How to become a better and profitable trader with a 9 to 5 job - #240
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Welcome back to the TradeCity Traders in Proof podcast. And today we're diving into a topic that is going to resonate with a lot of aspiring traders. How to become a better and eventually profitable trader while juggling a 9-5 job.

And if you've ever felt like your limited time is holding you back from reaching your trading goals, this episode is really for you. We'll explore practical strategies, mindset shifts and daily habits that will help you carve out your edge, build consistency and grow as a trader, even if you have a busy schedule. So let's get right into it. And I have divided this podcast in three different categories with 10 steps total.

And the first category is what I call the foundation. So the first tip in the foundation is that you need to adapt your trading to your daily and weekly schedule. So if you have a 9 to 5 job, you need to plan your trading around your daily schedule. And this first means making an audit of your daily and weekly schedule and asking yourself when do you actually have time that you can allocate to your trading.

Do you have time in the mornings before you head out to work where you can do some chart work that you can use for your trading? Or is this not even a possibility? And also, can you maybe monitor your trading during your job? Which doesn't mean that you need to look at your charts all day, all the time. But if you can look at your charts maybe once or twice during your workday, that's going to give you a lot more possibilities. And if that's not a possibility,

then you're probably going to be bound to the higher time frames. And I will come back to the trading style later, but this is a very first important step where you have to ask yourself: When do you actually have time? And that also then means that you probably have to focus on specific market sessions that align with your time availability. For example, if you are a European trader and you live in Europe,

you probably can focus on the US session in the evening, especially if you're not able to look at your charts during the day when the European market and the London market is going to be most active. If you cannot look at the charts, then probably trading in the evenings and looking at US markets, maybe US Forex pairs, that's going to be probably a possibility. So let's jump into the trading style, because this is quite connected to the daily schedule.

So you need to find a trading style that aligns with your personality. But probably even more important in the beginning, when you still have a lot of time restrictions, you need to make sure that it fits into your schedule. So if you have no possibility to look at your charts during your workday,

then trading the higher time frame is probably going to be your best option. Because it means that you can look at your charts in the evening, you can do your chart work there and you can set new trades or set new orders. A lot of traders will then choose to trade the daily time frame, which means that they only have to look at their charts once a day.

at the daily candle close and then they can make their trading decisions there. This is ideal for traders who have really not a lot of time. Or alternatively, if you cannot look at your charts during the day and also maybe not in the morning, but you have some time in the evening,

Even if it's just maybe an hour or 90 minutes, you could choose to trade an active session as a day trader for that period of time where you have time. So for example, if you live in Europe, you come home from work, the US stock market is still going to be open. So what you could do is to focus on day trading strategies that are focused on

US stocks or US Forex pairs. So US dollar related, Canadian dollar related because they're going to move the most during that period of time and that could be an idea. However, you have to keep in mind that

When you come home from work, you might not be able to focus as well and your mental capital might have been used up during your day. So if you cannot focus, day trading in the evenings might also be quite hard to pull off because it can be quite demanding to make good trading decisions as a day trader after a full day of work. So probably your best bet is going to be the higher time frames, the daily time frames.

If you have a little bit of time during the day, maybe to look at your charts, you could choose to trade something like the four hour timeframe. For that, it is okay to only look at your charts every four hours when a four hour candle is closing and make your trading decisions there. You don't need to spend a lot of time to look at those four hour candles. Ideally, you do your market analysis and your preparations in the evening before when you are off work and when you have some time to

and you create your trading plans then. And then during the day, it's just following on those trading plans that you have already created. So you just pull up your charts and see if something is triggering from what you planned before and then you can execute that. So that is a possibility if you have a few minutes here and there at the four hour candle close that you could do as well.

And those are typically your options that you have when you have a day job and trading time is limited. So it's really important that you are aware of that and then you make the timeframe choice based on that. And then this brings us to the third point and the last point of the foundation before we move on to the habits section. So it's really important that you have a structured approach.

Because a lack of structure in trading often leads to a lot of wasted time and misplaced efforts. Because traders end up focusing on activities that don't contribute to their growth and to their profitability.

So it's important that you build processes that allow you to know exactly what to do and when to do them. And this eliminates a lot of uncertainty and improves your efficiency and also the outcome. A lot of people say that they don't have time, but in reality they are just not clear about their priorities. And what can help here is that you audit your daily time allocation.

Ask yourself, do you spend more than 30 minutes watching YouTube or TV or Netflix? If that's the case, then you have more than enough time to become a better trader.

What you can do is just pull out your phone and look at your daily screen time. That's going to be painful for a lot of people, probably me included, but it can reveal time things that would allow you to work on your dream and develop a new skill. So it's really important that you have this structured approach. Be very clear when you have time that you can allocate to your trading and then know what you do there.

