In This Episode
- Why Walter doesn't trade in the morning
- Probably the worst timezone to trade in
- When to trade if you like reversion to the mean trades
Our Morning Routines for Trading
In this episode, we talk about our morning routines and what we do during the course of the day to check our trades and balance our lives. Some elements of our routines are done for health reasons and other elements are simple everyday tasks.
We also talk quite a bit about the best and worst time zones to trade in. Find out which timezone Walter likes to get his trades “triggered” in and why Hugh likes trading from Hawaii.
If you're looking for the best timezone to trade in, we talk about that towards the end of the episode.
Read the Transcript:
Hugh: Hi, Walter. I’d be interested to hear about your morning routine. If you have one.
Walter: Sure. What I like to do in the morning is first I will wake up and I will go and see if the kids are living. They are not beating up on each other or anything like that. As we're recording this, we’re in Australia.
We’re kind of in lock down like most places in the world. Just making sure that they were alright, that they’re fed. They are happy and stuffed then what I typically do, I’ll go and look at my charts.
So where I live in Australia, the Daily candles, the 5 PM New York time daily candles, they kind of shift over in the morning. It depends on the time of the year. Sometimes it’s 9 AM like in the summers down here which is the winters in the northern hemisphere.
Right now, which we’re going into winter. It’s autumn now in Australia. So it’s actually earlier. It’s 7 AM. All I really want to do when I check the charts is I want to make sure that nothing crazy happened. So, I’ll check the charts, make sure that nothing crazy happened.
There’s two ways to look at it. In the morning if I have a trade, I will check the trade. If I don’t have a trade, I will scan the markets that are on my watch list kind of like a method of highlighting those pairs. I will see how they are looking and that’s basically it.
Later on in the day, what I will do is listen to my hypnosis and I listen to my brainwave entrainment. I’m usually doing that if I’m doing any sort of back testing or if I’m actually entering my orders.
I usually enter my orders, so the Asian Session I’ll have at 8 AM, 9 AM around there London time. Again that shifts depending on the time of the year but that’s when kind of like I do my “trading routine”.
Where I put my brainwave entrainment on. Sometimes during the day I try to find twenty-five minutes to do my hypnosis. If I’m back testing I definitely do brainwave entrainment before doing back testing. So that’s more of my routine for back testing.
I feel like traders need to be really careful and vigilant with their back testing. So I try and treat it as much like a trade taking process as my normal. So I really don’t do any trading early in the morning. It’s more about just babysitting the charts. Making sure that everything is going well.
If I have my trailing exits activated, just making sure that the virtual private server, the VPS are actually on because sometimes they will reset. You have to turn on your MetaTrader and all that all over again. So just to make sure that it is on but that’s basically it.
I don’t really do any trading early in the morning. I do more just checking. For me where I live because I want my trades get kicked in during London or in New York, it’s actually kind of later in the day when I do my major trading. Basically when the kids are having dinner. So it works out well. Duck off and go. Do my stuff.
Hugh: Hey there! I hope you find this episode useful. I just want to let you know that Walter and I give away something valuable every month that helps traders improve their skills. You can enter to win by simply leaving an iTunes review and leaving a comment on our YouTube videos.
At the end of each month, we'll look at the comments and reviews from the month and we'll pick a winner at random. Each comment and each review counts for one entry during the month that it's pitted.
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Walter: What about you? What is your method?
Hugh: For me it’s getting up in the morning. Take a shower and do the cold shower thing. After that, do my meditation and then check the charts. For me it is a little bit different because we were just coming out of New York in the morning for us.
Same thing. It’s more like do I move my stops to break even if something hit. Is the EA or the management working right, stuff like that. And then kind of go along my day. At night, look at trades and look for potential setups and things like that.
Walter: I often think that if I live in the States, it’s so hard. The West coast it’s such a hard time zone.
Hugh: It is the toughest one.
Walter: It really is. I cannot get around it. I would almost want to live in the Virgin Islands or live close to the easternmost point or I would get up early. See the thing is, I really like it being kicked in during London though. That’s the thing.
You have a couple of choices. If you live on the West coast. If you live in the East coast, you can just get up early and you are probably going to be okay. Like get up at 5 AM, 4:45 AM just kind of live with that schedule and you are probably fine.
But if on the West coast, this is what I ended up doing when I lived in the West coast in the US. I would just stay up late as I could to put my orders in, around midnight or at 1 AM and then go to sleep then. Do you know what I’m saying?
Hugh: Yeah.
Walter: So that is how I do it. If you are trading the daily charts, it’s pretty like I just do not want to be triggered during Asia. That’s the biggest thing I worried about. I try to wait as long as I can through Asia. If it is what you want. It depends on what you want to do, I guess.
Hugh: When you want it, right?
Walter: Yeah and your style too. For example, if I were a reversion to the mean trader — I like to trade in a lot of breakouts and trends but if I were a reversion to the mean trader — I would actually, probably just trade — so I was trading lower time frames I would probably just trade like — New York Open or I would trade Asian Session even or Fridays.
When you get like Friday retracement which is pretty consistent, that is what I would probably do. In some ways that will be easier. If that was my bread and butter, reversion to the mean. The good news about that is they happen to be so predictable.
A lot of times when New York comes in, it is going to revert or when London comes in, it is going to revert or when New York closes, it is going to revert. There’s this typical time when you know at Fridays or the end of the week, it is going to revert.
Asia almost always not always but a lot of times it is going to come adrift one way and revert. I wish I had that mindset where I want to trade that way because if you can set aside a certain block and go, “Okay, this is when it should happen”, right?
Hugh: Yeah. I do the same thing. I stay up till one or two and then put the trades in. Even Hawaii is better.
Walter: Exactly, even Hawaii is better. I actually think if I had to choose, I would say the best time zone would be Thailand, Indonesia over there because what happens there if it’s in London, it starts kind of in the afternoon like 3 PM or 2 PM. That’s pretty cool because you could see London open and then later on in the evening you can see New York open.
Hugh: That will be great.
Walter: Yeah, that will be the best. Thailand, Indonesia right around there. You can live in Bali. Get a big, fat house for nothing.
Hugh: Yeah, cool. Thanks for sharing.
Walter: Thanks.
Hugh: All the information in this podcast is for educational and informational purposes only and is not trading or investment advice.
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