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Lee Sandford, a seasoned trader with over 20 years of experience, shares insights into his journey from professional football to full-time trading. With a passion for technical analysis and a disciplined approach to trading, Lee has built a reputation as a mentor, helping traders find their unique paths. Through his Trading College in London, he offers guidance to those looking to refine their trading skills and build sustainable strategies.
In this blog post, readers will learn about Lee’s practical trading approach, focusing on momentum trading in the FX market. Lee emphasizes the importance of personalized strategies, mindset, and risk management, offering a refreshing perspective on sticking to one trading style. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced trader, his insights into building self-awareness and the power of a solid routine will help you sharpen your trading edge.
Lee Sandford Playbook & Strategy: How He Actually Trades
Trading with Momentum
Momentum trading is the backbone of Lee Sandford’s strategy. He focuses on catching the market’s strongest moves in the most optimal directions. Lee uses a mix of technical analysis tools, combined with his own instinct and market feel, to enter and exit positions.
Key Momentum Trading Rules
- Look for Strong Trends: Lee searches for clear momentum in the market. A strong uptrend or downtrend is key—he looks for moves where the price is clearly moving in one direction.
- Wait for Pullbacks: Instead of jumping in at the top of a move, Lee prefers to buy on pullbacks in an uptrend or sell on pullbacks in a downtrend. This strategy allows him to enter at more favorable prices.
- Use Multiple Timeframes: Lee uses a combination of longer-term charts (4-hour or daily) to gauge the overall trend and shorter-term charts (5-minute) to pinpoint precise entry points.
- Watch for Divergences: Divergences between price and momentum indicators often signal a potential reversal. Lee looks for these clues before deciding on trade entries.
By combining these rules, Lee ensures that his trades have strong momentum behind them, allowing him to ride the bigger moves in the market.
Risk Management – Protecting Your Capital
Risk management is one of Lee’s core principles. He emphasizes that protecting your capital is just as important as making profitable trades. Without solid risk management, no strategy will work in the long run.
Risk Management Rules
- Use Stop-Loss Orders: Always set a stop-loss order to limit potential losses. Lee never lets a losing trade run too far without cutting it off.
- Limit Risk to a Small Percentage: Lee recommends risking no more than 1-2% of your trading account per trade. This ensures that a few losing trades won’t significantly impact your overall capital.
- Stick to Position Sizing: Keep your position sizes consistent, adjusting them based on your current risk tolerance and account size. Lee emphasizes never over-leveraging in the heat of the moment.
- Protect Profits Early: Once a trade moves in your favor, Lee advises locking in profits early. He does this by adjusting stop-loss orders to break even as soon as possible, reducing the risk of losing a profitable trade.
These rules help ensure that even when a trade doesn’t go as planned, it won’t hurt your trading account significantly, keeping you in the game for the long term.
The Power of Journaling and Self-Awareness
Lee is a big advocate of journaling, which he believes helps traders understand their strengths, weaknesses, and behaviors in the market. He stresses that trading is as much about psychology as it is about technical skills.
Journaling and Self-Awareness Tips
- Track Every Trade: Lee recommends keeping a trading journal where you document every single trade, including the setup, entry point, exit point, and any emotional thoughts during the trade.
- Review Your Journal Regularly: Going back through your journal helps identify patterns in your trading behavior. This could include when you tend to take high-risk trades or when you make emotional decisions.
- Monitor Your Mindset: Before you start trading each day, assess how you feel—are you well-rested, focused, and in the right mindset? Lee suggests checking in with yourself, as emotions can significantly affect your trading decisions.
- Evaluate What Works: After reviewing your trades, focus on what strategies or setups are working best for you. By consistently evaluating your performance, you can improve and fine-tune your approach over time.
Journaling allows Lee to refine his strategy and keep his trading psychology in check, ultimately leading to more disciplined and thoughtful decision-making.
Building Your Own Trading System
Lee is a strong believer in creating a personalized trading system that fits your personality and risk tolerance. He warns against blindly copying someone else’s strategy, as each trader’s temperament and preferences will differ.