So, for example, in the morning, if you have 30 minutes before work, make sure that you look at your charts, you update your support resistance levels, you draw your supply and demand zones, you update your trading plans, you know in the day or during the day what you are going to do, you know when to execute a trade, you know the best patterns, you have updated your watch list.

That's really important. Also be very clear about when you are going to journal your trades and when you're doing your backtesting. Don't let this be up to chance and you say, yeah, on the weekend I'm going to backtest and maybe update my journal. Instead, you should really schedule an appointment with yourself first.

You pull up your phone and then on the weekend you put in an appointment. 9:00 AM on a Saturday morning, you are doing your back testing for 30 minutes or you're updating your trading journal for 15 to 20 minutes. And that will make sure that you are more likely to stick to your plan and not leave it to chance. So it's really important that you have a structured process. You know when you look at your charts, you know when to update your charts,

You know when to backtest, you know when to journal. And now let's move over to habits, because that also ties in with what we have just discussed. One thing that can help you with your time spent is planning your trades. And proper trade planning is really essential, especially if you don't have a lot of time. So you can create watch lists where you map out potential trades in advance.

and you are already defining clear entry points and exit points. And this will help you also reduce impulsive decisions and it will allow for more efficient use of your trading time. And that's what I do in my trading and that's what I recommend to my traders as well. And I showed in my process.

So what I do is every Saturday or Sunday, I go through all of the forex pairs that I'm monitoring. I update my levels.

sort out the Forex pairs that are not interesting for me. So I'm a trend following trader and this means I will sort out all of the Forex pairs that are not trending and that they don't have good price action. And that will already sort out 70 to 80% of all the Forex pairs that I don't need to look at beyond that. And then with the list that is left over, that's why I create my trading plans.

I mark on my charts where I might be interested in getting into a trade. I know then already where to look at for trade entries. I have predefined areas for my stop loss. I look, okay, where does the stop loss make sense? You draw that on your charts.

And this will help you eliminate a lot of time that you are spending inefficiently if you are just scrolling through charts. You don't really know what you're looking for and you don't have a process. So planning your trades is really, really essential. The next habit that is important is that you set aside time for active improvement because real trading progress happens outside of the live markets.

Real progress happens through activities like reviewing past trades, analyzing patterns and refining your strategies. You can very nicely compare it to a professional sports player. So whether it's football, soccer, tennis, they have spent dozens and dozens, probably hundreds of hours

in training before they step onto the field. When they are in a game, in a match, they are just executing what they have previously learned and practiced. And it's very similar in trading. When you're executing your trade, that's just such a small part compared to what has gone into everything before that. You have back-tested your strategy, hopefully,

where you have collected data, where you've trained your pattern recognition, you know roughly what to expect and then you just execute the plan once the setup occurs. Also what falls into here is keeping a detailed trading journal and I hope you're all using the Edgewonk trading journal.

which is the one that we have created as a Trade Society podcast listener, you can use the discount code TRADECIODY when you go to edgewonk.com to get a very good discount. It's the biggest discount that you can get for Edgewonk.

And having a trading journal is so important because without clear record of your past trades, it becomes nearly impossible to recognize areas for improvement and making meaningful changes to your trading habits. Just ask yourself, do you remember your last 10 to 20 trades and know exactly what went wrong and what you should have done differently? Probably not. It's very hard to know that at the top of your mind.

And that's why it's so important that you have a way of recording your trades and then reviewing it. So this all falls under active improvement. It's about backtesting, it's about journaling, and that will make sure that you are getting better over time. This time that you put into backtesting and journaling is much, much more effective in helping you become a better trader than flipping through timeframes randomly, hunting for signals,

scrolling through social media, that's not going to help you and you're not going to become a better trader that way. At the same time what I want to point out here is that it's important that you not overwhelm yourself. So a lot of traders believe that they need to go all in in their trading, especially in the beginning when it's still all new and exciting. And this is not advisable because you can burn out very quickly. If you want to backtest every day for an hour or two,

It is not going to be sustainable. And most likely after a week or two, you're just going to stop completely and then all the progress is lost and you're not going to continue to grow. Instead, what I would recommend is that you set aside maybe 30, 45 minutes a day or every two days,

that you can spend on this active improvement. And that way it's more sustaining over the long term and that's what it's all about. You want to make sure that you can survive the learning curve. You want to make sure that you are in this for the long term and you don't want to rush things. Another important point here when we talk about habits is that you are building accountability.

And having a trading buddy, a mentor or a community provides a lot of external accountability and motivation, which can help traders stay consistent, committed and motivated for the long term.

So in a community or if you have a mentor, maybe you get mentored by me, you can share your trading experiences, you can gain feedback, you can share your trades and I review them. And this can help you provide or get new insights, different perspective that might not be apparent when you are trading alone. And trading is a very lone endeavor, obviously, when you're sitting in front of your screen all day by yourself without any other people that you are engaging with.

