Trust the process. Review positions daily. Stick to your stops.

Every January, traders make the same resolutions. And by February, most of them are already broken.

Now, I don't mean to start the year on a negative note. (Happy New Year, by the way!) But I do want to be honest with you...

The most successful traders I know don't wait for New Year's Day to get in the right mindset. They do it every single day.

After 30 years in the markets, I've developed a daily process that helps me stay on top of this. And it’s transformed both my trading and my personal life.

Today, I want to share that process with you.

Why New Year’s Resolutions Don’t Work

When you take a step back, the concept of the “New Year” is pretty strange.

Sure, the first day of a new year is obviously important. But there’s nothing especially significant about January 1 from an astrological or scientific perspective.

Starting a new year on the winter solstice (the shortest day of the year) would make a lot more sense. The days start to get longer after that, which seems pretty special to me.

January 1 was established as the start of the year by Julius Caesar in 45 BCE because the first new moon after the winter solstice fell on that date.

The fact is that the day we celebrate the new year is a completely manufactured concept, yet it influences so much of our lives.

Now, you’ve probably heard me talk about year-end seasonality before. To recap, many professional money managers are compensated on their year-end performance.

This motivates them to act in particular ways late in the year, which creates statistically significant patterns we can trade to our advantage.

Then January rolls around, and it’s time to reflect and reset. We set New Year’s resolutions, make goals, and think about how we want to improve our lives and the lives of those around us.

It’s a noble idea, but the fact is the vast majority of us fail at accomplishing these resolutions.

I think that’s because just like there’s no logic behind the calendar date for the new year, taking just one day to examine our goals doesn’t make much sense either. It sets us up to fail.

It may sound strange, but trading is something that resets constantly. When it comes to actively managing your portfolio, every new day is the start of the new year.

In other words, you need to make good on your resolutions every single day to be successful.

The Daily Practice That Made Me a Better Trader

About a decade into my career as a professional investor, I began to develop a process where I would review each of my positions every day.

I’d look at them as if they were brand-new positions and ask myself whether I would still put them on today.

This was an extremely useful exercise that helped me become a more successful trader.

Over the next decade, I built on my process even more by automatically reexamining my positions through this new prism.

Instead of analyzing every single position myself, my proprietary software — the same one I use today — would tell me the conclusion.

This put my trading into overdrive!

A few weeks ago, I was telling our awesome publisher Matt Insley about my process and how I now use it in my personal life every day too.

After waking up in the morning and preparing for my day (hygiene and prayer), I sit down and close my eyes for 10 minutes to think about my top priorities.

In my head, I go through the list of both the short-term and long-term goals that I want to accomplish.

Then I prioritize what are the single steps I need to do today to move those goals forward. Finally, I visualize what would be my perfect day.

As I told Matt, right after I think about how I can improve the lives of my family, my number one goal is how I can make our readers — yes, you! — money.

I think about how I can help teach you sustainable trading processes and share actionable ideas.

This process isn’t something that I do just at the start of the week, the start of the month, or the start of the year — it’s EVERY SINGLE DAY.

It has been 30 years since I began my career as a professional trader. If I could think of one piece of advice that I would give folks starting out on their journey, it would be this…

Treat every day as if it were New Year’s Day, and come up with a process to get better every single day.

Again, this applies to both your personal life as well as your trading decisions.