Building Your Personalized Strategy
- Backtest Your System: Before risking real money, test your strategy in historical data to ensure it has the potential to be profitable.
- Fit the System to Your Personality: Think about what type of trader you are. Do you prefer quick, high-frequency trades, or do you lean toward longer-term strategies? Your trading system should reflect your personality, making it easier to stick with it.
- Don’t Overcomplicate: Lee advises keeping your strategy simple. If it’s too complex, it will be harder to follow consistently, leading to errors and frustration.
- Commit to the System: Once you’ve developed a strategy that fits you, stick to it. Lee’s key point is that most traders fail because they jump from strategy to strategy without giving one method enough time to prove itself.
Creating your own system, based on your strengths and preferences, allows you to be more consistent in your trading decisions and helps avoid unnecessary confusion.
The Role of Mental Toughness
Lee emphasizes the mental side of trading, arguing that discipline and emotional control are as important as technical skills. In his view, without mental toughness, even the best strategy will fail.
Mental Toughness Practices
- Stay Focused and Patient: Lee warns against chasing trades just to make something happen. He stresses that sometimes the best move is to wait for the right setup and not force trades.
- Accept Losses: Not every trade will be a winner, and Lee advocates for accepting losses as part of the game. It’s how you manage losses, not avoid them, that will determine long-term success.
- Maintain Consistency: Lee’s advice is to focus on consistent behavior rather than seeking perfect outcomes. The key to success is showing up every day, following your system, and making small, steady gains over time.
- Practice Self-Control: When emotions run high, it’s easy to make impulsive decisions. Lee recommends taking breaks when needed and only trading when you feel mentally sharp.
By focusing on mental toughness, Lee ensures that he remains calm, rational, and consistent in his decision-making, even when things don’t go as planned.
Trading Routine – Start Your Day the Right Way
Lee has a structured daily routine that helps him maintain consistency in his trading. His approach includes careful preparation and setting clear objectives for each trading session.
Lee’s Trading Routine
- Start Early: Lee wakes up early to prepare mentally for the trading day. This includes reviewing the markets and setting objectives for the day.
- Set Clear Goals for the Day: Before each trading session, Lee sets specific, measurable goals for what he wants to achieve. This helps keep his focus sharp.
- Follow a Pre-Trading Checklist: Lee has a checklist that he follows each morning, ensuring that all his necessary tasks are completed before he begins trading.
- Review Performance at the End of the Day: After trading, Lee evaluates how he performed based on his goals and trading rules. This regular review helps him stay on track and adjust his approach when needed.
Mastering Momentum: How to Ride the Market’s Strongest Moves
Lee Sandford’s approach to trading is heavily centered around momentum. As a momentum trader, Lee focuses on identifying and capitalizing on market moves that are already in full swing. He believes that the most profitable trades come when the market is trending strongly in one direction, allowing traders to align with the prevailing momentum rather than predicting reversals or attempting to catch the very top or bottom of a move.
To implement his momentum strategy, Lee looks for clear, identifiable trends in the market and waits for pullbacks to enter at better prices. He combines multiple timeframes to analyze the market from both a broad and detailed perspective. For example, he uses longer timeframes like the 4-hour or daily charts to get a sense of the overall trend and then drills down to the 5-minute chart to find precise entry points. This method helps Lee stay in sync with the market, maximizing the potential of each move while minimizing risk.
Risk Management Done Right: Protecting Your Capital with Precision
For Lee Sandford, risk management is a cornerstone of his trading philosophy. He emphasizes that without proper risk control, even the best strategies can quickly lead to devastating losses. Lee’s approach revolves around protecting his trading capital by strictly managing the amount of money he’s willing to lose on any given trade. His rule is simple—never risk more than 1-2% of the trading account on a single position.
