Years ago, a seminal book on software development was published. It's called Design Patterns. It documented the recurring challenges in software development and elegant design solutions. I was the first to buy and read the book. I felt the authors made great sense. In other words, I felt the patterns were obvious.

However, more than a year later, one day, I suddenly realized that I've never used a single solution in my programming job, even though I pride myself as one of the better developers who take design seriously.

The obvious is in fact not so obvious. What's obvious to our conscious is not so obvious to our subconscious.

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So I read the Design Patterns book one more time. Then I thought about each of them a lot more. And I found ways to improve my work using design patterns. One piece of code had been giving me problems all the time despite inordinate amount of time spent on it. I redesigned it using a pattern. From then on, I never had an issue with it.

Slowly the patterns went into my subconscious and into my blood. And I'd use them everywhere without any thought.

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Same goes with trading setups. Every one of them may appear to make sense, yet we still go through each trading day missing the majority of them.

We need to read them 10 times and think about them 100 times. We need to go through each trading day looking for them. And we need to review every setup we missed and figure out ways to profit from them next time around. Then the setups would sink into our subconscious, dissolve into our blood, and we would enter the trades without knowing the setups.