15 Essential Trading Rules Every Trader Must Follow
Most traders don’t fail because they lack intelligence or market knowledge. They fail because they either don’t have rules — or worse, they have rules and simply don’t follow them.
Think about it: almost every trading book preaches “cut losses short, let winners run.” Yet most traders do the opposite. They hold losers, cut winners, chase tips, and let emotions drive decisions. Why? Because knowing the rules is easy. Living by them is the real challenge.
Having well-defined rules is the prerequisite to going professional. But following those rules with discipline — trade after trade, week after week — is what separates the consistent winners from the crowd. There’s no point in writing a brilliant playbook if you won’t execute it under pressure.
That’s where coaching comes in. Rules give you the framework. Coaching helps you develop the structure, accountability, and mindset to actually live by them — to stop self-sabotage and start compounding results.
I’ve spent years studying the world’s greatest traders and trading psychologists — Mark Douglas (Trading in the Zone), Alexander Elder (Trading for a Living), Van Tharp (Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom), Jesse Livermore (Reminiscences of a Stock Operator), Paul Tudor Jones (Market Wizards), Brett Steenbarger (Enhancing Trader Performance), Denise Shull (Market Mind Games). I’ve distilled their wisdom — along with insights from modern trading voices on X — into a definitive guide to trading rules.
Inside, you’ll discover:
- 15 essential trading rules that protect capital and build consistency.
- Classic maxims explained, sourced, and made practical for today’s market.
- Risk management guardrails that keep you alive long enough to win.
- Psychological principles to help you stop breaking your own rules.
Because at the end of the day, trading success isn’t about brilliance or prediction. It’s about discipline. Rules are useless if they live on paper. They only matter when you live by them.
The Core Philosophy of Trading Rules
Before diving into the rules themselves, let’s establish the why.
Trading isn’t about being smarter than the market. It’s about creating a set of rules that protect you from yourself — from your emotions, your impulses, and your bad habits.
Every professional trader understands three core truths:
- Trading is probabilistic, not predictive.
Each trade is just one of many in a series. You can’t know the outcome, only the probability distribution. This was Mark Douglas’s central teaching in Trading in the Zone. - Risk comes first, profits second.
Paul Tudor Jones famously said he’s more concerned with risk than returns. Without capital, you don’t get a second chance. - Process beats outcome.
Brett Steenbarger compares trading to athletics: it’s not about winning one game, but training the skills that let you win consistently over time.
Here’s the paradox: Most traders nod along when they read these truths — and then ignore them when money is on the line. That’s why rules matter: they act as guardrails when emotions want to take over.
Part 2: The 15 Essential Trading Rules
These rules come from decades of trading wisdom, psychology research, and market experience. They aren’t optional. If you want consistency, these are non-negotiable.
These First 4 Rules Form the Foundation of Professional Trading (non-negotiables)
Rule 1: Think in Probabilities, Not Predictions
The hardest habit to break in trading is the need to be right. Most beginners enter every trade convinced they “know” what the market is about to do. This stock will bounce here. Bitcoin is going to rip. And when it doesn’t? They feel betrayed, spiral into revenge trading, or abandon their plan.
The truth is harsher but freeing: you don’t know what will happen next. Nobody does. The best you can do is put the odds slightly in your favor and let them play out over time.
Mark Douglas called this the foundation of trading psychology in Trading in the Zone. His famous line — “Anything can happen” — isn’t an excuse, it’s a philosophy. It means every single trade is just one outcome drawn from a larger distribution. Like flipping a coin, one toss means nothing. Over a hundred tosses, the probabilities show themselves.
This is why professionals don’t measure themselves by the outcome of a single trade. They measure themselves by whether they followed their process. A casino doesn’t panic when a gambler hits a jackpot; the house knows that over thousands of spins, its tiny edge guarantees profit.
Most traders nod their head at this idea — then break it the moment money is on the line. They say they think in probabilities, but their emotions demand certainty. That gap between intellectual understanding and emotional discipline is where trading careers get stuck.
The shift only comes when you stop asking, “Am I right on this trade?” and start asking, “Did I execute my edge correctly?” That’s when trading stops being a game of ego and prediction, and becomes a game of probabilities and process. And that’s the mindset that turns trading from gambling into a business.
Rule 2: Accept the Risk Before You Enter
Every trader says they’re fine with risk — until the moment their stop gets hit. Then you see the truth. Stops get moved “just a little lower.” Positions get doubled to “average down.” Emotions take the wheel, and suddenly a small, planned loss has become a disaster.
