Our programs are designed to provide the serious trading professional with high tech strategies that promote maximum effectiveness and peak performance in the challenging and changing financial markets. I am here to teach you to keenly focus your efforts and take on “an edge of quiet desperation” in making successful investments and trades. In other words I want to help you develop a focus and intention to follow both your plan and your rules. I am here to help you discover how to overcome the specter of fear, greed, and self-doubt by harnessing a passion for following your rules and lighting a flame of belief in your competency that is so strong that it becomes a magnificent obsession in your daily trading routine. Also, procrastination in journaling and planning will cease as the habits of successful trading are seared into your system. The only thing that separates the successful achiever from the wishful thinker is the inner strength gained from the religious pursuit of a set of specific rules and a detailed goal/vision which makes your heart sing and your passion soar with an unshakable belief in yourself – even in the face of drawdowns.

Humans are emotional beings and some have suggested that it is possible to take emotion out of the trading equation. Well, that is nearly impossible. Yes, it is possible to become detached to a degree and develop the emotional distance that holds back greed, fear and failure to follow-through; but the reality is that these emotions still raise their ugly head…often. What is realistic and more effective is to learn to use emotion and learn to harness the power of passion to work for you rather than against you. It has been said that trading should be like making a sandwich, rote, automatic, and according to protocol. Yes, and that’s true…to a degree. What is more the case is that there was a drive of hunger that took you to “want” that sandwich in the first place; and that hunger, desire, is not satisfied until you devour it. That is the same hunger that can and often does turn into greed (one sandwich is not enough, 2 is not enough and so on). Depending how “hungry” you are, you might put off making the sandwich, but once the hunger has reached it’s zenith, the beast must be fed, and you begin the process to create what you want. In fact, throughout the process you are salivating, you are focused, and you are consumed by the desire to have it. What is important to recognize here is that you can no more eradicate the desire (or drive) to go after what you want than it is possible to live and not eat. Greed is a subset of fear and desire, it is the part of fear that relates to the fear of not having enough and it is the part of desire that has gone beyond the threshold, in other words, desire has become distorted. What was a mind focusing emotion, has turned into a mind mangling problem. Once you begin to separate supportive emotions from debilitating emotions, you are then availing yourself of untapped reservoirs of creative and compelling resources that are brought to bear on making the successful trade. Your job is to ignite a mind-set that is predisposed to making the “right” entry and the profitable “exit” with all the follow-through that keeps the trade on the profitable side. This is a process that honors “reality” and what is in the chart. It is a process that supports your “becoming one with the market.” The market is organic, meaning that it is an undulating, moving thing that is animated by the decisions of living beings. In other words, price action is driven by human behavior and as such it is a reflection of an organic process. This is the “psychology of the market” as seen in the price action as the organic representation of all the hopes, fears and aspirations of every trade that takes place. The psychology of trading is about becoming at one with that price action or market; and it’s about using the mediating element of your mind to tap into the market-mind or collective consciousness of every tick that reflects the market pulse. In other words, by becoming at one with the market you initiate the Zen of market analysis.

Many books and workshops have included some very important aspects of the Psychology of Trading by encouraging things like developing and following a plan, developing and following a set of trading rules, maintaining discipline, identifying and using the right position sizing for your portfolio, identifying a strategy that fits with your temperament and personality, and incorporating the discipline to follow-through. Well, these are of the utmost importance; but, it’s like telling someone what goes into a great dish without sharing the type or amount of ingredients, or like giving someone a car and telling them how to drive but not about the importance of fuel, or giving someone a map without telling them either how to use it and the critical importance of a compass.

Most businesses are very similar in that they all require among other things, follow-through, self-confidence, self-investment, drive, knowledge, planning, organization, perseverance, and creativity. We have put together a set of mind tools that will help you to plumb the depths of your inner strength. We aim to show you how to put the ingredients of successful trading together and more importantly how to harness the power of your mind to use passion and emotion as an ally and not fall prey to it as a devouring beast.