Trading Around a Job, a Mortgage and Two Kids

Almost all trading education is written as though you are at a desk from open to close with nothing else on. Six screens, alerts, a live feed.

That is not most people, and it is certainly not most people who are trying to build something on the side. The real question is not how do I find more time. You do not have more time. The question is: what does a trading process look like when the person running it is unavailable for nine hours a day?

It has a good answer. It is just a different answer.

The mistake is the timeframe, not the effort

If you trade a five-minute chart while holding down a job, you are not a part-time trader. You are a full-time trader who is absent for most of it — which is worse than either.

Everything that goes wrong flows from that one mismatch:

– You miss the entry and take it late, at a worse price, with the same stop. – You cannot watch it, so you either sit on your phone in meetings or you look up at 5pm to find it went to your target and came back. – You make the important decisions in the two windows you happen to be free, rather than when the chart says to.

Pick a timeframe that survives you being unavailable. For most people with a job that means the 4-hour and the daily. A setup on a daily chart takes days to develop. You can check it twice — once in the morning, once at night — and miss nothing that matters.

That is not a compromise or a beginner’s version. It is the correct tool for the constraint.

What does a workable week actually look like?

Sunday, forty minutes. Go through your markets on the daily. Which are trending, which are going nowhere. Mark the levels that matter. Write down the two or three you would take a trade in this week and what would have to happen first.

Weekday mornings, ten minutes. Has anything reached a level you marked? If yes, is the setup there? If yes, place the order with the stop and target already decided. If no — and this is most mornings — close the app.

Weekday evenings, ten minutes. Anything need managing? Stop moved, part of it taken? Otherwise, nothing.

That is under two hours a week, and it is enough. Not enough to day trade — it was never going to be — but enough to run a real process on a slower timeframe.

Orders do the waiting for you

The single most useful thing for someone with a job: you do not have to be there.

Decide the entry, the stop and the target when you have time to think, place them as orders, and let the market come to you. If it never gets there, nothing happens and that is a fine outcome. If it does, you are in at the price you chose rather than the price you happened to be free at.

This also removes the worst version of the problem: opening the app at lunch, seeing something moving, and taking a trade you had not planned because it is the only moment you have. That is not trading around a job. That is your schedule choosing your trades.

Fewer positions, deliberately

You cannot manage eight positions in twenty minutes a day. You can manage two.

So take fewer. This sounds like a limitation and it mostly is not — the traders who lose money rarely lose it for lack of opportunities. Two well-chosen positions with a plan will beat eight half-watched ones, and the constraint does the selecting for you.

The part nobody says out loud

Some weeks you will not trade at all. Work will be busy, someone will be ill, and you will not open a chart from Monday to Friday.

That is fine. Nothing compounds badly from a week off. Nothing is lost. The market will still be there and it will still be producing the same setups.

What does damage is coming back from a busy fortnight and taking three trades quickly to make up for it. There is nothing to make up. The account does not know you were away.

How do you know it is working?

The signal that this is working is not a good month. It is that trading stops occupying your head at times when you are not doing it.

If you are checking prices in the car park, at dinner, at 11pm — the timeframe is still wrong for your life, no matter what the account is doing. A process that fits properly is one you can put down for eight hours without wondering what it is doing.

Try this on Sunday

Forty minutes. Go through your markets on the daily chart only.

Write down: the two or three worth watching this week, the level each would need to reach, and what you would do if it got there.

Then do not look again until Monday night. Most weeks nothing will have happened, and you will have lost nothing by not staring at it.

Common questions