Today's Quote: “All things come round to him who will but wait." Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Patience, is defined as “The will or ability to wait or endure without complaint; it is steadiness, endurance, or perseverance in performing a task”. This definition works for trading as well.

You have a task at hand when trading. It is to make money on a consistent basis. Your trading plan is the method to accomplish this task. What can stand in your way? Not following your plan. What is one of the biggest causes for not following your plan? Well, first, most traders do not even have a plan or their plan is a joke. A good trading plan takes time to develop. Developing a good trading plan is an iterative process that requires the trader to simply document what they think they're suppose to do, do just that, analyze the results, and then revise their plan until that know and trust their plan without a second thought. But most do not have the patience to develop a good trading plan. Those that do have plans do not use them consistently. They do not review them every day to reinforce what they say; and at the end of the day, they do not compare their results against their plan. For the traders who really try to use them, the biggest problem is not having the patience to wait for the right set up. Taking riskier plays rather than waiting.

There is a direct correlation with trading mastery and patience mastery. It is often not hard to tell the traders that will not succeed. They need to be in something all the time. If the stocks they are watching are not set up right, they will find an entry rather than wait. They will find another stock rather than follow their plan.

Understand that patience has to do with waiting for the proper setups for your plan for your time frame. It is not necessarily the exact number of trades. A scalper may be exercising great patience and following their plan by taking only 25 trades. A day trader may be over trading on a particular day by taking four trades. It's not the number that counts, it's waiting for the proper quality out of the set ups that are available to you.

Try to take the view, that you have a plan for the stock you are looking at. Make it a condition to enter the play that the stock does what you desire. If your plan is to buy the first pullback after the break out, then don’t buy the break out. Don’t jump in and chase it before the pullback. Learn to pass trades. Learn to make stocks do what you expect or to pass on them. It is a fact, that as you develop this skill; your trading profits will improve.