Prior to when I completed the school of pipsology, I thought I had it all planned out.
My plan was, pick two pairs and stick with them, develop a trading plan and strategy, start testing my strategy with a demo account, create a journaling thread here on babypips forum, get a satisfactory success rate, then move on to a live account.
Guess what!
I’m yet to reach a conclusion on the pairs to trade, let alone developing a trading plan.
But no, I’ve not been relaxing, on the contrary, I’ve been taking a dive into deeper concepts of trading as well as doing some analysis with just trend lines, support and resistance levels, and psychological key levels, and I open positions sometimes on mt5 or mt4, while sometimes, I just use the position tool alone on trading view.
I haven’t been taking notes because I started placing those trade without actually planning to, I only wanted to get use to the market behavior, charting platforms, mt4, and mt5, you know just to familiarise myself with these things, and then I get a bit excited, I go on to analyse the market condition, then I get a nudge to open a position, that’s it.
From those impromptu trades, I happen not to have done bad at all, I had more wins than losses. I guess I’m a natural, yeah! 
Anyways, I might not have carried on with my plan to have already started testing out my strategy and perhaps having this topic as my trading journal instead, but I’m very glad my path drifted into studying more, because that has opened my eyes and broadened my understanding of the market and trading in general.
At least, I better understand market structure, things like BOS and CHoCH and how they play a major role in market structure. I now understand liquity and how institutional traders and the big banks use it to set traps for retail traders (called inducement zones), which is what we’d usually see as the fakeouts.
Basically, I’ve been studying the smart money concept (SMC) this past month, and it has been amazing all I’ve learnt and there’s still lot more to learn.
At first I thought to myself, “I’m wasting time, this isn’t the plan. I should be developing my trading plan.” But I had to convince myself that it’s not about how fast it takes me to start trading live accounts, but how grounded I should be, before trading live accounts.
“Knowledge first, profit later.”
What do you think? Do you believe I should have just pushed on with my initial plan regardless? Or what would you have done or done differently?
