Last month I had a couple of the worst trading days of my career because I broke some of my rules. Breaking your own rules is easy to do, so I’ve made a few scheduled tasks in Windows XP to make breaking my rules a little more difficult.
First, a rule that I have is not to make any trades after 1pm. On both of my two worst days last month I overtraded and continued to trade into the close. This month I have managed to stop myself from overtrading by having a scheduled tasks go off at 1pm that closes Cybertrader. I then have this task automatically run every 10 minutes until 3:30.



If you don’t know how to set up a scheduled task, you can read instructions here. As you can see, I also downloaded and use the nircmd program which allows me to run the command to close Cybertrader. Having Cybertrader automatically close every 10 minutes after 1pm makes it very difficult to overtrade. Of course, I could simply turn off the scheduled task and overtrade, but that would be another step and would take time – this makes it more difficult and also serves as a reminder to stick to my rules.
I also have some scheduled tasks that run throughout the morning which play audio clips of some of my rules that I have recorded. For example, an audio file will play right after the open which is a recording of my voice that says “30 minute candles.” These help to remind myself of the importance of sticking to my rules.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 13th, 2006 at 9:12 pm and is filed under trading. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.