. As you continue practice trading you will likely see areas of your plan that you need to tweak. It's important to work the bugs out before you start investing with real money.
All of these steps are important as you develop your own personal stock trading plan. You don't want to continue experimenting too much once you begin trading. Use these tools to prepare yourself for greater success right from the start.
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