Being Prepared For Trading

Don't just think about your backup plan, practice it!

Today’s “Thoughts” tells a story on me. Yesterday I travelled by plane to Nashville, TN, to visit family. Great flight, but tied me up all day, driving down to the airport, checking luggage, 3.5 hours in the air, etc. I did not get to my daily market update until after dinner and dinner was later than normal due to the arrival time and two time zones that I went through.

I set up my laptop, got my papers out, printed off a spreadsheet I decided beforehand that I would use to run through my work and was underway. Only it didn’t go as smoothly as planned.

I normally have two 35 inch curved screens wrapping around my desk, along with my laptop screen and have no trouble seeing the numbers, the indicator lines and the price bars. However, all of sudden, this being the first time I’ve travelled since the first of the year, I was having a hard time seeing the numbers.

I should know better with my experience on emergency backups when I was running Trendstat Capital, but I had never gotten around to actually running the travel plan at my desk back in Arizona like I would be running on the road. I had added a strategy a couple of months ago that used the spreadsheet to track that strategy’s positions. Problem was, when I printed it out, it was a very small font for 69-year old eyes. Changing the font to a larger size would have spilled over into multiple poorly designed pages which would be worse. In addition, no more 35 inch curved screens. I was down to a small laptop screen, period! The charts were very small, the prices were almost unreadable and I was struggling to tell whether it was a 3, an 8 or a 9!

I searched my backpack and fortunately found a pair of cheater eye glasses with more magnification that I don’t even remember sticking in there and was able to make out the spreadsheet, charts and numbers, BARELY! Today I head to a local pharmacy to buy cheaters with more magnification. It took me a long time to finish my work.

Bottom line: Rehearse your back up plans periodically, so you don’t have surprises. It’s easy to do and almost breaks up what should be the monotony of trading your normal way. It’s great to have a backup plan, but if you don’t periodically rehearse it, you will have a lot more stress when you find out that you forgot something required for your process.

If you rehearse your plan, you have a better shot of enjoying the ride!