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Trading is rewarding, there’s no question about it. The satisfaction you’ll find from making a good trade, watching your investments grow and learning to trust your decision-making skills is enormous. But the technical aspects of honing your skills can seem difficult to understand and arcane at times.
Luckily, with a few tricks from SmartTrader, MTI’s comprehensive charting and analysis platform, these skills will become second nature in making trading decisions faster and more effectively.
Controlling Emotions
At SmartTrader, we value gut instinct. While you’ll often hear us talking about checking in with your emotions before making a trade — Do you feel good about it? Do you have hesitations? — it’s also really important to make sure you’re not leading with your emotions when making trading decisions.
There’s a difference between using your intuition and falling prey to emotional decision-making. Emotional eaters know what we’re talking about. How many times have you eaten something because you were stressed, sad, angry, even happy or celebratory, and then regretted it later?
It’s the same with trading. We should check in with our emotions and make sure our decisions are in line with them, but we should not make decisions based solely on emotional output.
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed, nervous, apprehensive or anxious about making a trade. There is an amount of risk and risk and unknowns always make us feel this way.
Learning a new skill, which trading certainly is, also makes us feel unsure, anxious and overwhelmed. It’s totally OK to feel these things, but don’t let them guide your decisions. Rely on the data, the analysis and the charts to steer you to your goals, and never be afraid to walk away from a bad trade.
Multiple Timeframes
When familiarizing yourself with the history of a market or stock to trade, it’s advantageous to look at the same chart over multiple timeframes to see the big picture.
SmartTrader’s Fibonacci Dashboard allows you to customize your workspace so you can segment out the charts you want to compare and see trends developing over time — one day, four hours, two hours and even down to 15 minutes — at the same time. When you see trends appear over this amount of time, you can gain more understanding about how a stock or market is performing both short- and long-term, and make your decisions based on those trends.
SmartTrader also makes it super easy to identify support and resistance trends in charting. Smart Trend Lines, Smart Support and Smart Resistance can help you decipher charts and make the best trades possible.
You can also look at these Smart Tools over the different time frames to connect the trends you see to the bigger picture. You can even use a Counter Trend-Line Break to unify multiple timelines! So cool.
Multiple Confirmations
The more data you have, the more confident you’ll feel when clicking that ‘trade’ button, and SmartTrader has made it simple to get those confirmations quickly. Confirmations on a stock chart are patterns that show a trading opportunity that appears over and over throughout a timeframe. Usually, this means three or more days of consistent activity in order to establish a pattern.
SmartTrader allows you to make workspaces that show multiple confirmations at once. This maximizes the opportunities you have to trade and make decisions that will pay off over and over again.
When you look at the candlestick patterns over time, and can chart several indicators at once with the Smart Tools, you’ll be able to compute the kind of data that results in smart trading decisions.
