Taking two trips within two weeks is not my typical schedule — but it’s what I’m living right now, and honestly, I’m loving it!
Ever since I can remember, though, preparing to travel has felt daunting to me. So over time, I came up with systems and little solutions to make it less stressful. And I’m sharing this progression, because it relates directly to your trading — especially if you’re looking to revamp and optimize as we head into 2026.
Sometime in my twenties, I started using Excel spreadsheets to make what I call packing lists. I didn’t buy a template. Nobody told me to do this. I just built a system, and it was completely game-changing. Especially as a girly girl, it meant I knew I had all my lotions and potions, plus outfit combinations that actually made sense for what I was doing — like an Indian wedding versus a business conference. That alone reduced a ton of packing stress.
Then I started using colored packing cubes. I got that tip from one of my sisters, who’s an accountant and travels a lot for audit work. She explained how the cubes make everything live in a category and become so much easier to find in hotel dresser drawers. I loved it immediately.
In 2025, though, I took it a step further.
I had a big, fancy Indian wedding to attend in California, and I was traveling alone, joining my mom and brother there. I didn’t want to wheel more than two pieces of luggage, so I invested in compression packing cubes. These are next-level. They squeeze the extra air out of clothes — especially fluffy skirts or puffy jackets — and suddenly you can fit so much more into one suitcase without paying for extra luggage.
And this is where it ties directly to your trading.
Whether you’ve built a formal plan — like the way I teach inside the First 40 Trading Club — or you’re working off scratchy notes by your desk, a digital file, or just what’s layered on your charts… whether you’ve defined it or not, you do have a trading approach.
What I want to challenge you to do is look at that approach and ask: What can I compress out of it?
Here are a few ways to get started.
Declutter your Charts
Go back to your charts of whatever you trade — the ones that are probably annotated — and ask yourself if there’s anything on there that you either never used in 2025, or that simply didn’t benefit you.
An indicator.
A drawing tool.
Something you thought you should use but never really leaned on.
If it didn’t serve you, remove it.
This is you zipping the packing cube and squeezing the extra air out. Less clutter. More usable and easy to see data on your charts.
Streamline Your Setups
Another way to do this — especially if you have a trading plan in motion — is to look at the setups you’ve been taking.
Are some of them not serving you as well as others?
There is no law that says you need 58 different setups. You can have two or three. You can even have just one.
So again, take that zipper and compress the extra air out of your trading plan by deleting — yes, removing— setups that have not served you for at least one year.
And I say one year very intentionally.
Not just because it’s January — which, by the way, is named for Janus, the Roman god of new beginnings, as I recently learned — but because markets tend to follow a 12-month behavioral cycle. If a setup hasn’t worked for you in the past twelve months, there’s a very strong chance it’s not going to suddenly start working well in the future.
And remember: you can always remove now and add back later.
But if you don’t clean out your trading plan on a rotational, systematic basis, you’re just making it harder for yourself to get to what you need. Like belongings thrown into a suitcase without order.
Trading, like travel, is stressful enough.
We want to optimize wherever we can!
~ Hima
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