{"id":761,"date":"2026-09-01T09:11:20","date_gmt":"2026-09-01T16:11:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tradingacademy.com\/newsletter\/?p=761"},"modified":"2026-09-01T16:25:06","modified_gmt":"2026-09-01T23:25:06","slug":"preparing-for-q4-is-your-trading-plan-ready","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tradingacademy.com\/newsletter\/preparing-for-q4-is-your-trading-plan-ready\/","title":{"rendered":"Preparing for Q4: Is Your Trading Plan Ready?"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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September is here, which means summer is winding down, football is back, pumpkin spice is about to invade everything, and traders have one full quarter left to finish the year strong or completely sabotage themselves trying to make up for the first nine months. I\u2019m hoping we can avoid option number two.<\/p>

This is a great time to take a look at your trading plan and ask a simple question: Is what I\u2019m doing actually working? For newer traders, that can be difficult to answer because most people judge their trading by one thing: Did I make money? If the answer is yes, they assume they did something right. If the answer is no, they assume something needs to change. Unfortunately, trading isn\u2019t quite that simple.<\/p>

You can make money on a terrible trade, and you can lose money on a great trade. If you ignored your plan, bought a stock because somebody on social media said it was going \u201cto the moon,\u201d risked half your account, and somehow made money, congratulations, you made money. But you didn\u2019t necessarily make a good trade. You may have simply gotten lucky. On the other hand, you might identify a quality setup, enter at the right price, manage your risk properly, follow your rules perfectly, and still take a loss. Losses are simply part of trading.<\/p>

Start With Risk Management<\/strong><\/p>

Before worrying about how much money you made, look at how much money you risked. One of the biggest mistakes beginning traders make is focusing almost entirely on profits. Everybody wants to know, \u201cHow much can I make on this trade?\u201d I\u2019d rather have you ask, \u201cHow much can I lose if I\u2019m wrong?\u201d That question will keep you in this game a lot longer.<\/p>

Every trade should have some basic parameters before you enter it. Where are you entering? Where will you get out if you\u2019re wrong? How much of your account are you risking? Does the potential reward justify the risk? Think of risk management as the seat belt of trading. You probably won\u2019t need it most of the time, but when things go wrong, you\u2019re going to be very happy it was there.<\/p>

As you prepare for Q4, review how consistently you managed risk. Did you use stops? Did you increase position size after a loss? Did you move your stop because you \u201cjust knew\u201d the market was going to come back? If your biggest losses are dramatically larger than your normal losses, that deserves some attention. One undisciplined trade can wipe out weeks of good trading.<\/p>

Study Your Winners and Your Losers<\/strong><\/p>

Most traders love reviewing their winners. We pull up the chart, admire the entry, and quietly congratulate ourselves on being market geniuses. Losing trades somehow disappear from memory remarkably quickly. Unfortunately, those losing trades are often where the best lessons are hiding.<\/p>

Go through your trades and look for patterns. What did your best trades have in common? Were they from a particular setup? Did they happen during a certain time of day? Were you more patient? Then look at your losses. Maybe you consistently lose when you chase a market after a big move, trade during certain hours, or immediately jump into another trade after taking a loss.<\/p>

That last one is called revenge trading. The market took your money, you got angry, and now you\u2019re going to teach the market a lesson. Spoiler alert: the market does not care.<\/p>

This is also why keeping a trading journal is so valuable. You don\u2019t need a spreadsheet with 47 columns and enough data to make a NASA engineer uncomfortable. Record what you traded, why you entered, where your stop was, where you exited, and whether you followed your plan. One bad trade might mean nothing. The same mistake happening fifteen times is probably telling you something.<\/p>

Don\u2019t Overreact to Short-Term Results<\/strong><\/p>

There\u2019s another danger when reviewing performance: constantly changing your strategy. New traders often take three losses and immediately decide their strategy doesn\u2019t work. They change indicators, switch markets, adjust timeframes, add another moving average, remove the moving average, watch another YouTube video, and two weeks later they\u2019re doing something completely different.<\/p>

