The importance of a Plan

I've been trading for a long time now, and honestly, to be a trader / day trader / investor all you need is a plan. We plan for a lot of stuff in life, we plan events, we take the right classes to get into college / university and trading is the same way. When making a trade, it is important to KNOW exactly what you want out of it. That's what the whole point of a plan is. During my last year of high school I planned to NOT take science courses because I knew I wanted nothing to do with sciences, so I apply the same idea to trading and tell my self: I will not take any trades that are not in my plan. Its SIMPLE, but very very hard at times to follow. This is the only way to move on from failing and making stupid mistakes.

Made 2 trades today, 1st one wasn't planned and the 2nd one was. Enjoy.

The EPIC FAIL Positive Trade

MW was a good catch, it was a fade play considering that it gapped into resistance and most likely it would go down at the open. I grabbed it without planning on what ima do with it. So the commentary explains for itself, the profit I made out of this explains for itself, at one point I was +$100 but I closed the trade and came out with only $17. Epic FAIL. If you look closely, you will see I made yellow rectangles all over the stock, those are my fail exits, I was taking profits at the wrong spots with the wrong amount of shares. 

The EPIC PASS Positive and Relaxing Trade

Now here we have CCL, check that out, see that writing? That is what I wrote down before the market opened, I knew exactly what I wanted or had somewhat of a clue of what I wanted and did what my plan told me. It did fail once, but I was confident that it was just a fake out so I re-entered again. And look what happened, I made money, I made relaxing money and I knew exactly what I was doing.