What is Coach T at Topstep – Create a Strong Daily Trading Routine:
Topstep offers a handful of human performance coaches to help traders within the community develop and improve themselves. But Coach T is a new personalized, digital, and fully automated performance coach created by the Topstep Team.
Whether you’re going through the Topstep Combine or already have a funded account, Coach T is available within the Dashboard to help you build good habits, firm discipline, and a meaningful routine. It’s all about awareness, accountability, and improvement.
Sadly, many people use the market as an opportunity for thrills and gambling – which doesn’t typically end well. But when it comes to trading at a professional-level, there’s much more to it than randomly and impulsively clicking buttons during market hours.
A meaningful trading routine extends outside the realm of actually trading into phases of preparation and reflection as well. Merely trading without preparation or reflection is a recipe for failure. It leaves no room for structure, accountability, and growth.
Below we’ll discuss the 3 components of a strong trading routine and the benefits that Coach T brings to the table for each of them.
3 Critical Components of a Solid Daily Routine → Prep, Trade, and Reflect:
In many cases, new traders solely focus on the act of trading – but there’s much more to durable success than that. So if you want to put yourself in a position to consistently improve over time, then you have to implement proper preparation and reflection.
Lacking in any one of these three critical phases can be the difference between success and failure in the markets:
PREP
The first phase of a strong daily trading routine is preparation. This can include a number of actions that you might not consciously connect to trading, like sleep, meditation, exercise, and healthy eating – which certainly impact your mindset and results.
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At the moment, Coach T doesn’t necessarily focus on all of these critical components of peak performance. But what it does allow you to do is set a personalized trading plan based on three main factors – daily loss limit, max number of trades, and max losing streak.
You might be thinking that predetermined daily loss limits already exist within the Topstep Combine and funded accounts – which is true. But this is an opportunity to hold yourself even more accountable to your own individual rules, plans, and systems.
Overall, the preparation phase is designed to help you understand your state of mind going into the trading day and create a detailed roadmap for how you plan to carry out the actual trading phase. Being prepared and balanced goes a long way in live situations.
TRADE
The second phase is the actual act of trading during market hours. The preparation phase should have prepared you well for this phase. So instead of being flustered and fearful like most other market participants are, you can feel poised and confident.
Most people who attempt to trade on a short-term basis (like day trading or swing trading) are far too concerned about the result of every individual trade. It might seem a bit counterintuitive, but short-term traders still need to be long-term focused.
What I mean by this is that losses will happen – there’s no avoiding them. So attaching the result of any individual trade to your self-worth just isn’t helpful. One trade is insignificant. It’s about consistency and repeatability over a large number of trades that matters.
When you boil it down, trading is just a numbers game – you want to create rules, plans, and systems that put the odds in your favor. But what tends to get in the way is our emotions and impulses. So the main focus during this phase is risk and mindset management.
REFLECT
The third phase, and probably the most important, is reflection and analysis. This is where you take an honest look at your plans during the preparation phase and what you actually did during the trading phase – and then pinpoint areas for improvement.
Did you follow your trade plan? If not, what were the consequences of your actions? How can you better stick to your plan in the future? Did something happen in the market that led you to think, feel, and behave in an irrational or impulsive way?
This is your opportunity to get to the root of your trading errors and then build out plans to fix them. It could be a matter of slightly adjusting your rules based on your trade data, but it could also be a matter of you having to adjust your own attitudes and beliefs.
What Coach T does is provide you with a Discipline Score based on how well you followed your rules created in the prep phase. Coach T also provides individualized analytics and insights concerning average profit/loss, win percentage, and risk/reward ratio.
My Overall Thoughts on Coach T – The Digital Performance Coach at Topstep:
Overall, Coach T is a great tool for Topstep Traders to take advantage of in order to build good habits, cultivate personal accountability, and leverage individualized data and analytics for continuous improvement. I love the focus on healthy and sustainable trading.
But the tool as it stands right now is really just scratching the surface within the areas of preparation, trading, and reflection. It’s possible Topstep kept it simple for a reason. But it’s my hope that they continue to improve upon Coach T to make it even more robust.
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I don’t think the average person truly understands what goes into trading at a high-level, especially from a mental perspective. But trading is an endeavor that takes hard work, dedication, and persistence not just during trading hours, but outside of them as well.
I respect Topstep for attempting to get this message across to anyone who signs up for their platform. The focus isn’t skewed exclusively toward profits. Instead, the focus is on the overall process. And when the process is right, profits take care of themselves.
Please share your thoughts, feelings, and experiences with Coach T and Topstep in general within the comments section below.
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Written by Matt Thomas (@MattThomasTP)
Related Pages:
- Is Topstep Trader a Scam? My Thoughts as a Topstep Trader
- What is Topstep Futures – Earn a Funded Futures Account
- What is the Topstep Trader Combine – Prove You Can Trade
- Best Trading Sites – Beginners Guide to Active Trading
- Can You Learn How to Trade By Watching YouTube Videos?
I actually have a friend who has his own trading busieness so I will be sure to share this article with him. I am sure that he will appreciate it and he will be able to pick up a few tips from this – he should probably even think about trying to get funded through a program like Topstep. I’m still giving thought to entering the trading world and this article has certainly helped me understand the process required to succeed
Hi Aubin – I’m glad this article about Topstep’s Coach T was so helpful for you. There are many other articles that I’ve written which discuss the realities of trading as well. So those might be really beneficial in deciding if active trading is something worth pursuing for you. I won’t tell you that trading is an easy path to riches – because it’s absolutely not. It takes a ton of hard work and dedication. But the rewards after training, building skills, and gaining experience can be incredible if approached correctly. Far too many people come into the markets obsessed with the money and potential rewards – and end up quickly failing. But that’s not the proper approach. The proper approach includes becoming more self-aware, patient, balanced, and disciplined – and these attributes can help you both inside and outside of the markets. For me, trading has essentially become a lifestyle with mindfulness, health, and probabilistic-thinking at its core.