Stay Away From The Screen To Make Money

Every Tuesday Chuck releases a new Trader Tip video on YouTube. In this episode you will learn how to have less stress, higher earnings per hour wage, and better trading performance.

You can read the episode transcript below or watch the video that follows.
If you have any questions, please reach out to us. We look forward to being a continued part of your trading education!

Welcome to another episode of Trader Tip Tuesday. Today we’re gonna talk about stay away from the screen to make money. What does this mean? We’re going to introduce the concept of forced checking, and forced checking was something I first learned about from L.R. Thomas in a book that she wrote called How to Stop Overtrading.

With the concept of forced checking, the idea is we want to avoid looking at the trading screen all the time.
Staring at the screen introduces stress. A lot of times we have the belief, if we just stare at the screen long enough that we can will our trade to a profit. You notice the trades are working really well, we tend not to look at the screen. But when they’re losing, we stare at the screen a lot hoping that by staring at the screen, the trade will turn around. That’s actually a sign for us. Paul Tudor Jones once told me that he knew when he was staring at the screen all the time, that there was a problem with his position.

So the more we stare at the screen, the stronger our inclination to take action. After all, why would we stare at the screen all that time and do nothing. So the more we stare at the screen, the more likely we are to do something, whether it’s warranted or not. So we have a strong desire to take action to justify your time.

The more we stare at the screen, we start to see ghosts.
What does that mean? If we keep staring at the screen, we’re going to see things that aren’t really there. We’re going to see things that don’t exist. We’re going to see price action that we think means something when it really doesn’t. We’re going to see trading signals that are not part of our plan. And all these things are going to tempt us to take action.

If we really want to be successful, we want to get away from the screen.
And we want to set ourselves up in a way that we can succeed when we’re not in front of the screen. To address this problem, one, we want to put our orders in the market, we want to have our stop order in we want to have peels in, we want to have exits that are targets, whatever your framework is you want to have your orders in in the market and working. If you’re concerned about them getting particularly a stop getting activated well you could do a partial stop, rather than the whole stop, but you do want to have your orders in so that action can be taken when you’re away from the screen.

The second thing you want to do is you want to set all unnecessary price alerts. So you might actually want to have price alerts set. If you’re working a peel. For example, you might want to have a price alert set for below the peel. So that in case the market gets close to your peel, you know about it and you have a chance to take action and not miss it. This is what we call the inverse R. And we’ll discuss this in a later episode of Trader Tip Tuesday. So set your price alerts, and when you alert goes off, come back to the screen.

The last aspect is time alerts. So you can set a time alert on your computer, you could set a time alert on your phone. But your time alerts tell you when to come back to the screen. So let’s just say for example, we’re trading 60 minute bars, we could set an alert, let’s say our 60 minute bar is going to expire at noon, we could set an alert for 11:55am. When the alert goes off, we come back to the screen. And we evaluate what’s going on with the price as we transition out of this 60 minute bar into the next 60 minute bar. And we can take whatever action we need to take. We can adjust our orders so that they’re now set at the right levels, we can readjust our alerts. Then we set a new alarm for 12:55pm, Five minutes before the end of the next 60 minute bar at one o’clock. After we set our alert. We minimize the screen and we go back to doing whatever we’re doing.

You’ll find using this technique dramatically reduces your stress makes it easier to follow your trading plan It will result in better trading performance with less effort. One of the things we always want to be aware of is what is our hourly wage for our trading. The more we spent, the more time we spend in front of the screen, the more our hourly wage actually goes down. So if you only spend five minutes a day or five minutes an hour in front of the screen, and then you’re off doing other productive work, your hourly rate wage is skyrocketing.

So remember that. Less stress, higher earnings per hour wage, better performance. Try forced checking, and remember, stay tuned every Tuesday for additional webinars that will teach you different ways to think about trading that will take your performance to an elite level.

See you next Tuesday. Bye!
– Chuck Whitman