How To Set Realistic Trading Goals in 2023

Achieving Realistic Trading Goals

Most people won't take the approach of setting trading goals from the beginning but if they do, often go for trading goals that are extremely high. If you're not sure about what goals you should be setting, using XABCD Patterns as a strategy can handle most of these important elements.

7 Steps To Setting Realistic Trading Goals:

Don't set goals that are too low that cause you to be uninterested
Don't set overly high goals that will cause you to risk to much capital
Higher your goals, the higher your emotions
Switch how you think about your goals top be more realistic
Trade so your emotions are controlled
Know your maximum risk levels ahead of time
Sticking to your strategy is always paramount

Goals That Are Too Low:

Goals that are too low do not keep you excited enough to stick to your plan and for consistency in your trading. You end up getting bored and drifting. You look at different strategies or try to combine multiple strategies. Regardless your mind drifts and eventually so does your consistency and results.

An example of goals that would be too low:

Demo trading is good, but after too long you could get board of it.

Goals That Are Too High:

Goals that are too large usually requires the traders to take trades that have high risk. High risk, high reward they say. Sadly the approach usually leaves the trader without much of an account as they can't withstand the normal ups and downs in the market. With any system that is sustainable your going to have series of winners and losers and if you can't sit through the losing trades because your risk is to big then you'll be left without an account. It's all about survival.

Realistic trading goals should be ones that you can actually hit. Otherwise you might be risking more just to hit these targets that can totally derail your trading.

5 year projection for realistic trading goals

The chart above will show you a 5 year projection if you start out with 10,000. Each colored column is a different percent gain per month. 5%, 15% and 30%. So if you believe you can do 30% a month consistently, you will take 10,000 and turn it into 31.2 billion dollars in just 5 years.

What this should be telling you is that your goals should be realistic. I would like to think (and hope) that you do not see doing 30% a month realistic, month after month.

Switching How You Think:

How does one survive and also have big goals? First of all you need to switch your thinking from a goal being dollar driven to percent driven. Making 1500 a month might not seem like a lot but if that is 5 percent growth then your doing very well. Let's say you had been doing this on a 1 million dollar account. 5 percent is 50k. Given that most money managers charge a 25 percent performance fee your looking at making 12,500 for the same effort that you took to make your own 1500. You just need a 7 figure account to manage.

Baby Steps - Realistic Trading Goals One Step At A Time:

One step at a time. Get yourself to the point where you're able to do 5 percent a month growth without using any leverage on your account. When you do that keep it up for 6 months. If you need some further support you can consider checking out the membership details and what's included.