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You cannot be a successful Forex trader if you are not discipline. I have seen many of my fellow traders loose money for lack of discipline. I have also lost money for lacking of discipline. You must be disciplined to stick with your trade plans everyday.
Let me give you a perfect example. I have a fellow trader whose goal of pips in every trade is 10 pips. He is so successful in this that in any trade he enters he picks his 10 pips with easy. He entered a trade in one day and at the end he picked the ten pips within 3 minutes. A discipline trader should just close his trade for that day and wait for other time. Since he now had more times in his hand, he entered another trade which turned bad, he didnt put his stop loss and before you can say foreign exchange he lost his capital. If he had stick to his trade plans he wouldnt have lost that money.
A good Forex trader is a man that has worked and perfected his strategy and stick to it whatever happened. An undisciplined trader is a trader that is always tosses to and fro moving from one strategy to another. It has happened to me in the past I bought many books on Forex trading looking for the holy grail of successful trading. I spend thousands of dollars on this venture. I later released that if I dont stick to one strategy I will never be successful in Forex trading. After trying many strategies I finally stick to news trading. You can never find me trading indicators. It is not in my game plan. Even if Fibonacci himself comes today and teach me his skill, I will not touch it with a long poll. I have decided to discipline myself to trade nothing but news trading. You can never see me trade when there is no news.
I trade when I know the economic data is being released that is what I called disciplined. If you are good with indicators and you are really making money with it you better stick with it. Like today and tomorrow for instance I dont have any trade, so what will I do, I decided to write this article and never to open my trading platform less I will be tempted to trade. An undisciplined trader is a gambler. He also shoots in the dark and he is like a man winking to a beautiful lady in the dark. The lady would never know what he is doing and will never win the lady for friendship. Forex is not gambling. It is a business and for a business to succeed it must be based on proper planning and business discipline.
I have read of a trader that trade just three times in a month and he average between 30% to 40% gain on his capital every month. That is what I called discipline. I read about another one that is always satisfies with just 10 pips on a trade. My own goal for every of my trade is 10 pips per trade and I have disciplined my self to only trade 10 times in a month, this will give me 100 pips per month. With proper planning and research I am able to achieve this goal every month. When I trade economic releases like NFP that moves sometimes 70 pips to 120 pips within a few minutes I still stick to my ten pips.
I will rather trade my whole lot and catch ten pips per trade than to trade 3% of my lot and gun for 70 pips. Let see an example. If I have $1000 in my account and I trade 1 lot with 10 pips gain that is 10% profit than when I trade with 0.3 lot to gain 70 pips which will fetch me 21%. I have discovered that it is much more risky to trade this because of whipsaw. It is easier for me to gain the 10 pips quickly than 70 pips. So I disciplined myself to stick to my game plan of 10 pips per trade.