Besides investing and thoroughly studying your investment strategies and markets, a good follow up will also enhance your performance. After selecting, deciding, checking your position sizing, your work is still not finished. That is not even half of it. After you start your trade then there will be two instances where you should devote some more studying time in order to be a successful trader and investor.
During the trade
During the trade there is a lot you should be doing instead of just sitting around and hoping for the best, hoping that you trade go exactly as planned. By the way, if you are “hoping” than this is not a good signal. Professional traders and investors do not hope, they just do it and are unemotional about it. That is the best way to invest and it is how you should be investing to.
During the trade it is when you need to start asking questions like: is the trade going as expected? If yes, good. If the answer is a sound no, than “Why?” it is not behaving the way you expected it and most importantly WHAT you should be doing about it. The second question is the most important: what exactly you should do in the event that the trade do not behave as one might expect. Always try to have a plan before you start your trade, that way you can plan in calm way that will avoid some common mistakes that are made when one is looking directly at a blinking screen with his money already in the game.
After the trade
After the is also important. That is when you should gather all your data, sit down and spend some good timing looking to what happened to your trade. Again, that is easy to do, start asking questions! Did it came out as I expected? Did it no went well? Why the stock soared? Why the stock plummeted?
After you do that research you might be able to extract a lot of useful information about the trade itself and most importantly, about the way YOU behave when you face those conditions. So, next time that the same thing happen, you will be better prepared to face it once again and, hopefully, make the right decision.
Fernando Brinkerhoff is a long time investor and has wrote several articles. You can also check some of his interestes at minky baby blanket and friendship bracelet.
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