One of our funded traders asked me during a coaching call: "What should my daily P&L target be?"
My answer surprised them: "That shouldn't be your primary goal at all."
The Problem With Dollar Targets
Here's what happens when your daily goal is a dollar amount — say, $500 per day:
You're at $400 after two trades. One more good trade and you hit your target. So you start forcing entries. You take setups you wouldn't normally take because you're $100 away from your goal. You end up giving back the $400 and finishing red.
I see this constantly. One of our funded traders described it perfectly: they'd be green on the first couple of trades, then want more, and end up losing control and giving everything back.
A P&L target turns into a P&L addiction. It shifts your focus from process to outcome — and that shift is what creates the emotional spiral.
Goals That Actually Work
Instead of dollar targets, here's what I coach funded traders to set as daily goals:
1. Process Goals
- "I will take no more than 3 trades today"
- "I will wait for my checklist conditions before entering"
- "I will take a screenshot of every trade"
2. Behavioral Goals
- "I will not trade in the first 5 minutes after open"
- "I will step away from my screen if I take 2 consecutive losses"
- "I will eat breakfast before the session starts"
3. Risk Goals
- "My max loss per trade is $300"
- "My max daily loss is $600"
- "If I hit max loss, I'm done for the day — no exceptions"
Notice what these all have in common? You have 100% control over all of them. You can't control whether the market gives you a winning trade. But you can absolutely control whether you follow your rules.
The Daily Loss Limit Is Non-Negotiable
Of all the daily goals I set with funded traders, this one is the most important: your daily loss limit.
I explained to one of our funded traders: "You've got to know the number where you walk away. Once you hit it, you're done. The market will be there tomorrow."
Every trader has a threshold where their decision-making breaks down. For some it's a dollar amount. For others it's a number of consecutive losses. The point of the daily loss limit is to get you out of the chair before you reach that breaking point.
I've seen funded traders who knew they should stop but didn't — and turned a manageable $300 loss into a $1,500 disaster. The daily loss limit exists to protect you from yourself.
Redefining a "Good Day"
Here's how I want you to think about daily goals:
A good day is any day where you followed your rules completely. Even if you lost money.
If you took three trades, all within your system, all with proper risk management, and all three lost — that's a good day. You executed your process. The losses are just variance. They'll come back.
If you made $1,000 but broke three rules along the way — that's a bad day. You got lucky. And luck doesn't compound.
One of our funded traders started tracking this on my suggestion — rating each day purely on rule adherence, not P&L. Within a month, they noticed their actual profits improved. Not because they changed their strategy, but because they stopped sabotaging their own process.
Set Them the Night Before
One more tip: set your daily goals the night before, not the morning of.
When you set goals in the morning, you're already in "trading mode." You might be influenced by overnight moves, pre-market sentiment, or just how you slept.
Setting them the night before forces you to plan from a calm, detached state. Write them down. Put them next to your trading screen. And then follow them — regardless of what the market looks like when it opens.
The market doesn't care about your goals. So set goals that don't depend on the market.
This article is based on real coaching sessions with DTR Trading funded traders. The scenarios and advice are drawn directly from one-on-one calls where traders brought their real challenges to work through together.