Patience

Doing nothing looks like the absence of a decision, but in trading it’s a position in its own right, and it’s very often the correct one. Patience shows up in two different places in a trade’s life, and most traders are only good at one of them. Waiting for the setup, not just a setup The first kind of patience is refusing to trade until the market offers the specific conditions a strategy is built around, instead of something that resembles them closely enough to feel tempting. A strategy built on a clean break of a key level doesn’t get to skip that requirement because three hours have passed with nothing happening and a near-miss just showed up instead. The setup that’s 80% there isn’t a slightly worse version of the real thing, it’s a different trade with a different, usually worse, expectancy behind it. ...

The DAX open never behaves the same way twice, and that’s the first thing you have to make peace with. Some mornings it gaps, spikes, reverses, or chops sideways for an hour before it commits to a direction, other mornings it barely moves at all, as though it hasn’t had its coffee yet, and every so often it’s clean from the first bar. There’s no way to know in advance which version you’re getting, and that uncertainty is usually my cue to stay out. There are always exceptions, but the safer approach is almost always to sit on your hands and let the move come to you. ...