In this article i’m going to talk about how you can avoid pitfalls in trading with young children around you as a woman, when trading the stock market. I’m going to talk about practical tips you can apply in your trading right now, to avoid some of the things which can go wrong and cause stress. Let’s get straight into it!
First of all, let’s talk about what can go wrong in trading with young children around you
Wow – where do I begin? Here are a few examples:
Example 1 – You miss your target: you are in a trade and it’s going to go up to your target area, so you are keeping a bit of an eye on it while your toddler is eating their lunch. Sometimes trading with young children around you is unavoidable depending on the needs of the child and what’s happening with your trade set up and the market. Toddler drops lunch on the floor (along with the beaker, the rattle, the baby wipe and anything else within reach which has ended up on the floor in the preceding ten minutes). Crying ensues, stress in mommy ensues – “what am I going to feed them now – i’ve just made that lunch and it’s gone”. Trade goes near the target but mommy is focused on clearing up the spaghetti on the floor. Trade failed – it went back down to below target level and then into loss position by the time mommy realised what’s happened.
Example 2 – You forget to add a stop loss: You’re baby is asleep while you are planning and trying to execute your trade set up and entry point. You enter a buy position and just before you can set your take profit and stop loss, baby wakes up and is screaming for milk – it needs it NOW. You rush over to bubba to console them while you try and get a bottle ready and in the meantime, you have forgotten about adding your stop loss. Trade goes against you while you are heating up the baby’s milk and you end up in the red, to a level which is two times the size of the loss which would have happened, had you set your stop.
These are two examples of a multitude of things which could happen while you are keeping an eye on trades, while simultaneously looking after your baby or toddler. If you are a man or non caregiver of young children, I do not expect you to understand this. This is something which mothers contend with every day – it maybe that they are trying to do something else besides trade, quickly before their baby wakes up – there are many things which a woman could need to deal with while looking after small children, and the children are not interested in anyone else’s schedule, but their own. This is the biological reason why women ended up better at multi tasking.
OK, so we know these things can go wrong. What can you do about it as a trader to protect your account and your confidence?
The first recommendation I can make is for you to trade higher timeframes. The timeframes which should be avoided are the 5, 10, 15 minute time frames. Maybe even the 30 minute time frame. Why? The higher the timeframe you use, the more time you will have to execute your entries and exits and plan your trades. The price moves more slowly on the higher timeframe. It will give you time to sort your baby out, give him/her a bottle, adjust your target or add one automatically.
Another suggestion is to do your research at times when you know baby will be sleeping – the tasks which could have an interruption and not go wrong – like choosing which market to enter from the really high time frames like the daily, the weekly, and you can do this while your baby is sleeping in the evening but tend to him/her if he/she wakes up.
My recommendation would be to not trade without a stop loss or take profit being automatically set on your trades. You can do some analysis of what actually happened with the price movements (whether you made an error, why it went down instead of going up as you had planned etc) at a convenient time, as long as your position is automatically protected from going wrong.
I hope you found this article helpful in deciding how you can avoid pitfalls when trading with young children around you. I also published a video on my YouTube channel, on avoiding pitfalls when trading with young children- which you may find helpful:
Disclaimer!
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