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Mindset & psychologyDiscipline6 min readBeginner friendly

A Daily Profit Target Makes You Take Worse Trades

A Daily Profit Target Makes You Take Worse Trades — Investing 101 guide cover

Key takeaway

  • A daily target is a promise you made on the market's behalf. When it comes due, the only thing you control is taking another trade — so that is what you do.
  • Opportunity is lumpy and your target is flat. "Some days there are zero good setups, and that's perfectly fine."
  • Replace the number with a rule you can keep on a dead day: trade only your listed setups, or don't trade.

Learning pathExecuting the plan when it hurtsStep 5 of 14

Read before this:Watching Every Tick Is Not Analysis

Based on a clip by Jdun Trades (@jduntrades) — YouTube

Watch the original

How a number turns into a bad trade

By mid-afternoon the target is not a goal any more. It is a gap, and gaps want filling.

The source video is blunt about where this leads: setting $500, $1,000 or $2,000 a day "forced me to take trades even when they weren't there".

A progress bar short of a daily targetA bar filled about a third of the way to a marked target, with the remaining gap pointing down at a box representing the trade taken to close it.A $500-a-day target, seen at 2pm+$180$500$320 still to gowhatever closes the gapThe number picks the trade, not the chart
You cannot make the market produce a setup. You can always produce a trade. When the two are confused, the number wins.

Notice the trade you take at that moment is chosen by arithmetic, not by your rules. It is usually bigger than normal too, because a small position cannot close a $320 gap.

Opportunity does not arrive on a schedule

A daily target assumes one good trade a day. Markets do not deliver in equal instalments.

Ten days of setups, most of them emptyA bar for each of ten days showing how many good setups appeared. Six days have none, and one day has three. A dashed line marks the one-a-day level a daily target assumes.Good setups per day, over ten days1Six of these ten days had nothing worth taking
A flat daily target is only achievable on the days that already gave you something. On the other six it can only be met by lowering your standards.

The video's own record makes the point at a larger scale: months with barely a profitable trade, followed by a month over $100,000 — with the biggest day arriving straight after a run of losses.

Pick a bigger unit of measurement

The day is the noisiest window you could possibly judge yourself in.

One rising equity curve with a single day boxed outA curve rising from left to right with several dips. A dashed box marks one short falling stretch of it.one dayone quarterSame account — the window decides what you feel
The same account, read two ways. One of these views tells you something about your system; the other tells you about Tuesday.

This is not motivational framing. It is the same argument as thinking in probabilities: an edge shows up over a sample, and a day is not a sample.

Being picky is the cheapest edge available

Fewer names, fewer trades, more knowledge of each. That is the whole upgrade.

The video describes going from a hundred watched tickers to three to five, and from taking everything to requiring two confirmations before a trade exists at all.

A hundred small dots beside four large onesOn the left, a ten by ten grid of small grey dots. On the right, four large cyan circles. An arrow points from the grid to the circles.100 tickers4 tickersa glance eachwatched every day
A hundred names you glance at once teach you nothing. Four you watch every day start to have recognisable behaviour.

A daily target is directly hostile to this, because pickiness costs you trades and the target counts trades as the way to get paid.

Missing a trade is free; chasing it is not

The loss from a missed setup is zero. The loss from chasing it is a real number.

One rising move with two entry points markedA price line rising to the right. One dot marks the planned entry near the stop level; a second dot marks a much later entry, far above the same stop.the same stopyour entry1Rwhere you chased5RSkipping it costs nothing. Chasing it costs five times as much.
The idea has not changed and the invalidation level has not moved — but entering late means paying five times as much to find out you were wrong.

The video's framing is worth keeping: trades are buses. The discipline is not in catching every one, it is in not sprinting after the one that has left.

What to keep from the video, and what to leave

Most of it generalises. One part is a personal routine wearing the costume of a rule.

  • Keep: no daily target, expect nothing from any single trade, judge over months.
  • Keep: trade only when you are in a fit state to follow your rules — and size down or sit out when you are not.
  • Keep: write the reason for the trade down. A journal is how you find out which rule you actually broke.
  • Leave: the 5:30am starts and the 16-to-20-hour fasts. That is one person's routine, presented as a cause of the results.

Try this week

  • Delete any daily or weekly dollar goal from your plan and your screen.
  • Write one process goal you can complete on a day with zero trades.
  • Cut your watchlist to five names for two weeks and log what each one does around the open.
  • Count, over your last twenty trades, how many were taken in the last hour of a red day.

Common questions

How much should a beginner aim to make per day trading?

Nothing. A daily figure is unreachable on the days the market offers no setups, so the only way to hit it on those days is to take trades you would otherwise reject. Judge yourself on rule-following per trade and on results over months.

Why do I keep overtrading?

Usually because something in your setup measures activity rather than quality — a daily target, a belief that a real trader trades every day, or a screen you sit in front of for eight hours. Remove the thing being measured and the behaviour usually goes with it.

Is it bad to have goals in trading?

Goals about your own behaviour are fine and useful: follow the plan, log every trade, size correctly, review weekly. Goals about outcomes you do not control — a dollar amount by Friday — convert directly into forced trades.

How many trades a day should I take?

However many of your listed setups appear, which is often zero. If your answer is a fixed number, that number will be met on days when nothing qualified.

What should I do after missing a good trade?

Nothing, deliberately. Log that you saw it and why you missed it. Re-entering after the move has run means a worse price against the same invalidation level, which is a strictly worse version of a trade you already decided not to take.

Reading about a system is not having one.

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Next in this path

Step 5 of 14 — Executing the plan when it hurts
Stop the Trader Spiral Before It Starts — Goals, Stops and a Daily BrakeThe same pressure in a short trader story: a daily brake is what prevents one loss or one winning streak from deciding the next trade.Risk & trading system

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Why Daily Profit Targets Backfire: Trading Psychology, Overtrading and How Much to Expect a Day | Plutux