The difference between amateurs and professionals isn’t whether they take losses. Everyone takes losses. The difference is that pros accept the full risk of the trade before they click the button. If the stop gets hit, they’ve already made peace with it. There’s no bargaining, no panic, no moving the line.
Mark Douglas taught this as one of his five fundamental truths. Alexander Elder echoed it in Trading for a Living. And Ed Seykota, one of the great trend-following pioneers, put it bluntly:
“If you can’t take a small loss, sooner or later you will take the mother of all losses.”
Accepting risk isn’t just math. It’s emotional hygiene. If you haven’t accepted the loss in advance, you will unconsciously manage the trade to avoid pain, not to follow your edge. You’ll hesitate to exit. You’ll justify breaking your plan. And eventually, you’ll give back far more than you intended.
The discipline is simple but not easy: when you place a trade, look at your stop level and say out loud: “I accept losing this amount.” If you can’t accept it, reduce size or skip the trade. There is no shame in passing. The only shame is pretending you’ve accepted risk when you haven’t.
This single habit creates enormous freedom. When you’ve already accepted the loss, you no longer fear it. You can let the trade breathe, follow your plan, and trade like a professional.
Rule 3: Always Define a Stop Before Entry
A trade without a stop isn’t really a trade — it’s a gamble dressed up as strategy. If you don’t know where you’re wrong, you haven’t defined risk. And if you haven’t defined risk, the market will do it for you, often in the most expensive way possible.
Van Tharp, in Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom, was relentless about this. His position-sizing models only work if every trade has a logical stop — a clear line in the sand where the setup is invalid. No stop, no edge. No edge, no business.
Think about it like this: if you buy a stock because it bounced off support, your stop belongs just under that level. If it breaks, your reason for being in the trade is gone. Hanging on because you “still believe” or because “it might come back” isn’t discipline — it’s hope. And as every veteran trader will tell you, hope is the most expensive emotion in trading.
Ed Seykota captured the spirit of this rule with his mantra: “The elements of good trading are: (1) cutting losses, (2) cutting losses, and (3) cutting losses.” A stop is the tool that makes that possible.
Stops also do something more subtle: they free your mind. When you know exactly where you’ll exit if you’re wrong, you don’t have to constantly monitor the screen, debating with yourself on every tick. The decision is already made. That clarity lets you trade with composure, instead of emotional whiplash.
Every professional, from day traders to macro legends, agrees: no stop, no trade. Define it before entry. If you can’t find a logical one, don’t take the position. That simple boundary is the difference between a controlled business risk and an uncontrolled gamble.
Rule 4: Keep Risk Small (1% or Less per Trade)
One of the fastest ways to spot a rookie trader is position size. Beginners trade so big that a single bad move can wreck their account. They tell themselves, “If I risk more, I’ll make money faster.” What usually happens is the opposite: emotions spike, discipline disappears, and one mistake wipes out weeks of progress.
Professional traders think very differently. They size trades small — usually risking no more than 1% of their total equity on any single position. Many pros risk even less, 0.25–0.5%, especially during volatile markets. Why? Because small risk buys you the most precious commodity in trading: emotional stability.
Van Tharp spent decades teaching this principle through his concept of R-multiples and position sizing. By fixing risk as a percentage of your account, you normalize your trading. Every trade becomes just “1R” at risk, not a random dollar amount that swings your mood. It’s math you can execute without fear.
There’s another reason small risk matters: survival. Paul Tudor Jones put it plainly: “Don’t focus on making money; focus on protecting what you have.” If you stay in the game long enough, your edge has time to play out. But if you blow up, the game ends right there.
Picture two traders. One risks 5% per trade, the other 1%. Both hit the same losing streak of six trades. The first trader is down nearly 30%, and emotionally wrecked. The second is down 6%, and can calmly keep going. Same market, same losses — but only one is still standing with a clear head.
Keeping risk small won’t make you rich overnight, but it will keep you in the game long enough to compound. And in trading, longevity is the real edge.
Taken together, the first four rules form the foundation of professional trading. Thinking in probabilities, accepting risk, defining stops, and keeping size small — these are the guardrails that keep you in the game. They don’t guarantee profits, but they guarantee survival. Without them, every other rule becomes irrelevant, because sooner or later the market will take you out. With them, you’ve built the mental and financial resilience to let your edge compound over time.
