Each of my first four trades should have been a winner but tiny execution errors led to all four being losers. Entering a trade a hair early, chasing a trade and getting in a couple of cents late, setting a stop loss that it is a little too wide or a little too tight.

These little decisions might seem insignificant in the moment, but many times they are the difference between a winning trade and a losing trade.

It isn't enough to be "mostly" patient or "mostly" disciplined. You have to be all in. If you want these types of trades to go green you must decide to:

• Wait patiently for the trade to come all the way to you. FOMO-ing in early forces you to set wider stop losses and wider profit targets, which increases your risk and decreases your odds of success.
• Resist the urge to chase trades and remember that there will always be more opportunities to come. Sometimes, waiting for your target entry means that you'll narrowly miss entering a winning trade. It's painful to watch a trade take off without you, but it's even more painful to chase the trade, have price reverse on you, and then take an unnecessarily big loss. 
• Fight your feelings of fear so that you can set proper stop losses at proper invalidation points. My fourth trade is a perfect example of fearful trading. After taking losses on my first three trades, I set an unnecessarily tight stop loss on my fourth trade. I did this to reduce the amount of money I could lose on the trade - as if I was planning on losing the trade before I even entered it. Not surprisingly, this resulted in me getting stopped out of a would-be winning trade before the trade was actually invalidated.
• Fight your feelings of greed so that you can set proper profit targets. Early on, I learned that you should move your profit targets ahead of key support/resistance levels on the chart and you should also move them ahead of round numbers. But this week was a good reminder that it's equally important to lock in profits when you see momentum slowing. Saying "That's close enough" and locking in profits a little early is always better than letting a green trade turn red.
  
  

These are the type of tiny decisions that separate breakeven traders from the consistently profitable ones. 

The difference between losing $150 on my first four trades and profiting $300+ on my first four trades came down to four cents; and that four cents came down to tiny decision-making errors.

It's deeply irritating to lose those trades by such a thin margin but it's also satisfying to see how far I've come. It wasn't long ago that the difference between losing and winning was $0.25 per trade, then $0.10, then $0.05. 

It takes a lot of trial and error but if you keep trying to master these tiny decisions, the gap between success and failure will continue to shrink, and eventually, the narrow losses will turn into big wins. 

Have a great week,

​Eric