I say this all the time and I will continue to say it. I am not a self professed expert at trading. I have never worked on (or even been to) Wall street. I don't have any kind of degree in finance, worked for a brokerage or have any special accreditations. I am simply a day trader that has found a way to make trading a full time career and some insight on how others might be able to do it too.

That being said, I thought I’d go over my own personal approach to trading profits management from the trenches. You’ll need to have a trading account and you should have enough in the account to be able to trade it through a draw down period. For me, I started with $3500.

NOTE: This was my 3rd time to fund a new account. I had successfully blown it out 2 times before with some help from some egomaniacal trade room moderators/coaches that made me feel like an idiot because I couldn’t trade their system successfully.

I traded single contracts until I could build up my account a little. Initially I was not taking any out of the account. I had a business that was paying the bills so I was able to let the account grow. It was simply discretionary money that I was using to get started. When I doubled my account by trading single contracts, which took several months to do, I added a contract. I played around with using it as a runner but that ended up being a waste of time. I did the math and figured that trading all in and all out was almost exactly the same results over time. So that’s how I trade now. Much less stress and I’m out of a trade much earlier.

My account began to grow a good bit faster now. I decided at that point that every $2500 my trading account increased, I would add a contract to my trades. This took a good bit of discipline but I stuck to my guns and really focused on the money. I was constantly focusing on the money every day. My goal of trading full time was beginning to seem like it might be possible, but I still had to pay my bills. Would I be able to make enough to pay my bills and grow my account too?

Money became my main focus in life. It was almost obsessive. I noticed that my mood was dictated by each win or loss of each trade. Losses were tough for me to take. Money I just had a few minutes ago was gone! What if I don’t get it back? What if I had just passed on that trade….I’d still have MY money!

It didn’t take long to notice that my account was no longer growing and I couldn’t figure out why. I had the data to suggest that I should be moving forward but my account was flat lining. Then it hit me. I was so worried about giving up something that was mine, I was shying away from some really good trades or exiting early because I was scared of losing MY money. When I didn’t have much to start with, I didn’t really worry about it. But now that I had seen that I might be able to trade full time for a living, then my entire attitude seemed to change without my knowing it. Rather than gaining confidence in my trading I actually started to worry about losing what I had earned.

Flash forward a few weeks…..So I was having a conversation with a trading friend of mine one day. He’s been trading for 27 years and has forgotten more about trading than I will ever know. I asked him how much money he made trading that day. He said he didn’t know…. Huh? …Not know? ….How do you not know? He was pretty lackadaisical and blasé (thank god for spell check on those words) about the whole thing. He said that he looks at his account about once a month but that’s about it. I was floored! I live and die on each trade. How could he not know on each minute of each day how much was in his trade account?

I didn’t really make much of a big deal about it at the time. And in fact, I thought I had forgotten about it. But apparently it was eating at me and I didn’t know it. I had learned a lesson, but it had not hit my conscious mind yet. It was trying to get there but my preconceived ideas and my fears and frustrations were blocking it. It hit me like a ton of bricks out of the clear blue sky one morning. For no particular reason when I was opening my dom one morning to start trading I heard, clear as a bell, “Stop counting”. Simple as that. Automatically my subconscious took control of my dom and turned off my running P&L report at the bottom of the screen. And in my mind ticks and dollars look the same. So I blocked the tick count from view too. I felt like I was flying without a net…in the dark. But I was kind of excited to try it.

The first week it was pretty much pointless. I was still keeping up with the money in my head and still anguishing over every loss. The second week was a little different. Keeping up with the money in my head was getting to be too much trouble….so I started keeping up with ticks. For some reason the ticks did not feel as much like money anymore. But after another week or so, I quit counting ticks too. The markets have different tick sizes so keeping up with ticks was too much trouble to try to convert in my head and I decided it was pointless anyway.

The 3rd week was when it started to turn around for me. That week I only counted winning trades and losing trades. Easy to do. If I could keep up with that, and just make sure I had at least double the winners to losers then I would be doing ok. So I stuck with that for a few weeks and as if by magic, my account was growing again. I had gained confidence by removing a mental block from my trading strategy……money. All I had to do was win more than I lost. That’s it.

The next step in this process was to stop worrying about today’s trading record. If I had more losers than winners on a particular day, then I worried about it until I could get back to trading the next day and try to make it up. It didn’t take me long to figure out what I was doing and remember what my friend said. He only checks his account about once a month or so. That was a little too long for me, but I decided to just look at my totals for the week every Friday afternoon. That’s when the game is over in my mind. Each trading day is just a period in the game.

It took some mental training on my part, which is what day trading is all about anyway. But once it became routine to me to trade that way and to include it as part of my trading plan, I’ve seen steady increases in my trading account. I am more relaxed during and after a trading day. And if I stick to my trading plan with dogged determination, then I have very few weeks where I have lost the game. Each week is just a game. The year is an entire season. I can afford to lose a few games on the way to the championships.

Today my goal is to net 2-3 winners each day. I don’t care if I am trading single or multiple contracts, that’s my goal. When I hit that goal. I step into sim mode for the rest of the day and continue to trade. To me, simulation trading is like training is for an athlete. It keeps you sharp and the more you do it more second nature trading will come to you when it is most important to make quick decisions. And remember, it’s not about the money. Just win more than you lose and get to the championship game.

For more from Tony, please visit The Intentional Trader.