If the first four rules are about protecting your capital, the next set is about protecting yourself from yourself. This is where most traders stumble. Not because they don’t know the rules, but because emotions hijack their decision-making the moment money is on the line.
From averaging down in desperation, to cutting winners too early, to chasing tips without a thesis — these are the classic behavioral traps that have ended more trading careers than bad markets ever did. The following rules are designed to keep you disciplined, clear-headed, and aligned with your plan when fear, greed, and ego start whispering in your ear.
Rule 5: Never Average Down
Few habits destroy trading accounts faster than averaging down on a losing position. It feels logical in the moment: “If I buy more here, my average entry price improves. I just need a small bounce to get back to break-even.” But what feels like “clever risk management” is actually a slow-motion account implosion.
Paul Tudor Jones said it best in Market Wizards:
“Losers average losers.”
That four-word maxim has probably saved more trading careers than any risk formula ever written. Why? Because averaging down doubles your exposure at the exact moment your thesis is weakest. You’re adding size when the market is proving you wrong.
It’s important to distinguish this from investing. Long-term investors sometimes add to positions in quality companies over time. Traders can’t afford that luxury. Trading is about edge, timing, and risk control. Once the setup is invalid, adding to it isn’t “conviction” — it’s denial.
History is littered with traders who blew up by averaging down. Jesse Livermore wrote about it a century ago in Reminiscences of a Stock Operator. Countless modern traders have told the same story: one bad average-down, and years of work gone in a week.
The irony is that averaging down is often born from ego, not logic. It’s the refusal to admit being wrong. And yet, being wrong is inevitable in trading. The pros know it, accept it, and move on. They add only to winners — never to losers.
So here’s the rule, hard and simple: if the market proves your thesis wrong, you exit. No excuses, no bargaining, no “just one more add.” Your job isn’t to force the market back to your entry point. Your job is to protect your capital for the next valid setup.
Never average down. Live to fight another day.
Rule 6: Cut Losses Fast, Let Winners Run
Most traders get this rule backwards. They hold onto losers, hoping they’ll turn around, and they grab winners too quickly, afraid of giving back unrealized profits. Over time, that inversion kills expectancy. Small wins, big losses — it’s the math of ruin.
The professionals flip it. They cut losses without hesitation and give winners room to breathe. Ed Seykota, one of the original trend-following legends, put it in the simplest possible terms:
“The elements of good trading are: (1) cutting losses, (2) cutting losses, and (3) cutting losses.”
Why is it so hard in practice? Because taking a loss feels like admitting you were wrong, while locking in a quick profit feels like a win. But the market doesn’t reward ego. It rewards discipline. The job isn’t to be right more often — it’s to make more when you’re right than you lose when you’re wrong.
Jesse Livermore, in Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, explained how his biggest fortunes came not from jumping in and out, but from having the patience to “sit tight” when a trade was working. Cutting losers quickly freed his capital, while holding winners let compounding do the heavy lifting.
The math is straightforward: if you lose 1R on your losers but make 2R or 3R on your winners, you can be wrong more than half the time and still grow your account. That asymmetry only works if you enforce the rule with iron discipline.
So cut your losses fast — no debate, no delay — and when you’re right, give the trade space to deliver. Small losses and larger wins are the survival formula of every professional trader.
Rules 5 and 6 go hand in hand. One protects you from making bad trades worse by throwing more money at losers. The other ensures you don’t strangle your best trades by cutting them too soon. Together, they enforce the golden asymmetry of trading: small losses, bigger wins. Get that balance right, and the math starts working for you instead of against you.
Rule 7: Trade Only What You Can Explain
If you can’t explain your trade in plain language, you probably shouldn’t be in it. That might sound obvious, but you’d be amazed how many traders pull the trigger on setups they couldn’t articulate if their life depended on it. They saw something on social media, felt a rush of FOMO, or convinced themselves they “just had a feeling.”
Alexander Elder drilled this lesson into his students in Trading for a Living. His mantra — Mind, Method, and Money — was all about clarity. If you don’t have a defined setup, a clear trigger, a logical stop, and a target framework, you’re not trading. You’re gambling.
Think about how different it feels when you can articulate your trade. You might say: “I’m long here because the daily trend is up, price has bounced off the 50-day moving average, my stop is just below that level, and I’m targeting a move back to recent highs.” That’s crisp, clear, and actionable. If someone asked why you were in the position, you could answer in one breath.
