It happens to the best of us.  At some point in your career you will almost certainly find yourself pouring over candidates for your trading plan that do not meet your entry criteria, and rather than planning a day at the beach, you will decide to have â�,��"another look.â�,�  The result will almost certainly be bad.  By bad, I am referring to both the psychological and financial implications of not following your own rules.  

When a setup falls outside your normal criteria, the best thing you can do is move on. Psychologically, even a gain on such a setup can be damaging, as you have been rewarded for straying from your discipline.  The next time you gamble, you may not be so lucky.  

If the non-criterion trade moves against you, the financial blow is merely the first in a series of negative outcomes.  Now there is both a monetary loss and an inability to â�,��"follow my own disciplineâ�,� to deal with.

The problem as I see it is that many traders are looking for the â�,��"action,â�,� rather than the reliability of the potential entry.  Things are fine as long as the market hands over plenty of criterion relevant pattern setups.  But when things dry up for a few sessions, many traders are too eager to loosen up their rules in order to generate more trading opportunities. The outcome of all this is an undisciplined trader and a declining equity curve.

My best advice is, once again, Plan the Tradeâ�,�¦Trade the Plan.  Know your rules and stick to them.  Understand that trading is not a 9-5 job at the office.   You will not get paid just for showing up.  And an extraordinary effort to â�,��"reinterpret and capitalize on the situationâ�,� can just as often lose you a weekâ�,��"�s pay as earn it for you.  Profits and losses from unplanned trades are at best ambiguous indicators of the future.  A carefully executed plan leaves no question about what is happening and what should happen next.

Adrian Manz is the author of Around The Horn: A Trader's Guide To Consistently Scoring In The Markets and is cofounder of TraderInsight.com. Email him at adrian@traderinsight.com.