This video from Lightspeed Trading's Trader Talk Series contains advice from a successful trader on how to minimize risks, monitor future performance and seize opportunities.

Video Transcription

How to Adhere To Your Stop My number one rule of being a trader, you have to always adhere to your stop. All it takes a one huge loss to wipe out your whole account, or lose your whole month. You always have to adhere to get stop. With that, you don't want to be in a trade where your stop is so far away for you to give the chart a chance. So your entry point in a position has to be great so that you know you can adhere to your stop and make sure that the chart -- you give the chart a fair chance. If the risk is too much then you have to wait around for the right opportunity. The right opportunities will always come about. There will always be a stock with a lot of volume so you have to be really patient. There are lot of times when the market moves around and you may feel like you missed an opportunity, you can't catch everything, so you have to patiently wait for your setup that you are looking for. You don't want to force it. If you force it, then it's very easy to get sucked in and continue to keep trading and turning yourself and making a whole bunch of trades that break all your rules. So you have to be patient and wait for your setup. Once you begin trading, you have to figure out what setup it is that you like. You should definitely write them down, make note of them every night, when you look at the market and see what stocks did what and just keep a note of what setups consistently keep working for you. Once you have those two, three, four, whatever the setups might be, you make a note of it and you go in to that month or that day and you tell yourself, these are the four setups that I am going to look for and if I don't see them, then I am not going to trade, because the most frustrating thing about trading is being patient. It's very easy to sit there and see everything moving around and say, oh! I could have been in this and I should have made that or I could have made 20 cents in this trade. But if you don't see your setup, then you just have to sit on this sidelines and wait. Then, once you do have that opportunity, you cease it. The biggest thing is just protecting what you have made. There is always the opportunity to make money. You have to preserve your capital and not risk it on stupid trades that don't consistently work for you because that's -- I have seen a lot of people be able to make money, but they cannot maintain it and they end up losing it and that can be very frustrating part of trading.