Getting in the training…

Athletes train for success. Futures traders should also train for success. Here are some drills that the futures trader should work on…

1. Placing orders in the DOM. Adding and removing contracts. It is surprising how bad most trading platforms are when it comes to managing multiple contracts. It is important to the active trader to add and remove contracts. What happens when you add extra contracts and the market doesn’t look good? You may want to take off only a portion. Can you do that? It is not easy.
2. Taking as many trades as possible in the simulator. Imagine a trader who takes 3 trades per day versus a trader who makes 30 trades per day. Multiply that over 10 days. The trader who made 30 trades per day has 10x the experience. It might not always be advisable to take 30 trades per day in the live markets but for building experience, taking more trades will help one gain experience faster. More observations. More ideas to test.
3. In addition to training for more trades, why not try to train to trade with only 2 tick stop losses. It may or may not be possible to make money consistently in the market with 2 tick stop losses but you will gain a lot of experience.
4. Training different methods and styles for diversification benefits.
5. Manipulating time. If I go back to a random point in time on a daily chart and chart-step it then it is surprisingly easy to pick off several perfect trades. Why? Because when you step a chart, you control the tempo. You can play it back at the perfect speed for your processing speed. In real-time, those market moves would have been painfully slow. There would been a lot of distraction and talk around the moves. A lot of time to self-doubt oneself. A lot of time to lose interest or for life to intervene or to get scared out of a good trade. In real-time, the market tends to move either too fast or too slow. Playback the market slower and faster. If you do trade from charts, try to find a chart that naturally moves at or near your optimal processing speed. If you find yourself taking a lot of bored trades then it may help to trade more frequently for smaller moves: if you trade for smaller moves then just from basic statistics, the best trades within that context will come more frequently.
6. Building proprietary indicators and methods. Most things you will invent will have been done before. You know that. There is very little new under the sun. But, when you build it yourself, it becomes your own in a unique way.