Screen Time Is Not Skill Time
Why Watching the Charts All Day Can Hurt Your Trading
One of the most common mistakes novice traders make is assuming that profit comes solely from the time spent on the screen. The more you watch, the more you learn. The more you stare at the chart, the more trades you’ll find. Unfortunately, this is not true:
The longer you sit in front of the screen, the more likely you are to force something that isn’t there.
When Patience Turns Into Pressure
Markets spend more time going nowhere than they do making decisive moves. During those quiet stretches, your brain gets restless. You start seeing setups that aren’t there. You take marginal trades to feel active.
For the majority of traders, entertainment is their prime driver, and these periods of perceived inactivity are excruciating. The key lesson is that to take no action is an action.
You cannot force the market to give you something, no matter how hard you try. This is when tinkering with a system becomes a real possibility, and it is something I have seen over the decades. Traders become frustrated at the lack of signals, believing it is a bug in the system, when in fact it is a feature of a well-designed trading system.
The role of a trading system is not to tell you what to trade; it is to say to you when not to trade.
One or Two Setups Is Enough
A hard lesson for new traders to learn is that trading is about efficiency – it is not about how many trades you take or how many times you are right. It’s about how much you make each time you’re right.
It only takes one or two setups applied consistently over time to achieve success. The problem for most traders is that there is a caveat to this idea: it is that it is, on average, over time. The over time bit defeats most because they want to be widely profitable right now as opposed to letting the system do its thing and slowly gain momentum.
Ask Yourself a Question
What happens from candle to candle is essentially an irrelevancy – what is important is the context, and this context generates the condition for a trade.
The key question that every trader needs to ask themselves is –
Am I actually doing something productive or am I feeding my boredom?
You can always walk away; despite what you might think, the market will still be there when you return. And surprisingly, it will continue to offer opportunities to those who are patient enough to survive.
