Trading Educators Blog

​When you get an easy winner do you feel guilty?  Do you ask yourself, "Do I deserve to win?"Do I? The world's most successful traders believe in themselves and their ability to win. In fact, many of them feel that they "own" the market. They are not necessarily being arrogant, but they are sure of themselves and sure that they are able to take profits out of the market. Most important i...

​The gut actually has its own self-contained nervous system, known as the enteric nervous system. It can operate in the complete absence of input from the brain or even the spinal cord. It is vast, with more than one-hundred million nerve cells in the small intestine alone. Add to that the nerve cells of the esophagus, stomach, and large intestine…the result is that the gut contains more nerve cel...

​Science has been called the most creative art form.It expresses its creations in technology. Valuable information is the most prized commodity, because it makes the wealth creation process and individual creative process possible.For me, passing on valuable information and seeing someone use it to fulfill his hopes and dreams is my most rewarding endeavor. So far, the computer is technology's ult...

The winning trader must be cold, calculating, and logical. It is absolutely necessary to control your emotions, rather than let them interfere with your trading decisions. While it is true that fear and greed are major factors in market behavior, there are other emotions, such as anger and disappointment, that influence our trading decisions. Because emotions can interfere with discipline and soun...

​It sounds crazy, but you can know too much about anything you want to trade.  This is hard for people to accept in our "Knowledge Is Power" society… where the Internet puts thousands of pages of information, data, and news in front of us with a few clicks of a mouse. People like to believe that with enough information, they can make a perfect decision… That by adding fact after fact, data po...

Humans have a tendency to forget the obvious. We often think that life is more complex than the issues right in front of us, and that obvious solutions offer little solace when trying to find solutions to seemingly insurmountable problems. The markets are complex at times, but the psychology of the market is not. And the psychology of winning isn't all that complicated either. It is vital to accen...

As you trade, have you ever heard a little voice inside talk about only what is going wrong? As the market moves against you, the voice whispers, "My money is on the line. What if I lose? What am I going to do? How will I meet my financial obligations this month? I need to win! The little voice moves you away from your ongoing, immediate experience to your emotions, what may go wrong in the next m...

When your money is on the line, it's difficult to remain calm, rational, and in complete control. What happens if you lose? How will you recover? It's natural to become consumed with self-doubt and abandon your trading plan, or act irrationally in the midst of the chaotic market action. But winning traders control their impulses. They execute a trading strategy effortlessly and flawlessly, even un...

There are times when our judgment is cloudy. Perhaps we want to win so badly that we optimistically see trading opportunities that aren't there. At other times we may be so stressed out, busy, and tired that we can't concentrate, and end up making an impulsive decision or a trading error out of a sense of frustration. As much as we search for a rational, robot-like perspective on the markets, it i...

​John is kicking himself right now. He just made an unexpected losing trade and he feels especially down. He expected to make a killing, and he was looking forward to winning and celebrating big. He thought he had done everything to prepare for the trade. He had looked at the moving average to discern the trend. He looked at the highs and lows of the stock for the past two months, and set his stop...

 First and foremost, thank you for sharing your valuable knowledge, its much appreciated. For scalping/daytrading CL, EC, GC, RTY, what would be the suggested time-frame to set up the charts as per the Trading with More Special Set-Ups Webinar--Stochastic 5,3,3 and BB 18,2, but what time-frame do you suggest, 3min/9min? The time frame and the setups are independent of each other—mutually excl...

​As you trade, do you ever just think, "It's all just random, why even bother trying at all?" If you passively think you have no control, you may end up making less money. A team of scientists studied a group of university students who played a computer game of roulette. All participants reported they had gambled recreationally in the past year. Researchers asked participants to describe the strat...

Self-control is often the key to trading success. Masters of the market are disciplined. They don't sporadically act on a whim. They develop specific trading plans and follow them. Trading is largely a matter of capitalizing on odds. If you assume that a given trading strategy has a past performance record of 50%, for example, it's a matter of odds as to whether that particular strategy will obtai...

​Have you ever made a small losing trade and thought, "It's alright.I'll win on the next one." The next trade comes along, and you lose. And then the next one is a loser, and so on, and so on...until finally, you are in a severe drawdown. Before you dig yourself into a hole that is virtually impossible to climb out of, it is vital for survival to constantly monitor your progress. Take a good hard ...

​It's not the number of times you fail that matters. It is all about getting back up after you've been knocked down. Ask any successful person and you'll find that he or she has experienced a mountain of failure. Trading is a challenging profession. Few make it, and of those who do, many eventually blow out their accounts and give up the profession. What's the difference between the successful, wi...

Looking at your screen can be much like looking at a slot machine, and stopping yourself from dropping a dollar in the slot and pulling the handle. You must restrain yourself from making an impulsive trade, but there's a very human tendency to seek out excitement and receive a quick reward. You must fight temptation and maintain self-control, however. Electronic trading platforms have made trades ...

​What are the latest headlines? Do they impact the markets? Well, it depends. On Monday, October 17, 2005, here were some of the headlines that may have impacted you. GM reached a tentative agreement with the union. What's the impact? It seemed to satisfy long term investors. Company profits are bound to improve with lower labor costs, right? The Supreme Court refused to allow the government to pu...

​If you're like most modern traders, you try to do it all. You study charts and historical data for trading opportunities. You struggle to devise a thorough, well-designed trading plan. You enter trades on your own electronic trading platform, and you monitor your trades to make midcourse corrections when necessary. Depending on your personality, available resources, and time commitment, you may w...

Do you remember your first impressions of trading? Perhaps you were young and had a strong desire to achieve early success, but if you were like most people, you had unrealistic expectations about the financial resources and skill level that were needed to trade profitably. You probably figured that you could just open a typical online brokerage account and turn $1,500 into a fortune. You probably...

​It was a muggy day and I couldn't seem to do anything right. I fumbled around all morning. He hadn't slept the previous night. I was tired, and was tempted to just quit for the day, drink some ice-tea, and sit in a hammock by the pool. But I still had enough willpower to fight temptation a little longer. I had been working on a trading plan for the past month and I wanted to see it through. The d...