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System-Based Trading
Emotions are a big part of trading. There's lots of information based on strategies, but less focus and education based on psychology and managing your emotions when a trade is running. A system-based approach allows you to reduce those emotional biases and just simply follow a system or group of rules. You can build your own system or find existing systems with a proven edge.
You must do you own testing for each system you find to understand the edge and how to implement it. Otherwise a few losing trades, you'll lose faith in the system and move on to the next one! - Classic system hopping is terrible for longer term success.
There's two charts to use here. On the right hand side is the Weekly Time Frame. This is your anchor time frame. This drives your decision on whether the market is up-trending, down trending or moving sideways. For long trades, once the Green candle is confrimed on the Weekly and you can see a trend is developing where the candles are above the moving averages, you have the green light to look for long moves on the 4 hour entry timeframe.
Once you see the first green candle (after a red one), you wait for it to close and confirm, then place and order to buy one point above. You're looking for continuation of the trend. We put a stop at the last swing low and look to take first profits at 1:1. So if the stop is 50 points away, you'll take half profits at 50 and then let the rest run until the next red candle.
We always exit on the break of a subsiquent next red candle. This means we don't often get a full stop out, We can often take small losses on pullbacks, but ride long trends up over multiple days.