Contrast that with: “Well, I don’t know, I just think it’s going up — everyone’s talking about it on X.” One is a professional plan. The other is a recipe for regret.
Clarity does more than reduce bad trades. It also calms your emotions. When you know exactly why you’re in a trade and exactly what will make you exit, you don’t waste energy second-guessing yourself every time the price wiggles.
So here’s the rule: if you can’t explain the setup, the trigger, the stop, and the target in two sentences, you don’t take the trade. Simple as that. In trading, ambiguity is expensive.
Clarity protects you from making trades you can’t defend. But even clear trades can fail if you ignore the bigger picture. A beautiful setup on a five-minute chart means nothing if it’s fighting against the dominant trend on the daily. That’s where the next rule comes in.
Rule 8: Respect Higher Timeframes
Markets are fractal. They move in layers — intraday noise, daily swings, weekly structure. New traders often get trapped in the small picture, reacting to every wiggle on the chart. The pros zoom out. They anchor their trades in the higher timeframe trend and use the lower timeframes only for timing.
Alexander Elder formalized this with his Triple Screen system, teaching traders to always align short-term signals with the bigger trend. If your hourly setup is long but the daily chart is in a clear downtrend, you’re swimming upstream. That doesn’t make you brave. It makes you bait.
Jesse Livermore said the same thing a century ago, long before indicators and charting software: “A market is never too high to begin buying or too low to begin selling.” What he meant was that context matters more than price in isolation. Where you are in the bigger picture defines the meaning of the signal you see.
Practical example: a breakout on a 15-minute chart looks like opportunity — but if the daily chart shows the stock is just bouncing inside a long-term downtrend, that “breakout” is likely nothing more than noise. Professionals either step aside or wait for alignment.
Respecting higher timeframes doesn’t mean you ignore the smaller ones. It means you give priority to the bigger context. Short-term setups that align with the long-term trend are the trades with the highest odds of success.
Trade with the tide, not against it. The river always wins.
So far, these rules have been about mindset, capital protection, and avoiding classic behavioral traps. But discipline isn’t just mental — it has to show up in your process. That means turning trades into data you can measure, review, and improve. The next rule is how you make that shift from trading as guesswork to trading as a business.
Rule 9: Journal in R (Risk Units)
Most traders keep some kind of record, but they usually track the wrong thing. They obsess over dollar amounts won or lost, or worse, they only remember the highlights and forget the rest. Professionals measure in R — a simple unit that standardizes every trade by the amount of risk taken.
Van Tharp popularized this framework in Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom. If you risk $100 on a trade, that $100 is 1R. Win $200 and you’ve made +2R. Lose $50 and you’ve lost –0.5R. By measuring in R, you strip away the noise of position size and focus on expectancy: How much do I make on average for every unit of risk I put on the line?
This method has two massive advantages. First, it keeps you honest. You can’t hide from the math. Second, it creates emotional balance. A $1,000 loss feels huge, but if that was just –1R, it’s the same as any other planned risk. You’re not failing — you’re following the plan.
Professional traders build their journals around this idea. Every trade gets logged: setup, trigger, stop, R risked, R outcome, and notes on emotions or rule violations. Over time, patterns emerge. You learn not just what works, but also what mistakes cost you.
Ed Seykota once said, “Win or lose, everybody gets what they want out of the market.” Journaling in R reveals what you really want — whether that’s disciplined execution or the thrill of breaking rules.
The edge isn’t just in the strategy. It’s in the feedback loop. If you’re not tracking in R, you’re not running a trading business. You’re just rolling dice.
Once you start journaling trades in R, something interesting happens: you begin to see not only the math of your trading, but also the psychology behind it. Patterns of fear, greed, hesitation, or overconfidence show up right there in your notes. That’s the signal most traders miss. Numbers tell you the outcome, but emotions tell you why you got that outcome. Which brings us to the next rule.
Rule 10: Emotions Are Data, Not the Driver
Most traders treat emotions as the enemy. They try to suppress fear, ignore greed, or trade like robots. But markets are human systems — they run on emotion — and your feelings often contain useful information if you know how to read them.
Denise Shull, in Market Mind Games, made this her central message: emotions aren’t noise, they’re signals. Fear might be telling you your position is too big. Hesitation could mean you don’t fully trust your setup. Excitement might be a warning that you’re chasing instead of executing.
The mistake is not in feeling these emotions. The mistake is in letting them drive your decisions. When fear makes you exit too soon or greed makes you double down, you’ve handed the wheel over to the wrong part of your brain.
