A major portion of the book is devoted to working on yourself. Part 1 includes many different topics:

• Doing a thorough self-assessment, including a 17-point questionnaire that separates the real traders and investors from the pretenders.

• Understanding why commitment is so important to trading well.

• Taking personal responsibility for the results you get.

• Empowering yourself.

• Handling obstacles that get in your way.

• And dealing with beliefs that determine how you trade.

You are shaped by your beliefs about yourself. One of the key aspects of working on yourself is to examine your beliefs to determine whether they are useful. This section of the book takes you through assessing your beliefs and how to change the beliefs that limit you.

Your trading business plan should include your beliefs about the big picture and strategies that work with those beliefs, the systems that make up your business, and a worst-case contingency plan. This section of Super Trader will help you create a successful plan based on your objectives and beliefs. This document will be your assistant throughout your trading career; it will become a working document that you’ll want to refer to often.

It’s not that hard to develop a good strategy for any particular market condition. For example, during the roaring bull market in technology stocks, in the late 1990s, it was easy to buy high tech stocks and just hold on. But that strategy stopped working in 2000. And that’s what happens with most strategies: they stop working when market conditions change, but people keep on trading them. In this section, you will learn about how to read the market and design strategies that work under the current market conditions. You’ll learn how to develop strategies that fit each of the six different market types.

Your trading system has nothing to do with meeting your objectives. Instead, it has everything to do with determining how easy it is to meet your objectives. What most people don’t realize, including most professionals, is that you meet your objectives through position sizing. In Part 4, you’ll learn the basic principles of position sizing, as well as position sizing strategies you can use in your trading right now.

If you have followed the first four parts of the book, you will have rules to guide your trading. And you’ll be confident that you’ll make money if you follow those rules. We define a mistake as not following those rules. Thus, it is only through making mistakes that you’ll fail to make healthy profits. Repeating the same mistake over and over amounts to self-sabotage.

Learn to determine what mistakes you make, how much they cost you in real trading profits and how to avoid repeating those mistakes to minimize their impact on your bottom line.

View the Table of Contents