Determine what time frame you’re trading on:

Many traders get in the market without thinking when they would like to get out, after all the goal is to make money. This is true but when trading, one must extrapolate in his mind’s eye the movement that one expects to happen. Within this extrapolation, resides a price evolution during a certain period of time. Attached to this is the idea of exit price. The importance of this is to mentally put your trade in perspective and although it is clearly impossible to know exactly when you will exit the market, it is important to define from the outset if you’ll be ’scalping’ (trying to get a few points off the market) trading intra-day, or going longer term. This will also determine what chart period you’re looking at. If you trade many times a day, there’s no point basing your technical analysis on a daily graph, you’ll probably want to analyse 30 minute or hour graphs. Additionally it is important to know the different time periods when various financial centers enter and exit the market as this creates more or less volatility and liquidity and can influence market movements.