Polyphasic Sleep for Day Traders

Imagine being able to trade the forex market all day and not exhaust yourself. I just read this article about Polyphasic Sleep over at Steve Pavlina’s blog and I think it would be perfect for a forex day trader.

What is Polyphasic Sleep?

Polyphasic sleep is the practice of regulating the frequency and length of your sleep.

From Wikipedia

It is basically spreading out your sleep over the entire day so that you won’t have to sleep as much. Someone who only sleeps once a day would be considered a monophasic sleeper, sleeping twice a day would make them a biphasic sleeper. Polyphasic sleepers instead take multiple naps throughout the day, but overall they sleep less.

Polyphasic Sleep for Day Traders

I think this would be awesome for forex day traders! Or really anyone who just wanted more time in their day. The foreign exchange market is open literally 24 hours, and 6 days a week. You can trade from about 5pm EST on Sunday to 5pm EST on Friday. That’s because the currency exchanges are located around the world and each one is open during the day, their time. The only problem with the forex market being open so many hours is that even the most efficient trader will not be able to take advantage of all of the opportunities that are available while the market is open.

If you’re day trading the Euro, you will want to be awake during the hours that their exchange is open; same thing with the Yen and the Swiss Franc. I’m on Eastern Standard time and I would always miss the big moves at about 3 or 4 in the morning when I was asleep. (That’s when Tokyo and London trading intersects.) But if I implemented Polyphasic Sleeping, I wouldn’t have to miss any of the major moves while I’m normally asleep.

When Steve Pavlina wrote about Polyphasic Sleep, he decided to try it out. He changed his sleep patterns by first waking up earlier and going to bed later. Then he incorporated short naps of about 30 minutes into his day. He was able to get more done and he was more alert when he was awake. You can read about what happened at the end of his experiement by reading his Polyphasic Sleep log.

Do you think you could rearrange your sleep schedule and break up 5 hours of sleep into short naps throughout the day?

Would you do it if you knew that you could make more money by doing it?

I’m curious to hear your feedback on this one.

Photo Credits: http://womantribune.com/normal-schedules-mojo-follow

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