To manage risk effectively, Lee always uses stop-loss orders to limit his downside. He’s also keen on adjusting his position size based on the current risk level, ensuring that each trade adheres to his predetermined risk guidelines. Lee’s focus on consistency and discipline in his risk management ensures that even when he encounters losing trades, they won’t significantly impact his overall capital. This approach helps him stay in the game long enough to profit from the winning trades, ultimately making risk management just as important as finding good trade setups.
Building Your Own Trading System: Create a Strategy That Fits You
Lee Sandford stresses the importance of developing a personalized trading system that fits both your personality and risk tolerance. He believes that while copying another trader’s strategy might seem tempting, it rarely leads to lasting success. Instead, Lee encourages traders to create a system that aligns with their individual preferences, trading style, and market approach. This ensures they can follow their strategy with consistency, avoiding the temptation to jump from one method to another.
Lee’s advice is to start with backtesting—testing your strategy on past data to see how it performs before risking real money. Once a strategy is found that works, the key is sticking to it and not getting sidetracked by the endless search for the next big thing. Lee’s approach centers on building confidence in a system through time and practice. By sticking to one proven method, traders can fine-tune their strategy and ultimately make it their own, adapting it over time as they gain experience and insight.
Trading Psychology: How to Manage Emotions and Stick to the Plan
Lee Sandford believes that trading is as much about mastering your mindset as it is about mastering technical skills. In fact, he argues that one of the biggest barriers to success for most traders is their inability to manage emotions, especially during periods of volatility or when things aren’t going as planned. Lee emphasizes the importance of self-awareness—recognizing how you feel before and during your trading day. Are you well-rested? Are you frustrated by previous losses? These factors can heavily influence decision-making, and Lee advises traders to check in with themselves regularly to ensure they’re in the right mental state.
For Lee, the key to overcoming emotional hurdles is developing discipline and sticking to a structured trading plan. He recommends having a clear objective for each trading day, setting out exactly what you want to achieve and sticking to it no matter what. When emotions start to run high, Lee suggests taking a step back and reviewing the trade objectively—making sure it fits within your pre-defined strategy. This discipline helps prevent impulsive decisions and allows traders to maintain consistency over time, which is essential for long-term success in the markets.
Consistency is Key: Developing a Routine for Profitable Trading
Lee Sandford stresses that consistency is the ultimate differentiator between successful and unsuccessful traders. He believes that having a well-established routine is essential to maintaining focus and discipline in the market. By starting each day with a clear plan, traders can avoid the trap of emotional, reactive trading. Lee’s routine includes preparing mentally, setting clear goals, and reviewing market conditions before executing any trades. This structured approach ensures that he approaches each trading day with clarity and purpose, minimizing the chance of being distracted by market noise.
Lee also believes that consistency in execution leads to better results over time. He advises traders to stick to a single, proven strategy and execute it with precision every day. This means not only following the strategy but also adhering to risk management rules and emotional control. The more consistently a trader follows their plan, the better their chances of long-term profitability. By committing to a routine and sticking to it, Lee ensures that his trading becomes a sustainable, long-term career, rather than a series of impulsive, unpredictable moves.
Lee Sandford’s trading philosophy centers on a few core principles that can greatly improve a trader’s chances of long-term success. From his focus on momentum trading and using technical analysis to riding the market’s strongest moves, to his disciplined approach to risk management, Lee emphasizes the importance of protecting your capital while still being able to capture profits. His commitment to developing a personalized trading system is another key takeaway—he believes that traders should create a strategy that aligns with their own personality and risk tolerance, rather than blindly copying someone else’s approach.
Furthermore, Lee places significant emphasis on the mental and emotional aspects of trading. His advice on trading psychology, particularly around self-awareness and emotional control, underlines the idea that the best strategies are useless if a trader cannot manage their mindset. Consistency is another cornerstone of Lee’s approach—he stresses the value of sticking to a routine, following a proven system, and reviewing your performance regularly to improve. Ultimately, Lee’s lessons show that trading is not just about strategy and technique, but also about discipline, self-awareness, and building a structured approach to navigate the markets successfully.
