Missed opportunities?

It's annoying in some ways, but despite some of the trading opportunities that have popped up over the past few days, I have not traded. This is mainly because the best opportunities occur when I am at work and I can only keep half an eye on the market. Nevertheless, I do at times spot something while at work and will figure out a set-up and place that trade. Today was an example of that.

When I think about it I really do prefer to miss some of those opportunities, rather than dive in with a bad set-up and lose money. My main thing at the moment is to get better at trading well; although I obviously want to make profit, it is more important to me that I trade well. Trading well and making profit are not necessarily the same thing in my mind: I can trade well and lose money, and I can equally make money but not trade well.

'Trading well' for me means some of the following:

* I have assessed the trade set-up to make sure that the reward to risk ratio is in my favour

* I am risking a percentage of capital that is in-line with what I believe the probability of being right will be. I guess this is really down to a gut feeling, with <1% risk of capital being an experimental trade and at the other end of the scale a maximum of 5% risk of capital being quite confident in the set-up.

* Following my entry and exit rules. This can can often mean getting out slightly less than the initial profit target. I will often get out before a profit target is hit if I feel that the market has displayed the action that I thought it would but then reversed a few pips short of my designated profit target. I generally get a sense of when this is because the price will probably move more erratically when it's 'bouncing' away from the target area. I guess this is where it comes down to being a art rather than a science, especially with FOREX. I see no point in being 'pip perfect' in FOREX, especially as the market is not centralised and various data providers will all have different price information anyway; if the market has shown what I feel are it's 'intentions', I will get out of the market. I've focused on the profit side of things there, but that goes equally for losses: if I feel that the dynamic of the market has changed so that my initial stoploss no longer makes sense then I see no shame in admitting to myself that I was wrong and removing myself from the market in order to preserve capital.