The pros do something different. They notice the emotion, label it, and then check it against their plan. “I feel anxious — does that mean my size is too large? I feel euphoric — am I chasing? Or is this simply a good trade doing what it’s supposed to do?” By treating emotions as data, not commands, they turn psychology into an ally.
Jesse Livermore once wrote, “The market is never wrong — opinions often are.” The same could be said for feelings: they’re never “wrong.” They just need interpretation.
The goal isn’t to trade without emotion. It’s to become fluent in your own emotional language — and then let your rules, not your impulses, decide what you do next.
Rule 11: Process Over Outcome (Deliberate Practice)
One of the biggest mistakes traders make is grading themselves by wins and losses. It’s natural — after all, the P&L is what hits your account. But focusing only on outcomes blinds you to the one thing you actually control: your process.
Brett Steenbarger, trading psychologist and performance coach, has spent decades teaching this principle. He compares trading to athletics: champions don’t just chase wins, they train micro-skills. A basketball player doesn’t just hope to score more points — he practices free throws, footwork, and defense until execution is automatic. Trading works the same way.
If you review your trades only by whether you made money, you’ll miss the deeper lesson. Did you stick to your stop? Did you wait for confirmation instead of front-running? Did you follow your setup exactly as planned? Each of these is a skill that can be tracked, measured, and improved.
Steenbarger calls this deliberate practice. You identify one weakness, focus on it in the next session, and log progress over time. Maybe today you work on executing stops without hesitation. Tomorrow, on holding winners without flinching. Over weeks and months, those small gains compound into mastery.
Mark Douglas often said, “You don’t need to know what’s going to happen next to make money.” What you do need is a repeatable process that stacks the odds. And the only way to build that is by treating each trade as practice, not a verdict.
When you shift your mindset from “Was I right or wrong?” to “Did I execute well?”, the pressure lifts. Losses become lessons. Wins become reinforcement. And consistency becomes possible.
Trading isn’t about brilliance. It’s about training yourself to do the right thing, the same way, again and again, until discipline feels natural.
Rule 12: No Thesis, No Trade
If you don’t know exactly why you’re in a trade, you have no business being in it. Sounds simple, yet some of the most common reasons people click “buy” or “sell” are things like: “I saw it on X,” “My buddy’s in it,” or “I didn’t want to miss out.” None of those are a thesis. They’re emotional triggers disguised as logic.
Jesse Livermore wrote about this trap more than a hundred years ago in Reminiscences of a Stock Operator. He described how crowds would rush into a stock because of tips, rumors, or whispers, and how it almost always ended badly. The timeless truth is that tip-chasing puts you at the mercy of someone else’s conviction. And when the heat comes, you won’t have the confidence to hold.
A thesis doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact, the best ones are simple: “I’m short because price broke below support, momentum is accelerating, and my stop is above yesterday’s high.” That’s a trade you can explain, defend, and manage. You know what would make you exit, and you know what you’re aiming for.
Contrast that with: “I’m long because someone in my feed seems confident.” What’s your stop? What’s your target? What invalidates your idea? If you can’t answer those questions, you don’t have a trade — you have a gamble.
The discipline of requiring a clear thesis forces you to slow down and filter noise. It also builds self-reliance. You stop outsourcing conviction to strangers and start building your own.
So here’s the line in the sand: if you can’t articulate the reason for a trade in your own words — with entry, exit, and invalidation defined — you don’t take it. No thesis, no trade.
Every trader hits rough patches. Losing streaks, drawdowns, error clusters — they’re inevitable. What separates pros from amateurs isn’t avoiding them, but how they respond. The next rule is about protecting your mental and financial capital when the market (or your execution) turns against you.
Rule 13: Size Down in Drawdowns
Nothing compounds losses faster than trading the same size — or bigger — when you’re in a slump. Amateurs double down, telling themselves they’ll “make it back faster.” Professionals do the opposite: they cut size, slow down, and regain rhythm before scaling back up.
Paul Tudor Jones, one of the most respected traders alive, put it bluntly in Market Wizards: “Trade smaller when you’re trading poorly.” That single habit has saved countless careers.
Here’s why it matters. Drawdowns don’t just drain money; they drain emotional capital. After a string of losses, confidence drops, frustration rises, and mistakes multiply. If you keep risking the same amount during that state, you’re asking for a blow-up. Smaller size reduces the emotional sting of each trade and gives you space to reset.
