Part 3: Habits, Tracking, and the Rule of 10 — The Path to Sustainable Progress
This is a Guest Post by Dan Fitzpatrick of StockMarketMentor.com
The S.M.A.R.T.™ Trading Process gives you structure, but structure alone isn’t enough. Consistency is what transforms a set of rules into a genuine trading practice. Many traders know exactly what they should do — they can recite their strategy, describe the market environment, and outline where their stops should go — yet they struggle to execute any of it with regularity. They carry the knowledge, but not the habit. And if there’s one thing trading teaches relentlessly, it’s that knowledge without consistency is merely potential energy. Nothing moves until you do.
Consistency in trading rarely comes from raw willpower. It comes from developing routines so simple and ingrained that they no longer require negotiation with yourself. The most powerful idea you can adopt is the recognition that motion creates emotion. Whether in fitness or trading, action precedes motivation — not the other way around. Waiting to “feel ready” is a recipe for stagnation. What moves you forward is taking the smallest possible step, even on the days when your head isn’t in the game.
Anyone who’s ever fallen out of a workout routine knows this dynamic well. When you don’t feel like going to the gym, no amount of pep talk changes the underlying resistance. But if you force yourself simply to drive there, something shifts. Even if you just walk through the door, wave to the guy at the front counter, turn around, and leave, you feel a shift. At least you’ve done something! It hasn’t shrunk your waist size, but it’s a small step in the right direction.
Next time, you walk through the door and pick up a couple of light dumbbells. You do a set or two. Then you leave. It feels silly to have a 3-minute workout, but at least you did more than wave to the guy at the counter. Over time, the small microsteps have put you on a clearly defined path to fitness. That aversion to sweating has evaporated, and you’ve got new motivation to start taking better care of yourself.
What changed was not your emotional state — what changed was that you showed up, and the action itself created the momentum.
That’s why one of my favorite observations — and one of the most practical truths about performance — comes from Woody Allen. He once said:
“Eighty percent of success is just showing up.”
It’s deceptively simple, but profoundly accurate. The traders who succeed over time are not the ones who wait for perfect conditions, infinite motivation, or emotional clarity. They are the ones who show up for their process, day after day, even when they don’t feel like it. They look at their charts. They review their strategy. They log their trades. They do the next small thing they need to do. And those small, seemingly unremarkable actions accumulate into discipline, then competence, then mastery.
To make this manageable, I suggest following what I call the Rule of 10. Commit to ten consecutive trading days of structured behavior. Ten days is the sweet spot — long enough to reveal meaningful patterns, short enough that the mind doesn’t rebel against the commitment. For those ten days, track your trades each session. You don’t need to log every detail of every trade if that feels overwhelming.
Start with one trade in complete detail: why you took it, where your stop was, how you felt, how you exited, and what you learned. Also record simple daily context — how you slept, what your stress level was, whether you were rushed, distracted, or bored. Small details like these often reveal more truth about your trading than any indicator on your chart.
By the end of ten days, something remarkable happens. You begin to see your own patterns with real clarity. You may notice that you trade poorly when you’re tired, or that you get impulsive after your first losing trade of the day.
Perhaps you will find that you often trade out of sheer boredom — just looking for something to do. You might discover that you manage trades better when you have fewer positions open, or that you consistently hesitate right at your entry triggers because you are not confident in the signal. You wait for confirmation. And then you wait for confirmation…of the confirmation. And by the time you actually got into the trade, you had missed out on a great opportunity.
These aren’t character flaws — they’re behavioral patterns. And once you see them, you can work with them instead of fighting blind against them.
The tool you use for this doesn’t matter nearly as much as the act of tracking itself. I built TradeTrak™ to simplify and make the process more intuitive, but you can use a spreadsheet, a notebook, or even index cards if that’s what keeps the barrier to actually doing it low. Just do anything to get you past waving at the guy at the front counter of the gym.
The worst thing you can do is wait for the “perfect system” before you start. Perfectionism is procrastination wearing a mask. Start with whatever is easiest. Build the habit. Improve your method as the habit becomes stable.
Over time, the combination of structured processes like my S.M.A.R.T.™ approach and consistent measurement through trade tracking produces something most traders never experience: trust. You begin to trust your strategy because you can see its performance across dozens or hundreds of trades.
You begin to trust your discipline because you’ve repeatedly shown yourself that you can follow your own rules.
Most importantly, you begin to trust your decision-making because you understand the conditions that cause you to drift — and the conditions that allow you to perform at your best.
Successful trading is not built on inspiration or intensity. It’s built on the quiet power of showing up — for your process, for your review, for your own progress — even on the days when it feels uncomfortable. The market is unpredictable, but your routines don’t have to be. When you commit to steady, repeatable action, you build a foundation that can withstand setbacks, volatility, and the emotional turbulence that comes with this profession.
If you embrace this approach honestly, improvement becomes less of a goal and more of an inevitability. The combination of clear structure and repeated action will push you forward, whether you feel inspired or not.
Show up. Track what you do. Learn from what you see.
The rest will take care of itself.
You can follow Dan Fitzpatrick on X (Formerly Twitter), watch him on YouTube, or get his “Fitz In Five” Daily Trading Video at StockMarketMentor.com.
You can also read Part 1 here and Part 2 here of this three-part article series.