How to improve your trading

1. Keep a trading journal

This is the single highest-return habit in trading and almost no one does it properly. For every trade, log the setup, your entry and exit reasons, the risk taken, and — crucially — how you felt. After a few weeks, patterns emerge that no indicator will ever show you: maybe your Monday trades are consistently worse, or you size up right after a loss. You can't fix what you don't measure.

2. Fix your risk before your entries

New traders obsess over entries; profitable traders obsess over risk. Decide your per-trade risk (commonly 0.25–1% of the account) and your maximum daily loss before the session, and never override them mid-trade. In a prop evaluation this is doubly important — your risk plan should keep you comfortably inside the firm's daily loss and drawdown limits with room to spare.

3. Define and measure your edge

An "edge" is a setup that, over a large sample, makes more than it loses. You need to know your numbers: win rate, average win, average loss, and expectancy per trade. If you can't state those, you don't yet have a measurable edge — you have a hope. Trade one or two setups until you've got 50+ samples, then let the data tell you whether to keep, cut or refine.

4. Trade a process, not predictions

You cannot control whether a single trade wins. You can control whether you followed your plan. Judge yourself on process quality — did I take a valid setup, size it correctly and manage it per plan? — not on the P&L of any one trade. A losing trade taken correctly is a good trade. A winning trade taken on a whim is a bad habit that will cost you later.

5. Manage the psychology

Most blown accounts die from emotion, not analysis. The two biggest culprits are revenge trading (trying to win back a loss immediately) and fear of missing out (chasing a move you didn't plan). The fixes are mechanical, not motivational: a hard daily stop, a checklist before every entry, and a rule that you step away for 15 minutes after any loss. Remove the decision from the heated moment.

6. Review weekly, adjust monthly

Every week, read your journal and tag your best and worst trades. Every month, look at the aggregate: which setup made the most, which time of day hurt you, where discipline slipped. Make one change at a time so you can measure its effect. Improvement isn't a breakthrough — it's a hundred small, measured adjustments.