Formulating a trading strategy and keeping a journal.

Your trading strategy is essentially your rulebook, which has to include the following details:

• The time frame that you are willing to hold your stocks for.

• The industries that you want to enter(preferably something that you are interested in)

• The % that you want to gain.

• The % that you are willing to lose in case things go wrong.

• Entry and exit points.

Now, you can have more than one trading strategy of course. But always remember that you should stick to your plan. If you decided that you cant take more than 10% loss, then don't buy/sell into something that might give you a higher loss.

Be very careful of the industry that you pick - don't just go ahead and do what everyone is doing(but this doesn't mean that you invest in some random company that no one has ever heard of). Of course, the market in itself is governed by emotions of the average investor. Try to think how an average investor might think, and therefore act. Ultimately, this is the only way you could possibly predict anything in the market.

For example - renewable energy stocks may be great in the long run but we can never be really sure as of current technology.

Keep a trade journal - which includes all of your past trades, how much you made from it and what you learnt from it. This is really great after a while because often you may realise that you keep repeating the same mistakes and follow a pattern of things.