When I first started emini futures trading fulltime, I was sitting in front of my monitor from 7am until 4pm or 5pm. I was taking breaks here and there but essentially I was giving it 9 or 10 hours of my life every day Monday to Friday. By Friday afternoon I was wiped out by the effort and even by Wednesday I wasn’t at my best.
I’ve learnt through bitter experience that once I have reached my daily goal of points, I should stop and leave the markets to their own devices until the next day. If I don’t I end up giving back my profits, getting frustrated, I start overtrading and what could have been a relatively stress free profitable hour or two of trading turns into an emotionally draining 6 or 7 hours where I will usually look to other markets to get my profits and I end up negative on the day. Of course, there are exceptions to this rule and it’s those days I remember when I carry on but the reality is that the more time I give trading on any given day, the less profitable I am.
The key therefore to being a consistently profitable emini futures day trader is to limit your time in front of the computer to no more than 2 or 3 hours a day. The objective should be to make that quality, well focused time during which you are waiting for the market to give you signals to trade and hopefully enough points to make your daily or weekly target.
It takes practice and discipline to stick to your rules and keeping to a set number of hours is part of this. If you trade fulltime don’t be fooled into thinking that you need to be sat at your desk for 8 hours a day looking at charts. It’s an easy trap to fall into but remember unlike 9 – 5 jobs there’s little correlation between time/effort and the money you make and in fact I would say there’s a inverse relationship between two. In other words, the more time you commit to trading during the day, the less money you will make.