And if that's the case, you are most or very likely to make mistakes because nobody is checking on you. But if you are part of a group and you have a mentor, that is going to be really, really motivating also to get different perspective and to just have someone that you can share your good things and your milestones with. But also when things aren't going well, you can just get feedback and build yourself up.

The third part of becoming a better trader with a 9-5 job is we need to talk about the mindset and the approach for the long term. So it's really important that you avoid system hopping. And system hopping means jumping from one strategy to another. After you have maybe made two or three losses, you get discouraged and then you're looking for something new. And this is a really, really common mistake that a lot of traders make. I think most traders make.

And this is driven by impatience and the temptation of quick success. However, every time you change a new strategy, it's going to reset all of your learning progress. You have to start again from zero, from your backtesting, from your journaling, data collection. And it's also you're focusing on the wrong thing. It is not about finding the perfect strategy that will not have any losses.

I have done a lot of reviews for EdgeWong, so where users send me their journal. And I've seen time and again that the trade is actually the problem here. It's not the strategy. When you look at a trading journal from a trader, very often you will see that the strategy is actually performing profitable. But there are a lot of trades where the trader is breaking their trading rules and that's what's going to cost him his profitability. The strategy on its own would have worked, but the trader is just messing up.

And that's so big eye-opener and such a big aha moment for a lot of traders when they realize they don't need to change their system, they need to work on themselves. So whenever you feel the temptation to change your system and look for something new and better, keep that in mind and look at your last 20 to 30 trades and ask yourself, how often did you break your rules? How often did you trade outside of the strategy premises? And how much money could you have actually made if you would have avoided those bad trades?

Another really, really important point I want to address here is that you manage your expectations. Because unrealistic expectations like accumulating or achieving 20 to 30% monthly returns will set you up for frustration and eventual failure. Because it's just not realistic. Look at the best traders, the millionaire, billionaire hedge funds. They are consistently making 20, 30% per year, not per month.

So if you believe your average Joe trader trading from home allocating maybe 30 to 60 minutes a day without having a lot of experience, that you can beat those billionaire hedge funds and millionaire professional traders, that's probably not achievable or realistic. And instead, you need to redefine success as consistent improvement.

So what this means is that look at where you are currently. You currently maybe don't know much and you're maybe a losing trader. So the next step should be to make small improvement here. From consistently losing and having big losses, try to work on your risk management so that you can avoid large losses and move closer to becoming a break-even trader. That's the first major step.

Another important part here or another important step could be that you have a better routine, that you have a schedule and that you are very clear on your trading rules. That could be a short term goal as well. And then over time, you just try to find one thing week after week that you want to improve.

You don't want to set yourself the goal that you want to be the best trader in the world and make 20% a month right after you've just started trading or you're only in this for a few months. You want to make small steps towards your long-term goal. So each week, find one thing that you want to improve on, identify one mistake that you made last week, and then next week, try to avoid that. And over the long term, that's going to lead to very big changes.

It's also very important that you're honest and you spend some time on self-reflection.

So an honest self-assessment is a very critical part of trading success as it helps you identify areas that need improvement and it prevents self-deceptions. So you need to be willing to confront your mistakes and adjust your approach rather than justifying poor performance or blaming external factors. I've seen many traders who after a month or maybe even after years

still are losing traders and they don't want to admit that their approach to trading is wrong. They always think that "I just need to find a better trading system that is going to make money." It's always the trading system that is not working. But in reality, they are the problem. Again, I come back to the trading journal. Look at your last 20 to 30 trades and just look at how many of those are executed according to your strategy and how many of those are random trades where you have broken your rules.

I would guarantee and I would be ready to bet that if you look at your last 50 to 100 trades, if you exclude all of the trades where

you broke your rules and you know you shouldn't have been in, if you exclude them, you would have been, if not a profitable trader, at least very, very close to profitable trading. So it's very important that you're honest and that you take a clear look at where you are currently, if you've made progress, because if you are committed and if you're in this for the long term, you're going to invest hundreds and thousands of hours into this trading.

And if you waste this time because you're not honest and you're focusing on the wrong things and you just want to get rich, well, quick is not the right word here. But if you're just in it to make a lot of money and you're just hunting systems, then that's a waste of your time that you can use for something much, much better, such as spending time with your family and friends, developing other hobbies, other skills, rather than chasing this dream that is just not working out. And

And those are my 10 or 9 however many tips that I have for you when it comes to becoming a better trader while having a 9 to 5 job. Again, you don't have to change everything at once, but maybe you can pick one or two things that resonate with you and you can try to implement them over the next few days and over the next few weeks and see if and how this can make an improvement for your trading. And again, I'm still sorry for my voice. I haven't recovered 100% from the flu. I

I hope it was manageable. I hope it was understandable. I did my best to provide here a podcast that is okay listening to quality-wise, but just keep in mind, I'm still a little bit under the weather. But next week, I hope that I should be back to normal. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode and you will hear from me again next week.