The first and most important thing anyone needs to do in order to never miss a trade is focus. Here are the things you need to focus on. 

1. You need to focus on the ONE pattern you are going into the market to look for. Money made on a Morning Spike spends the same as money made on an Overextended Gap Down.

2. You need to enter the market and commit to only trading the best instances of that ONE pattern. Eliminate everything that is not that pattern. You will know what does not fit the criteria for the pattern and the weaker forms of it by looking for it everyday and paying attention to what you find. Maybe by notes or by chart taking, etc.

3. Once you have found that pattern you need to trust yourself enough when you see the point where an entry makes the most sense. THIS is the hard part. Trusting your own judgement and evaluation of what you see and making a trading decision.

My current problem is that I can do 1 and 2 well enough but I often just sit and watch trades that would have worked for me. I suspect that many traders have this problem and are looking for a way to fix it. This is a strictly psychological problem. This is not a problem of strategy or experience, therefore it requires a psychological solution. 

To clarify lets rephrase the issue: How do you push the buttons to enter when you are confident in the pattern?

Here is my plan for fixing this problem.

I am going to follow Rule #10 Only Take the Most Predictable Setups. Every successful trade I have ever taken has had this one thing in common. They were all predictable.

You stop missing trades when you are willing to be wrong on something that happens over and over again. My plan to get to this place is to think of myself as someone who actually understands a pattern and who is willing to lose on a pattern they understand. 

That question creates another question: If you are confident in the pattern then would you have an issue pushing the button? No, probably not. Therefore if you have this problem you either lack confidence in the pattern or confidence in yourself as a trader. 

How does a person build confidence in themselves trading and in the patterns they look to trade?

I imagine that some measure of confidence in yourself as a trader comes from inexperience and some of it comes from success. Not knowing how you can fail will make you more willing to try anything. Knowing how you can succeed will keep you doing what works. It seems like a muscle the more you use it the more it works. The less you use it the less it works. As such you need a willingness to be wrong. In addition you need to put in a quality of work where you would look at your own process, your track record of calling and executing plays. Then look at yourself and say “I would trust this person to make trading decisions for me”.

Confidence in a pattern seems much less complicated. You observe something in the market that works over and over and you trade it. The way you come to understand it is by going back to the beginning of what was said in this post. You focus on one pattern.

 

Ask yourself this question: If you could win a million dollars by having someone take a basketball shot for you, who would you trust to take the shot? Someone who made 60% of the shots they took? Or someone who saw 100 perfect shots and took none of them?