The Best Trades Are The Hardest – How I Made 200 Pips On The NZDJPY

I have been trading for over 12 years by now and I have seen it all. With my students, I share my setups every week. And in the video below, you can see a sample of my trades, how I analyze the market and what I trade:

Trading is 90% waiting and 10% doing something. The waiting part is the most important and, of course, also the most challenging one.

• As traders, we wait for the setup to finally trigger
• We wait for a trendline or support level to break
• We wait for the price to reach our profit target
• We have to wait and be patient with our account growth
• …and more waiting…

I was stalking the NZDJPY for weeks and I posted this trade 2 weeks before the actual trade signal came. By the time I posted the potential setup, the chart did look ripe for a reversal and I had a gut feeling that a sell-off was very likely.

I know many traders who jumped the gun and entered this trade way too early. It is very common for traders to accumulate losses during such early entries because they act on their gut feel and not based on signals and then once the real signal comes, they are either too scared to pull the trigger again or they have lost so much that even a winning trade won’t be enough to make a difference.

Just like every weekend, I share my best setups with our students and this one was outlined well in advance as well.

Final update:

The trade has reached take profit target 3. I extended my take profit target twice on this trade and made over 200 pips on this trade in total.

I follow all Forex pairs and many Futures and commodities to have a wide variety of setups at my disposal each week. This way I can be very selective and only take the absolute best trades.

My top tips for better trading

If you want to take your trading to the next level, here are a few very important tips:

• Pick one setup and try to master it. Most traders make the mistake of trying to trade too many setups or signals. You’ll learn so much about the markets once you start focusing on only one setup. Eliminate the noise!
• Get a trade checklist.  Often, we are too emotional when entering a trade and miss important clues. A checklist makes sure that we stay on top of our game.
• Enter later! Many problems can be eliminated once a trader starts looking to enter later. When I look at our struggling traders, I often see that the losses happen when they enter a candle too early, acting on their FOMO. Waiting one more candle to either see the real confirmation or the cancellation of a trade can be a game changer.
• Focus on trade management. In our pro area, we spend a lot of time looking at trade management and how we can improve our stop and target placement and trade management in general. Most traders spend all their energy on entries and then don’t know what to do once in a trade. I recommend that you start paying attention to how you (mis)manage trades and then find your weaknesses.
• Obviously, if you don’t have a trading journal, improvement is very hard because we easily forget our mistakes. A trading journal reminds us of negative patterns in our trading and shows us what we need to work on.