The 5 Steps to Consistent Market Profits

1. Work on yourself consistently and your personal issues so that they won’t get in the way of your trading. This step must be accomplished first; otherwise, those issues (if you have any at the moment) will interfere with each of the other four steps that follow.
2. Develop a business plan as a working document to guide your trading. This should be a continual work in progress to help guide your trading career. This NOT meant to raise money, which is the purpose for most business plans. This business plan will actually help you with the other four steps outlined here. There are 11 steps to developing an optimal business plan for trading/investing.
3. Develop trading strategies that not only fit your personality and temperament, but fits your view of the markets, and understand how these trading/investing strategies will perform in different market conditions. Obviously the ultimate goal of this particular step is to develop strategies that will work well in every market condition (Up, Down & Sideways markets).
4. Thoroughly understand your trading/investing objectives and develop a Position Sizing (part of Money Management) strategy to meet those objectives. I would say fewer than 10% of all traders and investors understand how important position sizing is to trading performance. You MUST understand that your position sizing strategy will ultimately allow you to reach your trading/investing objectives. Without this very important element to your overall trading plan, you will NOT meet your objectives.
5. Monitor yourself regularly and minimize the number of mistakes you make. A mistake means NOT following your trading/investing rules. So, for those of you that do not have any trading rules written down, everything you do is a mistake. However, if you HAVE followed the first four steps outlined here, you will have rules to guide your trading, and you will therefore be able to define a mistake as not following those rules that you have laid out for your trading. If you repeat the same mistake that is self-sabotage. So, if you regularly monitor your mistakes and continue working on yourself, you can minimize their impact on your bottom line trading results. For those of you who do this, in my opinion, tend to produce consistent, above average trading profits