If you talk to successful stock traders, you’ll find one thing in common wigth all of them. All of them have good, workable trading plans that they′re comfortable with. When you’re planning to go into the stock market, you could do worse by emulating these success stories and having a plan. Let′s be clear though, trading plans are more than just rules for trading, when to buy and sell all of those stocks on the open market. Those rules are actually trading strategies and are a subset of a trading plan. Let me run you through to what′s essentially a simple trading plan.

Every trading plan starts with a goal. Some trading plans have nebulous goals like: “I want to be rich before retirement,” but you quickly find out that plans with such far-reaching goals usually fail. Realistic, measurable goals are what you find in good plans. What (more…)