Captain's quick trading rule summary

• Know the EW rules inside and out.  There is no better technical trading system which provides such definitive guidance in order to achieve the best odds of success.  If you know the count, you know what the best-odds next move is.
• Don't fall in love with your masterpiece wave count.  It's probably wrong.
• Counts that go very far out incur increasing risk out in time.  Sure it's fun to be able to see the chart jibe with your long term model but if you stick blindly to it and fail to analyze progress along it each day looking more for ways that it can go wrong than ways it will go right, the market will sense that you are not paying attention and take advantage of you.
• Counts that are very zoomed in better take the past history of the chart into account.  It does no good to start at the zoomed in scale.  Only zoom in after creating a high level count.
• Use other indicators to help you with the count.
• Use the fib calculator
• Use support and resistance lines
• Use gap fill analysis
• Use CWT
• Beware the 3 wave move to the level of the prior 4th.  If you see it, don't be afraid to bail out and then get back in after the situation reveals itself.  Be careful of any 3 wave move up following a reversal.  That bottom you thought was the bottom might only have been another step toward the bottom.
• Use EW-defined stops.  Random or gut feel stops are not stops loss orders, they are stop profit orders and they teach people to hate stops.  Fight the herding instinct within that doesn't want to use them for stupid reasons like it might cost you a $10 trading fee, etc.  But if you have to choose between losing a likely profit in order to avoid some scary looking count, err on the side of caution.  Another trolley car will be along in 10 minutes.
• Stop looking at your balances while you are trading.  Your account balance, the amount you might be green or red on any particular stock cannot help you predict the future!  In fact, all it does is make your emotions work against you.  I'm doing this for more than 25 years now and I still have to fight emotional impulses all the time.
• Buy the 3 wave dips, sell the 5 wave peaks.
• Make risk avoidance a priority.  That doesn't mean don't trade.  It means wait to enter until the amount you will lose will likely be as small as possible when you figure out you were wrong. 
• Don't fall in love with stock "ownership". You really own nothing.  The longer period of time you hold stocks, the higher the odds that you will get caught holding the worthless stocks when the music stops.  And yes, some day the music will stop.  Think about the 1 day 40% loss of LinkedIn and all the other stocks that suffer the same fate. 
• TURN OFF THE TV.  MSNBC or whatever they call themselves these days are full of good looking, very intelligent, very articulate and entertaining people who don't know jack shit about what really moves stocks.  And the news itself is meaningless.  One day, low oil prices are a boon to the economy because it's like a tax break for the consumer.  The very next day, low oil prices are killing us and when will it all stop and maybe the government should raise taxes on oil and use it to subsidize people who have lost their oil related job.  I laugh at how many times the same reason is used to explain opposite movements in the shares.
• Only the paranoid survive.  Cross check your assumptions using other similar tickers in an industry and also against indices that might be trading in synch or in opposition to your traded ticker.  Even the very best, most intuitive wave counters can only claim MAYBE a 70% aggregate rate of getting things right.  It might seem like more than that sometimes but then there are the dead patches where nothing is working and those bring the averages down to Earth.
• Pay attention when a ticker falls on good news after a long string of gains or rises on bad news after a long string of losses.  These often mark major turns.
• Beware the potential deep vee second following the first wave in the new direction after a reversal.
• Remember that real stuff of value will never go worthless and will always be cyclical in a fake money environment.  The cyclicality is associated with the rise and fall of debt, not with the true economic value of  copper or steel or oil going in and out of style; fake money distorts the marketplace making actual price discovery (i.e. the true economic value of an asset) very difficult.  Likewise remember that stuff with no real economic value will always go worthless in the fullness of time.  Some day, Facebook will go worthless.  It sounds funny to say but FB is a fad and it really has low idea barriers to entry.  Likewise, pet rocks and beenie babies were fads and manias.

This list is not meant to be exhaustive.  It is not even meant for you.  I'm putting it here so I can create a shortcut to it and read it every other week just to make sure my frail human mind is continually cycling through each of these points as I think about trading strategies.