Time management. Are you a profitable trader? Hmm.... calculate your alternative costs !!!

Everybody talks about risk management and how important it is for your trading. But quite a few talk about time management.

And that is a very important and that concernes mainly the small non professional speculators.

I write here about it because I consider that this is very important.

The idea is that if you do not trade with big volumes the time spent trading becomes a concern. I mean it is a fact that the time has its own value. And if you want to be profitable you non only need to be profitale but you also need that the time spent trading is more worth as your alternative costs.

Yes time as a ressource has an alternative costs. I mean while you trade you spend time that can be spent elsewhere more profitably. How that concern the small speculators. Nobody talks about that but it is true if you have a small account you can't expect too much profit.

15 - 30 % return of capital on a year basis is very, very good achievement. So imagine you have 5000 USD account and you achieve 50 % return on capital. You would achieve a great success by any trading standrads. But it makes 2500 USD in your account. And imagine you have worked as a trader 10 hours per week. That makes 40 hours per month. And 480 hours per year to make 2500 USD.

And that makes you earn 5.2 USD per hour work. Well that is not much :(.

And in my country the minimum hour rate for my profession is 30 USD. So really what is the point. Maybe just the fact I like it. But calculate how much you are loosing while you are trading. From an economic point of view that is called alternative costs. Know your alternative costs at all costs!

The possible solutions are:

1. To trade larger and larger amounts. With larger and larger stress. That means to become a professional.

I have a lot of proffesionals who are here and have been invited by my, and semi-professionals as well. But most of the people who read this are not. And everybody cannot be a proffessional trader.

I have some psychological problems athat makes for me impossible to go to the next level. I just do not have the mentality to be a professional trader.

2. To keep it as a hobby and minimize the time spent on it.

That is the most important think. I will not develop the idea here but there are some times of the day that you can afford to trade and optimize the time spent on the markets.

3. To trade with larger time frames

That is my dream since a lot of time to design and implement that kind of strategy. I am still working on it. There are two variations: swing trading and position trading.

4. To automate the trading

Even if you cannot leave youe bot trading unsupervised it at least allows you to have multitasking while you are doing something else. That is a solution for the people in the on line business.