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A quick note before we start: I’m not a writer. Beyond a newsletter I wrote for Futex back in the day, this is pretty much it. Expect to find plenty of clumsy sentences asking the way! These are just my thoughts written down and I hope they help someone.
The problem isn't discipline
Most traders who struggle with consistency don't lack effort or willpower. What they lack is a clear picture of what they're waiting for.
You know the day. The plan says wait. The market chops around for an hour, one candle looks close enough, and you’re in. Then another. By the close you’ve taken five trades, and none of them were the plan. Maybe you made money, maybe you didn’t and it doesn’t really matter. If anything, making money is worse, because it rewards the bad habit. And how many times have you hit your daily stop before the trade of the day showed up, leaving you with no risk left to take it?
The usual advice is "be more patient". But patience isn't a personality trait you can summon on demand. It's a by-product of clarity. If you can't describe your best setup in a few lines, no amount of willpower will make you wait for it.
Anyone who journals, even loosely, can usually see that their best setups produce pretty decent returns. Now imagine you traded only those setups for a month. For most traders, the P&L would be far better than what actually happened. Now, imagine you’re still doing it six months later. The returns from those setups alone would be impressive, but then multiply the scoreboard by at least five, because that’s the size you’d be trading by then if you could stick to your edge and only your edge.
The real cost isn’t just the money lost on poor trades, going on tilt, or missing good trades because you were already stopped out. The real killer is that you never scale. No consistency means no ability to size up.
You can't wait for something you haven't defined
Jerry Cartwright made this point in a short Stocks & Commodities piece, "What Are You Waiting For?". He defines patience as waiting for the market to meet your conditions, which, of course, only works if you have conditions.
His argument is simple. If your setup is loosely defined, trades seem to appear everywhere and at any moment. If you’re watching several setups across several timeframes, you’re mentally spent by the afternoon and your patience wears thin. His fix: stick to one or two setups and average no more than about one trade an hour.
I'd go one step further. For most traders, three to four trades a day is all that’s required.
“A day” can mean different things to different traders. My 'traditional day' used to be 7am-5pm UK time – that incorporated the EU futures open, EU cash open, early US data, US open and EU close. For a top-tier trader, that’s probably still a normal day, and in volatile periods it can stretch all the way to the US close at 9pm UK time. But you have to be genuinely elite to stay focused that long without messing it up.
For most, the first 2-2.5hrs of the US session (adding in an hour beforehand on big data days) is probably sufficient to make a decent living without having to be 'elite'. Think about that: two to three hours of full focus most days, and you can still make very good money. Four trades in three hours is just over one an hour. So why are you taking four before the Initial Balance has even finished?!
Here’s a quick test. Can you write your best setup on an index card? Market context, trigger, where you’re wrong and what you’re aiming for. If you can’t, that’s the work, not “trying harder to be patient”.
Build a playbook
Mike Bellafiore of SMB Capital turned the index card into a system in The PlayBook (a great book everyone should read). Traders record the specific patterns, catalysts and market conditions where they perform best. Those become "their" trades, and anything outside the playbook counts as overtrading.
A simple playbook entry might cover:
Context: what the wider market is doing when this setup works best.
Trigger: the exact thing that gets you in.
Invalidation: where you're wrong, and your stop.
Target and management: where you're aiming and how you'll handle the trade.
Why it works: who is likely on the other side.
Bryce Gilmore had a less polished version of this back in 2007 in his futures diary: don't take a trade unless you can give three good reasons for it.
I really shouldn't need to write my own playbook trade as an example here... You've all seen me talk about it enough and it's why the market stats space was created.
Why waiting feels so hard
Even with a clear setup, two forces push you off it: boredom and the fear of missing out.
Brett Steenbarger counts boredom among the most overlooked risks in trading. A bored, impatient trader starts forcing trades or quietly abandons the system.
This idea has stood the test of time. Jesse Livermore, in Reminiscences of a Stock Operator: "It never was my thinking that made the big money for me. It was always my sitting." To be fair this was more aimed at sitting in a trade once in it, but the principle stays true. I saw a random X post recently: most of the time the market offers nothing, and a small slice of the time produces most of the profit.
So, reframe boredom. If trading feels exciting every day, you're chasing dopamine. If it feels a bit dull, you're probably doing it right. Be good at trading by being boring. Doing the same things that work over and over, when everything aligns.
FOMO is the cousin of boredom. Because you're bored you start looking for a trade; any trade will do after a while. So as soon as something vaguely resembles a setup and starts to move without you, you enter out of fear of missing the move. Wrong! It was a trick. The one the market plays again but you never quite figure out how it works.
Patience isn't passivity
Waiting is only half the job. The other half is acting decisively when your setup finally shows up.
I saw Lance Breitstein on X talking the other day about recent takeaways from the SMB desk and he made the point from both sides. Struggling traders don't hit the brakes fast enough when conditions don't suit their strategy and most traders also don't press hard enough when conditions are right. Qullamaggie, one of the great modern stock traders, says something similar: only trade a setup when conditions suit it and a good setup should be obvious when you see it.
Mark Weinstein used to talk about the cheetah: the fastest animal on the plains, yet it waits until it’s sure before it moves. Gilmore’s 2007 version: don’t trade a quiet market and the trades will come to you if you’re smart enough to wait.
So many great traders make the same point and yet new traders keep arriving and trying to rewrite the rule book.
One caution. Pressing harder means sizing up on edges you've already proved. Trades you know already provide a meaningful positive expectancy. You don't size up to claw back losses, or because you 'think the market is going higher'. You size up when the context is right and the setup is A+.
To sum it up with something I tell everyone I mentor: I’d rather wait for the market to drop a bag of money in front of me than go hunting for one. Sometimes the bag is full of coal. That still beats grabbing every bag in sight just in case.
Think in probabilities
Consistency also breaks down when a single trade starts to matter too much. Even a strategy that wins 90% of the time still loses, and you never know when the 10% will show up. Mark Douglas built Trading in the Zone (another excellent book you should read) around learning to live with that.
Two of his "fundamental truths" apply here. You don't need to know what happens next to make money. And wins and losses are randomly spread across any edge. Once you believe that, skipping a marginal trade costs you nothing, because no single trade was ever going to make your month.
Douglas suggests a “mechanical stage”: execute one defined setup exactly as written over at least 20 trades, then judge the batch rather than each individual trade.
Start smaller. Trade only your plan for five trades in a row. Try it; I bet it’s harder than you expect. Then do another five. Eventually you’ll get to 20, and if you’re any good, the results will hit you in the face. In a good way: they’ll show you what you’re actually capable of.
A practical toolkit
Write the index card. One or two setups (three max), each defined by context, trigger, invalidation and target.
Halve your trade count. Steenbarger's exercise: work out your average number of trades, cut it in half, and keep it there until results improve.
Log the current conditions every 30 minutes. Note whether you're in buy, sell or stand-aside mode, then mark later whether you were right.
Judge trades in batches. Run 20 trades of one setup exactly as written before deciding whether it works (Douglas).
Review every day. Write up one playbook trade and one thing to fix tomorrow
The takeaway
Consistency doesn't come from doing more. It comes from doing the same small number of things, the same way, again and again.
Get clear on exactly what you're looking for, and patience mostly takes care of itself. As one trader put it (apologies, I forgot who): "Patience protects capital. Process compounds it."