If there’s one thing we see consistently across all self help books, it’s setting goals. They talk obsessively about setting goals and breaking them down into sub goals and sub sub goals and planning every hour of your day….
Some goals require that kind of dedication and hard work. But some goals require work with carefully selected targets. Much like a company sets sales targets for its employee to reach the goal of profitability, we need to set ourselves some targets to reach our goal of consistency in trading.
As I wrote previously in my blog post, we must focus on what we can control and hence the targets that we set ourselves must be aligned to the same philosophy.
Most traders set targets for profit, or return on capital. I realized I wasn’t walking the talk. Market doesn’t owe me my target. I can’t force the market to give me the returns I expect or want.
Target setting varies from system to system. An intraday trader can reasonable expect to take several trades in a week. For her it might be statistically correct to check the PnL at the end of the month. For a swing trader there could be months where she doesn’t close any traders and PnL will be zero. Or a month could force her to book 3 losses in that month while several trades end in good profit the next. In such cases, monthly PnL isn’t a right measure.
Setting unrealistic targets can mess with your psychology too. If it looks like you won’t meet your weekly target, which you shouldn’t have set to begin with, you might force the trades and give up any gains that you might have made so far.
Also if you have multiple streams of income, you can set a collective quarterly target across all. I would consider trading in Equities, currency and commodities as three separate streams since required fundamental understanding of markets is quiet different in all three.
So set the targets you can achieve realistically with the capital you have. Follow prudent risk management and work on a trading system that gives you consistent market beating risk adjusted returns.
Happy Trading…
P.S. – Due to some personal reasons I will not be able to publish a post for two weeks.
Nicely analyzed trading habit of an investor to achieve targetted profit figure. In volatile market to achieve such targets is like to sail ship in storm . Last para is important for each investor. Keep it up.
Thank you so much 🙂