Trading mentor

"You trade what you believe." that one sentence of Van Tharp always puzzled me. I was sitting in his class room with some other participants in 2003 in North Carolina, staring at him. Repeating and repeating that one sentence over and over in my head. "You trade what you believe." "You trade what you believe."... But what do I believe? Well that was the start of a journey for me to become who I'm today. I wish I could say it was a path straight to success from then on, but it wasn't. Just like me, you too will have some challenges to become the best trader you can be. One of those challenges you are going to face is the right information in the right order. I missed someone in my day's that could tell me with confidence and structure what to do next and why. Well, you do not have to miss that one person. I can be there for you, to guide you. I can shorten your learning curve with years. There is no new information, there is no secret and you can find everything on the internet but you do not know if the information you are getting is true, false, hype or obsolete. What I share and do, is going to give you the ability to become the greatest trader you can be. On this page you will find some of the topics I cover to get someone consistently profit with trading. Enjoy the read and remember, you trade what you believe.

Personal Inventory

This is step number one. Before you go look for charts, indicators, systems and so on, you need to be paying attention to this first. Why? Because if you are not mentally ready, you will take that with you in your search for a trading system and you will fail. Because no system, indicator or black box will fix this for you.

Healing

People are hurt. Experiences, upbringing, trauma's, and so on, give you bagage. If you are suppressing, ignoring or even lying about it to yourself, you can not become aware enough to succeed in life. Be honest and look for thing that have hurt you in the past. Are you fine with it? No? Get counselling from a professional and deal with it first, before moving on.

Self Knowledge

You need to know your strength and weaknesses before you can begin. Do you know how you react on stress? Do you run, freeze or fight? 

Belief System

Because you will trade what you believe, you are going to need to exam your beliefs and where they come from. Maybe even delete some and make new ones.

Objectives

Why are you going to trade? What is your goal? How much are you willing to lose? How much money do you need to make? All objectives you need to fill in first, before going any further. It are these objectives that will tell you what you will trade and how.

What I do with you in this section:

We go over you own believes, and I will give your insights in to your own life. Then you can change your beliefs about yourself, the market and even about life. This will help you to see trading in a total new light, so you can use the tools given to you to make your own successful trading business. 

Mental strategies

When you are healed from the upsets of your past and you have set your belief system in order, then you are going to need to have a protective guard against any negative influence you can have that will put you out of the game. Stress, conflicts, situations will happen. There for you need the right mental strategies to protect, perform and improve your trading. Day by day.

Insights

Insights come from being aware of how you feel, react and take action. Is it your response on a badly situation that makes you lose or is it just a random outcome that is negative for you system? Insight will give an answer to this question.

Awareness

Being aware of your feelings, thought process and actions will give you the edge to compete against other traders that do not have this abilities. Greed and fear, which are strong emotion, will not cloud your judgements. 

Planning

Every day you have to plan, to win your day. Winning your day is crucial for your mindset, winning the week is crucial for your success in trading.

Balance

Most successful people in their field do not strive for more. They strive for getting better trough having a balanced life. If you ignore your balanced life, you will pay the bill with losing streaks in your trading business.

What I will give you for mental strategies are:

Tools to win your day. How to be proactive and plan around the things that throws you of your game. How to deal with setbacks, get you back in balance after a losing period and a winning period. 

Position sizing

This section is the most important part of your trading plan to obtain your objectives. Only through proper position sizing you will meet your objectives and keep your losses and wins in check.

Skew risk/award

For position sizing to work, you need a low risk idea or in other words, a method where you win more when you win and lose less when you lose. Letting you profits run and cut your losses short is the golden rule in trading.

What we are going to do together:

Optimal position sizing for your strategy is important to get the most out of your strategy. There are many different approaches you can use to maximize your returns. Multiple positions, pyramiding or even hedging has influence on your bottom line. Together we look in to this to create maximum return for your strategy.

Trading strategies

Finally we come to trading strategies. Internet and literally thousands of books are written full about entry signals or screeners for a setup that would make money. Nonetheless, if you maybe have noticed, not many people make money with that. That is because you need more than a good entry signal. The money is made with exits and most of all with how you handle your positions and how you react on the outcome. There are grosso modo three kinds of trading systems: 

Statistical analysis systems

These kind of systems look for statistical proof of one event happening over another. Data crunching can give you some ideas you can use to come up with a winning trading system. If you are a number guy or girl, you can make a trading system out of this. 

Trend systems

These kind of systems are the best known to traders. Trend following is the most used strategy in trading. It is also the most difficult one to implement. Being a victim of whip sawing as a trend follower can make you second guess the next entry, that usually is the big winner of the year. Miss a big trend trade and you may have a losing system.

Mean to reverse systems

These systems are more forgivable to traders. The money comes from many trades with smaller profits. A lot of index traders use a mean to reverse system, as a lot of floor traders did in the past.

What you learn from me about trading strategies