Part-time Trader Series (tip 2): Have a Plan

This is the second in a series of tips for the part-time trader who trades around a full-time job.

As a part-time trader, time management is as vital to success as picking stocks or managing my portfolio. Over the years I have developed tricks to streamline what used to take me up to 4 hours a night, down to about 45 minutes.

How many hours have you wasted agonizing over a trade you have just made? You place a trade, get back to work, look up at your monitor and watch every tick the stock makes. You try to get back to work, but you can't get the trade out of your mind. You don't know what to do. Should I sell now the stock has ticked up for a small profit? Should I exit now that it's gone the other direction?

The easiest way to combat this problem is to have a plan before entering every trade. In tip 1, we developing a weekly focus list which you fine tune on a daily basis. Every night you should review your focus list and mark each stock with an entry level, stop and target. Accompanied by these numbers should be comments on the setup and risk analysis.

By doing this, you make post-trade decision making a snap. The plan is there so you have no need to sweat as the trade develops. This type of preparation will not only make trading easier, you'll get more work done at your day job!

Tip 1

Part-time Trader Series (tip 1): Weekly Focus List

As a part-time trader, time management is as vital to success as picking stocks or managing my portfolio. Over the years I have developed tricks to streamline what used to take me up to 4 hours a night, down to about 45 minutes.

Over the next week I will share some of these tips. 

Time Saving Tip #1: Create a Weekly Focus List 

As a swing-trader, I spend most of my time building watchlists. Watchlists can provide a number of beneficial functions. Of course, the primary function of a watchlist is to find stocks to trade. However, well built watchlists also can provide insights into areas such as market sentiment and sector rotation. 

My watchlist is organic and can have anywhere from 100-300 stocks, depending on market conditions and how many different setups I am trading. However, I rarely trade more than 5-10 stocks at any given time. Most of the stocks in the watchlist are a few points away from ideal entry points, so it is a waste of time to go through the list every day. 

Now, instead of wasting valuable time analyzing a few hundred stocks daily, I create a focus list every Sunday, after my sector review. I go though my watchlist and pick the 20-30 best setups, and put them in the focus list. This is the list I trade from during the week. 

The focus list saves me an hour each night. That's about one extra day of "time" every month, time better spend analyzing my past trades, researching setups or just relaxing and having fun.