Every legitimate trading strategy will experience losing trades and losing streaks. The question isn\u2019t whether your last five trades made money. The question is whether you have enough data to determine that something actually needs to change. Don\u2019t confuse a small sample size with a broken strategy. Make changes based on evidence, not emotion.<\/p>

Focus on What You Can Control<\/strong><\/p>

Heading into Q4, your goal shouldn\u2019t simply be, \u201cI want to make $10,000 before the end of the year.\u201d That\u2019s a financial goal, not a trading plan. The market has absolutely no obligation to give you $10,000 just because you wrote it on a Post-it note.<\/p>

Instead, create goals around things you can control. Maybe you commit to never risking more than a certain amount on one trade, stopping when you hit your maximum daily loss, waiting for your setup instead of chasing price, or documenting every trade through the end of the year. Those goals may not sound as exciting as doubling your account by Christmas, but they\u2019re much more useful.<\/p>

As September comes to an end, ask yourself a few simple questions: What are my best setups? Where are my biggest losses coming from? Am I following my stops? What mistake do I keep repeating? And most importantly, what is one thing I can improve in Q4?\u00a0 If you don\u2019t know the answers to these questions, come join us for a free workshop where we explain these concepts and much more.<\/p>

Trading is a continuous improvement discipline. You don\u2019t need to reinvent yourself every three months, but you should constantly be reviewing your performance and looking for ways to improve. Your job isn\u2019t to win every trade. Your job is to execute your plan consistently, protect your capital, and manage your risk when you\u2019re wrong.<\/p>

Do that well enough, for long enough, and you\u2019ll already be ahead of a surprisingly large percentage of market participants. Q4 is coming. Make sure your trading plan is ready for it.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

September is here, which means summer is winding down, football is back, pumpkin spice is about to invade everything, and traders have one full quarter left to finish the year strong or completely sabotage themselves trying to make up for the first nine months. I\u2019m hoping we can avoid option number two. This is a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":790,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"rttpg_featured_image_url":{"full":["https:\/\/www.tradingacademy.com\/newsletter\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/00_Preparing_for_Q4_3.png",480,270,false],"landscape":["https:\/\/www.tradingacademy.com\/newsletter\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/00_Preparing_for_Q4_3.png",480,270,false],"portraits":["https:\/\/www.tradingacademy.com\/newsletter\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/00_Preparing_for_Q4_3.png",480,270,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.tradingacademy.com\/newsletter\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/00_Preparing_for_Q4_3-150x150.png",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/www.tradingacademy.com\/newsletter\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/00_Preparing_for_Q4_3-300x169.png",300,169,true],"large":["https:\/\/www.tradingacademy.com\/newsletter\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/00_Preparing_for_Q4_3.png",480,270,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/www.tradingacademy.com\/newsletter\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/00_Preparing_for_Q4_3.png",480,270,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/www.tradingacademy.com\/newsletter\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/00_Preparing_for_Q4_3.png",480,270,false]},"rttpg_author":{"display_name":"Merlin Rothfeld","author_link":"https:\/\/www.tradingacademy.com\/newsletter\/author\/merlin\/"},"rttpg_comment":0,"rttpg_category":"Uncategorized<\/a>","rttpg_excerpt":"September is here, which means summer is winding down, football is back, pumpkin spice is about to invade everything, and traders have one full quarter left to finish the year strong or completely sabotage themselves trying to make up for the first nine months. I\u2019m hoping we can avoid option number two. This is a…","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tradingacademy.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tradingacademy.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tradingacademy.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tradingacademy.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tradingacademy.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=761"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/www.tradingacademy.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/761\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":795,"href":"https:\/\/www.tradingacademy.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/761\/revisions\/795"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tradingacademy.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/790"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tradingacademy.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tradingacademy.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tradingacademy.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}