Think of it like a boxer taking a step back after a flurry. You don’t keep swinging wildly when you’re dazed — you cover up, protect yourself, and get your bearings. Trading is no different.
Some pros use hard rules: cut risk in half after a 10% drawdown, or reduce frequency until error rates normalize. The specifics matter less than the principle: when you’re off your game, protect capital first. The market will still be there tomorrow.
Drawdowns are feedback, not failure. If you respect them, they’ll make you stronger. If you ignore them, they’ll end your career.
Rule 14: Time Risk = Risk
Most traders think only in terms of price risk: “If it hits my stop, I lose X.” But there’s another kind of risk that can be just as dangerous — time risk. Holding a position through earnings announcements, central bank decisions, or major news events exposes you to volatility you can’t control.
Paul Tudor Jones, who built his career on disciplined risk management, was ruthless about this. He refused to “hope through” catalysts. If the market was about to flip the coin on an outcome outside his control, he’d cut or hedge the position. His focus wasn’t just on being right — it was on staying solvent.
Think about it. A company can beat earnings but guide lower, and the stock gaps down 15% before the market even opens. No stop order in the world saves you from that. Or a central bank surprises the market, and your carefully placed levels vanish in a flash of volatility. That’s time risk — exposure to events where the rules of normal trading don’t apply.
Professionals treat the calendar like part of their chart. They know when CPI drops, when the Fed speaks, when a company reports. If their edge doesn’t specifically include playing those events, they stand aside. Flat is a position. Cash is a position. Survival is a position.
Ignoring time risk is like leaving your car parked on train tracks because “the light is still green.” Maybe you get away with it once or twice. But eventually, the train comes.
Respect the calendar. If you wouldn’t deliberately flip a coin on an event, don’t let time risk do it for you.
With Rules 13 and 14, the focus shifts from protecting yourself trade by trade to protecting yourself across time. Drawdowns and event risk are the silent killers of trading accounts — not because they’re unpredictable, but because traders ignore the warning signs. By respecting both your emotional state and the market calendar, you give yourself the only edge that truly matters: staying in the game.
Rule 15: Change One Variable at a Time
Trading attracts tinkerers. When things aren’t working, the instinct is to change everything at once — new indicators, new timeframes, new strategy, new risk rules. But if you alter five things at the same time, you’ll never know which one made the difference. That confusion is why so many traders spend years system-hopping without progress.
Brett Steenbarger, in Trading Psychology 2.0, emphasized the importance of controlled experiments. If you want to grow as a trader, you need to approach changes the way a scientist approaches a lab test: one variable at a time, repeated enough times to produce meaningful feedback.
That’s why pros often stick with a system through at least 20 trades before drawing conclusions. If you change only one factor — say, moving from fixed targets to trailing stops — you’ll know whether that adjustment improves expectancy. If you change everything, you’re just guessing.
This rule isn’t just about strategy. It’s also about psychology. Controlled experimentation keeps you grounded, prevents frustration, and builds confidence. Every adjustment is deliberate, and every result becomes part of your learning.
In trading, randomness is everywhere. The last thing you need is to add more chaos by changing everything at once. Make one change, test it, measure it, then decide. That’s how amateurs become professionals.
Wrapping Up: 15 Rules That Keep You in the Game
These fifteen rules are not theories. They’re the distilled wisdom of traders who survived decades in the markets — and the scars of those who didn’t. Together, they form a complete framework: protect your capital, manage your emotions, follow your process, and grow through deliberate practice.
The hard truth is this: most traders know some version of these rules already. But knowing isn’t the same as doing. Having rules on paper is just the prerequisite. Success comes only from living by them, trade after trade, day after day, especially when it’s hardest.
That’s where most people struggle — and where coaching makes the difference. The market will test your discipline, tempt you to break your own guardrails, and push you back toward old habits. If you want to trade like a professional, you need more than strategies. You need accountability, structure, and support to actually follow your rules.
The market doesn’t reward predictions. It rewards preparation. And preparation starts here — with rules that protect you, guide you, and keep you in the game long enough for your edge to work.
Download the 15 Rules Trading Cheat Sheet
Reading the rules is one thing. Living by them every day is another.
That’s why I’ve put these principles into a simple one-page printable cheat sheet — so you can keep the 15 rules in front of you while you trade.
Download the 15 Trading Rules Cheat Sheet (Free)
Print it, pin it by your screen, or keep it on your desk as a reminder:
trading success isn’t about knowing more, it’s about following your rules.