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In today’s episode, you’ll discover 6 powerful trading tools to save you a ton of time in trading.
So listen to it now…
Resources
The Essential Guide to Systems Trading
Forex Risk Management and Position Sizing (The Complete Guide)
How to Create a Trading Journal and Find Your Edge in the Markets
Transcript
Hey, hey, what’s up my friend? In today’s episode, I want to share with you 6 trading tools that will save you a ton of time.
I will also share with you more trading tools for forex along the way, and not just for stocks.
1. Have a trading watchlist
A mistake that many traders make is that whenever they want to trade just open up their charts and see what familiar pattern they can find to trade. That’s ridiculous.
You’re going to waste a lot of time scouring through the charts trying to find patterns that make sense to you, trying to satisfy your itchy fingers and lose money. What you need to do is to have a watchlist. It depends on the type of trader you are.
For me, I’m a swing trader and position trader. I have my watchlist done every weekend on Saturday, typically on a Friday. And this watchlist prepares me for the week ahead. I know out of the 40 markets that I trade, which are the ones to focus on for the coming week.
Your watchlists don’t have to be complicated. First and foremost, you have to ask yourself, what type of strategy are you trading? Are you trading breakouts of support resistance, or are you trading reversals at support resistance?
Maybe you’re trading trend continuation trades, whatever the case is, before you do your watchlist, you have to know what you’re looking for.
Let’s say you’re trading trend continuations. You’re buying pullbacks in an uptrend, selling rallies in a downtrend. It’s very simple for your watchlists. You want to scan the markets every weekend and see which markets are already trending.
Because those markets which are already trading, chances are, they might present you a trading opportunity for this coming week. Because its already in trend, it’s in a market condition that you want to be trading. Make sense?
Or how about another example. Let’s say you trade reversals support resistance. And clearly, the markets in your watchlist should be those markets which are approaching near support resistance because that’s where you’re going to get a potential trading setup.
So have a watchlist, it’s gonna save you a ton of time and you won’t be all over the place, trying to find meaning out of the noise out there.
2. Get a position size calculator
There are many position size calculators, just google for them. You don’t have to manually calculate it in your head or on your calculator whatsoever. But I’m a bit old school and I still have this calculator here which I use from time to time.
You don’t have to be like me. You can use those free position size calculators such as myfxbook (which is one of the best trading tools out there, by the way), and determine how many shares to buy or how many units of currency to buy. That saves you a lot of time as well.
3. Set price alerts
I’m not sure which platform you’re using, but if you’re on Trading View, I believe the free plan does allow you to put set a few price alerts for free. Let’s say you want to buy at support, you can set a price alert at support.
Let’s say you set it at $100 for Amazon, so if the price reaches that $100 price point that you’re looking at, it will send an alert to your email, SMS or something along those lines.
Always use price alerts so you don’t have to be glued to the screen all the time. Set price alerts, it makes your life much easier.
Remember, the best trading tools make your life much easier.
4. Have a trading journal
Because here’s the thing, without a trading journal, how are you going to improve on your trade? And if you don’t have a trading journal, you’ll find that you waste a lot of time trying to remember what trades you put on previously.
Look, I can’t even remember what I ate for lunch yesterday. Do you think you can remember the trades that you put on last week? Don’t kid yourself. Have a trading journal so you don’t have to waste time trying to think what you did previously.
For your trading journal, it doesn’t have to be too complex. You want to put down the important metrics:
- Your entry
- Your stop loss
- Your profit in terms of R – for example, you risk $1 and you make $5 that’s a 5R profit
- Screenshot of the charts of your entry point
- The chart when the trade is over, what the exit looks like
- The type of trading setup – is it a breakout, or reversal etc.
All these, when you accumulate over time, it makes the process of reviewing your trade much easier.
Using one of the best trading tools such as a trading journal makes the process of reviewing your trade much easier when you accumulate the data mentioned above.
5. Have a scanner
Especially those of you who trade stocks, there are thousands of stocks out there in the US markets, Asian markets, China markets, Indian markets. How do you make your life easier?
For those of you who trade US stocks, Thinkorswim is a very powerful software, and it’s free. It makes your life easier by allowing you to scan the different stocks in the various indices out there like the Russell 1000, Russell 2000, Russell 3000, S&P 500.
So if you were looking stocks trading at 52-week highs, guess what, that will allow you to do that. Now, of course, it’s not gonna be as simple as click here, click there, you might have to do a bit of custom programming to tailor it to your needs.
But it can be done, and it’s not rocket science. If you’re like me, or you’re a programming idiot, you can always hire somebody to help you with it.
So use the Thinkorswim platform if you want something free, because the platform is free. And if you trade US stocks that platform is very powerful.
Another platform to mention, if you want to scan would be AmiBroker, this is a paid version, where as long as you have the data feed, you can scan the forex markets, stock markets, almost whatever markets that you want, but it’s more for the premium version.
If you trade the forex market, you can use forex trading tools such as the currency strength meter instead to determine which pairs you wish to trade.
You can learn more about it in this article here.
And finally…
6. Use a backtesting platform
The last thing to make your trading easier and save tons of time is to use a backtesting platform, especially if your trading system your trading strategy can be quantified.
My goodness, backtesting platform makes your life much easier to quickly validate whether a trading system works or not. Again, if you can’t do it, then get someone who can do it.
Because once you have this tool in your hands, you can verify whether a strategy works in like a minute or less, because when you click the backtest button, then in 30 seconds, it’s going to give you the results over the last 10, 20 years.
For backtesting platforms, you can use AmiBroker, especially if you trade multiple asset classes like forex, futures or a portfolio of markets, like 40, 50 markets at once. AmiBroker is powerful for that.
If you trade individual markets, you can look at TradeStation, MultiCharts, these are all paid tools. But again, they will save you a ton of time in the long run, especially if you want to get serious about this trading business.
Finally, if you trade the forex markets, one of the forex trading tools that you can use is FxBlue, Forex Tester, and Soft4fx.
Which, again, some are free, and some aren’t.
Sounds good?
Here’s a quick recap…
Recap
- Have a watchlist – it’ll save you a ton of time
- Use position sizing calculator
- Set price alerts
- Have a trading journal
- Use a scanner – for example, AmiBroker, Thinkorswim for example
- Use backtesting platforms like AmiBroker, MultiCharts, TradeStation, etc.
And if you’d like to learn more about this type of systematic trading approach then I recommend you to go down to my website, TradingwithRayner.com, I’ve got one guide called the Essential Guide to Systems Trading, it’s for non-programmers.
if you’re interested to learn more about quantitative trading systems trading but you can’t program then guide is absolutely for you.
I’ll show you how to do it, where to find people to help you with your programming work, where to find trading systems that work, how to test it, validate it and reduce your learning curve.
All this and more on TradingwithRayner.com, just go onto the website, the guide is over there, click download and I’ll send it to your email for free.
With that said, I wish you good luck and good trading. I’ll talk to you soon.