Trading Routine; Every Trader Should Have One

In this video Nick Radge, Head of Trading & Research at The Chartist, discusses his daily trading routine.

Hi, it’s Nick Radge. One of the things I commonly get asked is, what’s my daily routine?

Now I’m not a day trader. I don’t sit in front of the screen all day watching the numbers roll over.

I’m an end of day trader. I’m also quite systematic, which means that my actual daily trading ritual is pretty minimal.

For most of my strategies, I simply plug my account balance into my software and push the button. It generates the orders. In some instances, my program will actually send the orders direct to the broker. So there’s not a great deal for me to do. But let me run through how I do it each day. So usually first thing in the morning, we’ve got a home office here. I don’t run downstairs to immediately see what the market’s done, or what my account has done. The strategies, are designed to manage things for me. We roll the dice, and let the market do its thing, and then we take action after that.

Morning Routine

So there’s no need to run downstairs and find out what’s going on with the market. I’ll get the kids off to school, have breakfast and then come into the office and start my trading routine.

The first thing I do look at is the US trading. I run a couple of models in the US market overnight. So there’s nothing I can do there until I download the data, which is about 7:30 AM. I’ll download the data, and then I run my models. Any orders, or any positions that need to be exited in the US market, I’ll do that straight away. If there’s not may orders for the coming session I’ll place them in the morning. If there are a few, we use an API.  The API connects our software to our broker and manages the positions during the night. If I need to run the API, I won’t place those orders until the evening, before I go to bed.

Filling my day

And then for the rest of the day, there’s not a great deal to do from the trading perspective. (My trading routine is pretty dull!) I will speak to students from our trading system mentor course.  We discuss their hurdles and the challenges they’re facing, and we’ll run through the things that they’re working on. I’m an avid fisherman and I like to get out fishing during the day.

Now as for ASX trading, again, because I am an end of the day trader, there’s nothing I have to do until after the market closes. So that’s at 4:00 PM. I’ll download my data around 4:30 PM and again, simply pushing the button on the computer, it will generate the buy and sell orders, do all the position sizing and that kind of stuff.

Now I will place all of my ASX orders that evening, for the next day. I use both market on open orders for my longer term trend trading strategy, and some limit buy orders for my main reversion strategy. I place those orders the night before, and then I’m done. And if there are orders to go into the US market that night, using our API, I’ll place those before I go to bed. And then, it’s just a matter of rinse and repeat and do the same thing tomorrow.

Developing the trading systems, writing the code, and that’s all been done in the past. So the day to day operations, for me anyway, is very limited.

You can follow Nick’s trading strategies by joining The Chartist