Goals And Objectives

Few things are more important to trading success than having set goals and objective for what you are aiming to achieve. How often we hit our targets, meet our objectives, and reach our goals only when we articulate them and write them down.

For any business to be successful it must have measurable objectives that are actually achievable. In trading the primary objective is to make money, but it is important to have other objectives that are not purely cash-related. We must always remember that reward and risk go hand-in-hand in trading and that we cannot expect to achieve high returns without planning for high risk.

Compare trying to trade without a “goal” to a soccer team playing without a goal or a net to put the ball in for a score.They would run the field in circles aimlessly until they tired out.

Objectives and goals must be very specific,they must have the following characteristics to be useful:

Be measurable (in completion and timeframe)
Be achievable
Be worthwhile
Be positive

As an example:

Develop 1 new positive-expectancy trading systems each year
Make fewer errors implementing our trading systems each year
Achieve a return to maximum draw-down ratio of 1.5:1
Take 3 weeks vacation each year

Note that only one of them is about making money, and that has a measurable objective that is relative to draw-down, not absolute like make 100% per year.
You need to know what you are trying to achieve, and when you are trying to achieve it, the whole business is focused on meeting your objectives and pay attention to things you really want to achieve with your limited time and resources.
Generally traders with well-defined objectives will be much more successful than those that do not have pre-defined goals.