One of the best aspects of having kids come stay with me over the Christmas break is that I get to play endless rounds of WII tennis with my son. My sparse living room easily turns into a virtual version of Louis B Armstrong stadium, unleashing the inner Roger Federer within me as my son and I play set after set of serve and volley tennis while the vicious New York winter wind howls against the windows of my apartment.

My son who is a wiry and gangly thirteen year old with a waist almost half the size of mine is a much better net player than I. He dispatches his volleys with merciless strength often running our virtual opponents into the ground. Without him on my side we would never win so many matches. But lately the old man has been able to hold his own on the court, to the point where I’ve even received the ultimate of compliments from the teenager, “Hey Dad - not bad playing.”

The key to my success? Patience. Although my net game relies on touch rather than force I’ve come to realize that I do not need to overpower the opponent in order to win the point. Tennis is a game of angles. Move your adversary to one side of the court and hit your volley to the other and will not matter if the ball is travelling at the speed of sound or fluttering like a butterfly. As long as the angle is steep enough, no opponent – real or virtual will be able to get back over the net.

The essence of winning play in tennis is to position yourself for the proper shot. That may mean making as many as 20 volleys before you can establish a genuine advantage on the court. Fortunately the speed I’ve lost with age has been somewhat offset by gaining some patience. Unlike my son who likes to whack every shot that comes his way, I am now perfectly happy to stoically volley back and forth until I get my opponent out of position.

Trading like tennis is a simple game. Get the positioning right and all other mistakes will fall by the wayside. Contrary to popular perception, execution is the LEAST important aspect of the process. If you are on the right side of the trend it doesn’t matter if you paid up 10 or even 20 points more for your entry and conversely if you are wrong, no matter how great your entry you will still lose.

Getting into the right position when you trade is mostly a function of patience - of waiting for fundamentals and technicals to align themselves properly to provide you with the highest probability of success. When I asked why trades go wrong, I always answer that there are usually three reason for why our trades fail:

1. We are wrong on the data.
2. Some unexpected news event suddenly moved market sentiment against us.
3. We rushed the trade because we needed "to come up with something."

While the first two reasons are simply the normal market risks we assume every time we put on a trade, the third reason is where we have plenty of room for improvement, by learning to be more patient and selective. As the past year progressed, I believe we’ve become a bit better at doing that, but we still have a long way to go. Hopefully, as 2010 begins and we all get a year older and maybe a step slower, we will learn to appreciate the value of patience making our trading more precise and profitable.

Boris Schlossberg serves as director of currency research at GFT, and runs bktraderfx.com.