Thread: Trading with fixed schedules or all day in front of the chart?

I have been operating in forex for a year and I still can�t find the balance between spending time and not going crazy. At first I operated all day, without schedules, always looking at the chart and I ended up mentally exhausted. Then I tried to put on a schedule of only 2-3 hours a day, but I felt like I missed a lot of opportunities. How do you do it? Do you have fixed hours to operate or are you all day reviewing the market? Do you think that being more selective over time is better or you lose advantage over those who are all day ahead? I am especially interested in the experience of those who have already been doing this and live on trading. How do you organize your realistic workday?

I do scalping alone at the opening of London. Maximum 2 hours a day. And believe me, I earn more than before when I spent 12 hours watching candles and losing trades for exhaustion.

In my case I have a steady job, so I only operate in predefined sessions, but that limitation forced me to be more efficient and stop operating out of boredom, which was what made me most lose money.

The one who says you can do trading 24/7 and be profitable lies or hasn't yet gone through a burnout. This is a marathon, not a speed race. The focus is everything.

There is no single rule. Some operate only in the New York session, others in London. The important thing is to find what market moments best fit your style and pace of life.

I do it by blocks: I analyze at 7AM, open positions between 8 and 10, and close everything at 12 at the most. The rest of the day to live. This is not to be chained to the MetaTrader.

After several years dedicating myself to trading and having tried many styles, I can say quite clearly that establishing a fixed schedule not only improves your performance, but also protects your mental health. Many of us enter into trading as a probability and think that being facing the graphics more time equals more opportunities and therefore more money. But that rarely is so. In my experience, the overexposure to the market increases the number of impulsive errors, encourages the overrun and ends up reducing the account, the mood and the motivation. The first thing I did was to analyze in which hours my best operations were produced. It turned out that more than 70% of successful trades were in the European opening and the first hour of the American session. Conclusion? The rest of the time was burning energy uselessly, trapped in operations without volume or in erratic movements. From there I decided to reduce my time in front of the screen to those specific time windows.

Since I limited my trading to 2 hours in the morning, my results have improved tremendously.

Don't you think by reducing the schedule you might be letting key moves pass in other sessions?

Thank you for the contribution. Very good advice. I feel reflected with the "watch every tick" thing.