The goal for any trader is to scale up their business, but to do this you must

trade like you have size now. The trouble is, most traders who trade single or a handful of contracts, trade

like they’re 1-lot traders.

The route to making a lot of money for any trader is to perform on small size and then scale up the number of contracts in order to multiply future earnings. A trader who can average a modest 2 points per day on

the ES trading a 1-lot is not going to become rich.

But increase their lot size by a factor of 10 or 100 and the number of ticks they can theoretically pull from the market

is going to increase dramatically. 2 points on a 1-lot changes to 200 points

trading 100-lot clips.

However, the trouble is that a trader needs to change their mindset before they start increasing their lot size and

this can be an issue if you’re not careful.Take the example of the ES.....

your average newbie trader might look at trading a 1 or 2 lot clip size at best. This is a

pretty sensible tactic for the reason that even if you have a large account to begin

with, your chances of making money consistently straight away are pretty slim. So the aim of the game is to keep the cost

of learning to a minimum.

The trouble is that in terms of money, the swings are going to be relatively small and

this can lead to the issue of not placing enough importance on a trade of small size.You might be thinking that it’s not a

problem thinking like a 1-lot trader if that’s what you are – but I can assure you it is.

If you can’t approach the market with the same degree of importance when trading a 1-lot vs. 100-lot clips, then you’re probably not following your

plan properly – and not following your plan is likely to mean not making money consistently which in turn

means not trading bigger size.

As you’re developing as a trader on small size, you’re learning all the time and it’s

how you react to situations that will start to create strong habits that will act as the bedrock of your trading. If you don’t treat

your trading as seriously as you should, then you are likely to be forming extremely

bad habits such as not taking stops or trading impulsively.

Perhaps even more important however, is the fact that the longer you take to begin to trade as you would if you were trading a much

larger clip size, the more of your time you will have lost.

This may seem like a trivial point but when you consider that the process of

learning how to trade happens over the course of many sessions, it’s no

surprise to see that there are traders who take years to begin to get a hold

of consistency.

Your time is precious and you will never get back what has already

passed.So how do traders who have earned the right to trade larger size act

differently?

There are clearly a variety of aspects to that question, but in terms of

trading effectively enough to warrant a large clip size, 3 points stand out for

me

They act decisively when the time is right and make sure that they do not

miss their setups.

They do not take rash or impulsive trades, because it always matters

when a lot of money is on the line.

They accept the risk of trading means that they will have bad trades, days or

even weeks – so they stick to their stops and daily loss limits no matter

what.

But to bring these ideas to life and have them really mean something, there’s one change that you should

make today: Change the way you think in terms P/L from $ or ticks to ticks/lot

for each trade.

So this means that if you make 3 points in the ES trading a 1-lot, you’ve

performed better than if you make 100 points trading 100-lots – so in the first

case you made 3 points per lot or contract and in the second case you

made 1 point/lot.

Normalizing p/l for size in this way allows you to appropriately gauge day-

to-day performance irrespective of actual $ gain or loss.

Assess performance by looking only at $ gain/loss could artificially boost confidence when taking very few

prices on larger size than normal and also inhibit a trader’s desire to press

forward in good trading conditions as the money made can seem like a

decent amount.

Of course, watching $ P/L can also evoke strong the strong emotions of

fear and greed too.If you think big and trade like you have size now – i.e. you make sure you take your trades when they present themselves, you never

trade impulsively and you always respect your pre-planned risk limits

– you’ll have every chance of using clip size to leverage your profits as shown in the next image. Changing the way

you measure performance to tally the number of prices you make or lose

irrespective of clip size,

can help you to start to treat your trading with the respect that trading

large size demands.