Executing the Trading Plan from Start to Finish

The start of any trade comes when you step into the market and open up a position. How you enter your position, how you execute the first step of your trading plan, can be as important as the trade opportunity itself. After all, if you never enter the position, the trade opportunity will never be exploited. And probably nothing is more frustrating as a trader than having pinpointed a trade opportunity, having it go the way you expected, but having nothing to show for it because you never put the trade on.

The effort and resources you invest in researching, monitoring, and analysing the market come to a concrete result when you open a trade. You’re now exposed to price fluctuations and your trading account will register a profit or loss as a result. But that’s just the beginning of it.

Just because you have a trading plan doesn’t mean the market is necessarily going to play ball. You need to be actively engaged in managing your position to make the most of it if it’s a winner and to minimize the damage if the market is not going in your favour.

Active trade management is also critical to keeping more of what you make in the market. In my experience, making money in the forex market is not necessarily the hard part. More often than not, keeping what you've made is the really hard part.

You need to stay on your toes, and keep thinking about and monitoring the market while your trade is still active. The market will always be moving, sometimes faster than at other times, and new information will still be coming into the market.

Exiting each trade is the culmination of the entire process and you're either going to be pleased with a profit or disappointed with a loss. Every trade ends in either a profit or a loss (unless you get out at the entry price); it’s just the way the market works. While your trade is still active, however,  you're still in control and you can choose to exit the trade at any time.

Even after you've exited the position, your work is not done. If you're serious about currency trading as an enterprise, you need to review your prior trade for what it tells you about your overall trading style and trade execution. Most important, reviewing your trading results is how you stay focused and avoid lapses in discipline that could hurt you on your next trade. Only then is it time to move on to the next trading opportunity.