Study Your Results Once you are in tune with your capabilities and personal patterns, it is a good exercise to regularly examine your profit and loss statements, pondering each and every trade to determine when it was made, why it was made, and your state of mind before, when and after it was made. This will help unlock your individual trading patterns. If you are systematically wrong and you know why you did what you did, all you will have to do is the opposite. Some common trading patterns might be being constantly early or constantly late; taking profits and/or losses too slowly or too quickly; or essentially what you do, and how you do it. Look for what you did well and what you did not do so well. Again, look at the results, and always try to improve. Being Early We have considered that time regulates price promotion activity and that risk is a function of price and time, not just price. (Knowing this, we will soon consider the logical necessity for weighting trades.) Indeed, understanding time is the last key element standing in the way of achieving a sound trading strategy, and will probably be the key to improving your trading pattern. Specifically, few trader/investors consider: 1. The concept of their individual timeframe. 2. Whether or not it differs from the timeframe they are trading from. 3. Whether or not it differs from the timeframe they are expecting results in. In other words, most traders could benefit from considering the timeframe their situation and personality are best suited to, the timeframe they are trading from, and comparing that to the timeframe during which they expect the market to move in their favor. Curing the Trader's Biggest Problem As mentioned in the previous chapter, the biggest mistake people make in any endeavor is hesitating and thus being late. It is the same in trading and investing. We all face a natural human tendency toward lateness. The adage ''buy low, sell high," can easily turn into the opposite for those participants who have the problem of chronic lateness.