📈 1:1 Review Drill: Are You Always on the Wrong Side?

Here is a simple way to sharpen your entries:
Split the range into halves and review your trades.

Ask yourself:

  • Are you consistently trading the wrong side of the range?
  • Are you using a stop that actually makes sense based on structure?
  • If you are closing early, do you have a habit to have a stop much wider than your target?

🛠️ Exercises to Practice

🔹 Exercise 1: Find a 1R Exit

  • Use the 50% mark of the range.
    Find a simple 1R (risk:reward = 1:1) target

Focus on small wins first — you’ll clean up a ton of mistakes just by making sure you’re taking trades that have a reasonable 1R built-in.


🔹 Exercise 2: Both Sides Can Exist Close Together

Sometimes, both bull and bear trades are valid.
But the Always-In direction shows which side has an easier path to profit.

Key: You still need to pick your battles — one side will often have a smoother path, even if both sides get setups.


🔹 Exercise 3: Mark Up Your Own Trades

Step 1:
Use the fib tool and mark the logical 50% zones.

Step 2:
Now replace the marks with your own real entries.
Did you buy too high? Sell too low? Rush?

See that last buy was a late and target too big.

Step 3:
Compare your trades to the logical structure.
Were you:

  • Always chasing?
  • Fading strength?
  • Ignoring the range boundaries?

⚡ Final Tips:

  • Focus on 1:1 targets for now — simple structure-based exits.
  • Spot your good trades AND your dumb ones — don’t get emotional, just notice them.
  • Rushing or forcing often shows up clearly when you see your own entries against the clean structure.
  • You can take this drill and look at 1/3s if this is too easy. Some of mine from last week:

Here are some of my dumb ones:

If you exit the short, why so quick to get back in?
  • Why am I in a rush to buy high?

🔥 Why This Works

Most traders don’t realize they’re fighting the market structure until they see it on their own charts.
Awareness first. Correction second.

Get reps in. Review. Adjust.

Let’s go. 🚀


3 responses to “📈 1:1 Review Drill: Are You Always on the Wrong Side?”

  1. Maurice Amaraggi Avatar
    Maurice Amaraggi

    Thank you. Excellent. I am a bit loss in the colour of the rectangles but I guess I have got it. Sometimes it takes time to understand we are in a trading range. Look at the two last two videos of Trader Tom. Even an excellent trader like him can fail to see the forming TR.

    Like

    1. Tim Fairweather Avatar

      Hi Maurice thanks for this – yes you are right I forgot to put the legend on there – green long, red short, blue exits

      Like

  2. practicallyshadowy5d12ff6566 Avatar
    practicallyshadowy5d12ff6566

    Hi Tim

    I would like to thank you for your newsletters and youtube videos. I especially found your last newsletter interesting and helpful. The drill where you encourage taking 1R trades made me reconsider my thinking. My aim is to always go for 2R, but I sometimes make the mistake of moving stop loss to BE after 1R is filled, only to see a pull back take out my stop and then the price races to fill the 2R target.

    The charts where you show your own trades, both good and bad, gave me insights to trades that I wouldn’t have thought of before, showed your line of thinking and also revealed that a pro sometimes make mistakes 🙂

    I´ve been day trading DAX and Nasdaq for 6 years and have for the last 4 months been consistently profitable. Inspired by Al Brooks I copy charts at the end of the day and mark up all the trades I see and the trades I take.

    Some of the challenges I´m facing currently are:
    1. I´m sometimes trigger shy when I see a setup. That happens when I have just experienced a loss that makes me doubt my analysis. Or it´s because I´m unsure where to put the stop to calculate if the risk is worth the potential reward. Or because I fell bad for going for a 1R when my aim is 2R.
    2. I exit to early of profitable trades
    3. I use a stop loss that is too tight

    I´ve inserted an example of my analysis of Nasdaq of the 23th of April and a chart with the two trades I took that day.

    [cid:50f3b65a-7ccb-4b2e-b31b-784a572c9e7f]
    [cid:96b677b6-5d8c-4e8e-9237-85fd891a0b87]
    Regards from
    Soren Petersen
    Aarhus, Denmark

    Like

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I’m Tim

Welcome to Zen Trading Tech.

I’m a Aussie day trader and I post trading tips, practice drills, and indicators that helped my trading get to a professional level.

Everything here is to help train the eyes and hands to trade better. If it helped me I’ll post it for others. Hope you enjoy!