Do you calculate target pips per month??

I have really bad discipline when it comes to Forex. I succeeded in lots of things in my life by discipline and determination. But I found that the key to discipline is to make a plan and set a specific goal.

Do you take random number of trades and pips per day? Or do u have a certain WRITTEN plan? How do u calculate it?

I used to keep track of pips earnt but now I think more in percent per trade. You only need something like 0.05% profit per day to be very profitable over time. This might be a better way of looking at it if you need targets.
I do have a written plan for what deturmines my exits and entries and that does include simple ideas like setting to break even as soon as possible.
Be careful though, as my mentor once said: "Dont think that because you are now a day trader that you have no boss. The market will pay you when it likes and over trading in bad conditions will cost you dearly".

Just imagine that you trade many lots and remember that 97% are losers, this will help you to be disciplined.

You can discipline yourself by let the computer do the trading by making pending orders or using an EA to trade for you. I'm now comfortable with it because I don't need to look at the charts all the time and gain myself much more free time

Hi Brb-Fraudin. You have managed to raise several issues in your post, though the title was specific to target pips per month. You mention:

- Having a written plan
- Setting a goal
- Having a (pips) target
- Maintaining discipline

Every successful trader I know operates with a documented plan - however what is often found in a "good plan" is not just mechanical rules for entries and exits (this is where many plans stop - and fail - and EA's for that matter) but circumstances where JUDGEMENT is required, and also that the plan itself should be allowed to evolve based on the learning of the trader and to also reflect the changing nature of the chosen market(s). And JUDGEMENT in the markets cannot be purchased, acquired, copied or found.. it needs to be developed through experience and learning.

So with a good plan (literally years of trading development required to become "good" I would say) your job is both to execute your plan and to continue to improve your plan.

As for discipline, well yes, that is critical, and you can probably look at it in different contexts. Eg

1) Discipline to develop yourself as a good trader - this is about learning and hard work!

2) Discipline to stick to your plan..

My belief is that many traders put a lot of thinking and effort into "2" but have failed to realise their shortcomings in "1", so they think they have a "discipline" issue in sticking to their plan.. but actually the plan is crap in the first place, and no amount of "trading execution discipline" is going to help.. so forget about the trading psychology symptoms, and get to the root cause, which lies in issue discipline area #1. I'm not suggesting this applies to you, but is just an illustrative example.

As for targets (pips / $ / %return, etc) well there are different schools of thought here, but my personal view, for what it's worth, is that targets can indeed be useful, but only when they are just an expression of the CAPABILITY of your total trading method, which includes knowledge of the likely performance of your actual trading set-ups as well as the capability and comfort of YOU as the trader. Statements such as "I am targeting X pips per day/week/month" are mostly useless and potentially quite damaging, unless they are linked to identifying and exploiting the specific capabilities in your total trading method.

Just my 2 cents worth - not sure how much of the above is relevant to you, but hope some of it helps - and happy trading!

I would also agree that setting rigid goals for pips could hurt your performance, rather than better it.
However, I would try it for a while, as you may find that it will typically help.
You just don't want to fall into that hole, where your target pips will cloud your better judgement, and push you towards making improper decisions

The problems that arise with having a set total in an envirnoment that is not absolute is that you start to allow the emotions that kill traders to enter into your plan. Regardless of what the total may be you will find yourself either overtrading or holding onto trades with the hope that they work out. The mentality shifts violently also when you experience losses because now the mindset is more damage control; that is "I now need to make 150 pips because I dropped a 50 pip loss". The calculations start to come in and suddenly you are limiting your potential as you seek to regain the lost pips to ease the burden.

Trading is a business and as such needs to have tolerances to income fluctuations. Having run a personal business for some time now I can tell you that there are no hard and defined weekly totals. Some weeks I may make 2k, another week may be $600 and then there are some weeks were I make a loss. Trading needs to be taken with the same light, which is fundamental difficult for most to absorb because we are naturally programmed to expect a payout for the time we have input. A job pays a regular income for the hours that are performed and this is the approach that too many people come to expect from trading.

Razor