What Does "Checklist" Means? 👶🏻

Checklists are tools used to better organize your assignments and to verify, easily, your most important tasks. They have been designed to reduce errors and ensure consistency and completeness in carrying out a duty

As traders we want to use as much tools that can simplify our job when it comes to open deals or to make the next trade, in my early days when I was starting I used to save a lot of variables in my head such as:

• when price do this I should wait to get a confirmation from this indicators and then I need to make sure that there's no new could affect the trade that I'm about to open and then I need to measure the volume during the current movement and analyze whether it's gonna support my trade or not and the list in my head was non-stop, and this is the problem.

I was think that this will makes me a genius and professional trader in people eyes, but the true is, all I was doing is complicated things for myself and at the end, Nobody cares about my thoughts at all.

So then I transferred the plan in my head into paper in order to relieve the burden of my mind, and that helped me to clarify a lot of points and stop getting confused anymore or in case if there's a chance of forget anything in my list when it was coming from my mind, now I killed that chance.

A checklist helps the Trader/Investor to be objective. He can read each 'checkpoint' and honestly answer whether or not the confirmation has valid or not. Even if there's only one confirmation left on the list with discipline and respect for the trading plan the trader will decide to not took any trade without getting all the confirmations that are listed in the checklist.

There are so many benefits to creating checklists, yet there are millions of people who never bother to make them.

Let's Identify The Problem 🤔

Let me ask simple question: Do you have any idea how many things can the mind focus on at once?

• 13 things?

• 23 things?

• 31 things?

before telling you the right answer I'd like to highlight the pressure that our minds deal with everyday as (Day Traders), In the beginning of every trader 'including me' we wants to study everything in order to be aware of every aspect in our job, we has to many feels that keeps us do to much effort just to not forgot any thing! FOMO, It is not hidden that the psychology is one of the most important player here (if it's not the only one) and we must keep it healthy and under control because if small thing could affect on it, it's gonna take to much time and effort to recovery and fix the damage, for example:

~ You have good mindset when it comes to (Risk Management), You can make any trade with fixed R:RR, SL, TP, But it's only one trade that willing to destroy your discipline, one trade you just took because you believe that you have all the confirmations that you need and you marked all the 'Checkpoint' that your 'head-voice' telling you, But it's only 1 confirmation you forgot makes you take a trade without being aware of the outcome.

And you lost it, because of 1 confirmation you didn't marked you lost the trade, price reverse on you and hits you stop-loss, but what happens after is so unbelievable! The price just back to move to your favor after exiting you and just just watching how it went back to your break-even and then boom, your TP target got hits without your trade; What just happened?what do you thing the logic thing to do? you'll doubting yourself, and gonna start asking questions like:

• what wrong have I done?

• should I move my stop-loss a little bit far (While you know this'll break your strategy!)

• I think it's better to change my time frame to higher one (you know this'll break your strategy!)

and me and you know that applying these changes is not the solution and it's gonna gave you results that will destroy everything you've made in the past!

Let's get back to the root of the problem, You forgot something, do not blame the market, your strategy or even yourself! it's normal to forget things from time to time because the humans minds unfortunately is limited, it cannot hold and deal with a lot of things and we all know that our job as traders require a lot to deal with and have a lot of variables that any brain can not manage it

So, What's The Solution 🤷🏻‍♀️

Is your Answer of my question ready? Come on, Hit me?? is it 13, 23, or 31?

If you took one of these as an answer I'm sorry to tell you that all the answers you see is wrong!

Unfortunately the humans brain cannot handle or focus on more than 4 things at once and this can lead us to think deeply on the hard work that we delivers to the mind as traders, every time we open the chart in order to trade or to analyze we used to deal with a lot of functions/variables/lines/price-levels and sometimes some traders keep thinking of things that isn't in the chart but it has affect on it such as (in Forex) the correlation of pairs (A) and compare it to pairs (B) because any small movement in pairs (B) could effect of (A) and so on.

In light of all these things that happen, it is natural for the human mind to forget some things or not pay attention and this of course greatly affects the final results of your trading, Because forgetting less information might cause you to open a losing trade.

In an article published by 'Discover Magazine' entitled (Why Do We Forget Things?) the author mentioned:

(Far from signifying failure, forgetting may be the brain’s frontline strategy in processing incoming information. Forgetting is essential, some researchers now argue, because the biological goal of the brain’s memory apparatus is not preserving information, but rather helping the brain make sound decisions. Understanding how the brain forgets may offer clues to enhancing mental performance in healthy brains while also providing insights into the mechanisms underlying a variety of mental disorders)

So forgetfulness is a necessary habit that may be somewhat healthy for the brain to process the latest information, but we, as traders in stocks or Forex, this habit may not be of help to us so consider the simplest solutions that can make memory strong and able to remember all the details

Memory can be strengthened by writing all the information that you want to remember in a paper and put the paper in a place that you can read continuously, but with modern technology, today we have more effective alternatives than just a paper, as we can use (checklist) which can includes pictures and graphics that we can interact with;

I will share with you some FREE apps/sites that you can benefit from for this matter:

> Websites:

• Checkli (use it now)

• Canva (use it now)

• Checklist (use it now)

> Apps:

• Microsoft To-do (use it now)

• Todoist (use it now)

• Ticktick (use it now)

let me give you a quick example of this powerful tool, I'm going to use in this example Checkli.com:

1. Click on - Free checklist maker - to start making one

2. Click on the - Title - to change it

3. Click on - Description - to add one (not necessary)

4. Click on - Blue line - to write your first confirmation in your list

5. Click on - Enter - to add another confirmation-line

6. Click on - Save - to save your checklist

And this is my simple checklist that I just made: (Click here to View the Checklist)

Now, you don't have to save everything in your brain, you can use your phone of PC to keep the checklist in front of your eyes and in every time something happen from your list all you have to do is just Check it, and wait for the next confirmation, by doing this you can make your trading plan more effective in order to have close results to what you want.

Summary 🤗

Today we have a great technologies that we can use in our advantage, there's plenty of apps/sites that can many jobs for us, and having checklist will makes your mind rest and focus in other important things, by watching your checklist over and over day by day your eyes will collaborate with you'r mind overtime which gonna make the idea of remembering what's inside your list much easier. because humans brain loves patterns and routine.

🥂

🙋‍♂️ Written by: @itsFiras ┊ 26/6/2020 - 02:08 AM

" This Article is Protected by Copyright for its Author © "