How to set the right trading goals | Traders Improved (#67)

The wrong goals: Money, return, pips

You cannot control how much you take out of the market. You cannot control how many setups you get within a week or within a month. You cannot control how many of your trades will go on towards your TP and how many fail. Of course, over the long term, you can have fairly accurate statistics about your performance and expectations, but the short term follows different rules. Anything can happen on a week to week basis.

Thus, having results-based goals can be detrimental to a trader’s performance. If you hit your goal early, are you going to take the rest of the week/month off and miss potentially profitable trades? If not, why do you have such a goal in the first place?

If you are short of your goal, you are more likely to over-trade or take excessive risk. This will, most likely, bring you further away from your goal and lead to an overall bad trading quality.

Finally, where do those results based goals come from in the first place? How did you come up with them? Most likely, they are just made up. I have seen countless of traders performance wishful-thinking calculations where they pull up a spreadsheet and backward engineer how much return they have to generate to meet an artificial goal, such as making 1 million Dollars within a given time period. Obviously, this has nothing to do with reality and the market and the world could care less about what you want. Your one and only job as a trader is to make the best trades possible, but you cannot control when they happen.