I spent the morning looking through my trading history for the past year; It was glaringly obvious that I traded too much. As this is one of the most abused platitudes in trading circles, I will expound upon my particular offense.

Obviously, you cannot say from frequency of trade alone that you are “over-trading”. What is too much for one person or team is not necessarily the same for another. People have different capabilities. However, you can state unequivocally, that if action is taken on nearly every asset reviewed, you are a promiscuous trader. The reptilian part of my brain seems to chase every spark.

The problem with promiscuous trading is not the quantity of trades, but the resulting quality of the aggregate. I noticed that occasionally, I came across trades that seemed too good to be true — but were proved correct. You can argue that I am revising my history, but I should point out that I keep notebooks of all my trades and, looking back at them, the major successes almost always had something along the lines of “VERY GOOD PLAY” scribbled at the conclusion of my analysis. However, these trades make up the minority of my history. The majority of my fills were stocks I looked at, chose a direction, and placed my order. This is promiscuous trading — taking any action because it is available.

At this point in my education, I am not convinced that I have the emotional iron to prevent promiscuity without a set of established rules. Therefore, I am setting the following hard rule: At most I can make one trade every two weeks. Obviously the potential for promiscuous trading still exists (e.g. if I only look at my options once every two weeks) but at least it is somewhat mitigated by my unrelenting interest in the market. I will still take a side on every asset I review, but only send orders on those I feel very strongly about. I will be half paper-trading (for promiscuity’s sake) and half real-trading (for my reptilian brain’s sake).