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Kick
Start Your Trading Career
The
Workshop Hierarchy
We
get many inquiries here at the Van Tharp Institute from people
just like you, who weigh the value and opportunity, versus the
time, travel and expense that they have to incur to attend a
trading workshop. Therefore, to make the choice easier for you
(one way or the other), I thought it would be valuable to
provide an outline of what our workshops are and how they fit
together, so that you can make an informed decision as to
whether attending a workshop is something that you would like to
do.
Thankfully,
our workshops have a great reputation both for their content and
for the level of attendees that frequent our events. This
incredibly high caliber of clientele just keep coming back. Time
and time again, we see the familiar faces repeating or attending
a new course both for the educational experience and the
networking opportunities – so we must be doing something
right!
Whether
you are starting out on the trading journey or have been a
trader for many years, there are fundamental strengths that will
help you to be the best trader you can be and our goal is to
give you the tools and materials to help you do just that.
Van
K. Tharp has close to 25 years of experience coaching traders,
and in conjunction with his world class instructors, they have
put together a trading curriculum that is unrivalled in the
industry.
I.
Foundation Workshops
Tharp Fundamentals and the Backbone of
Great Trading
Although
these workshops are called Foundation Workshops, they are
definitely not basic. We name them that simply because they
provide the core material that everyone who wants to become a
great trader should master. We regard them as the starting point
for your trading education regardless of your background or
trading experience. Also, these core workshops are just as
valuable for the short term trader as they are for the long term
trader because what you learn is not dependent on the market
traded, nor the timeframe.
These
courses will help you master yourself, understand what you need
to do for profitable trading, learn to develop a blueprint for
trading/investing success, and learn how to develop systems that
fit who you are
II.
Specific Strategies and Proven Techniques in Various
Trading Styles
Once
you have a solid foundation and understand a new way of thinking
about trading and investing, then we offer many courses that
will give you a technical background and help you fill in the
details that you will probably want.
Can you take these courses without the foundation
material? Yes you
can, but doing so is like learning how to write a specific
computer program without even knowing the basics of computer
programming or understanding the potential mistakes that you
could make.
-
Proven Swing Trading Strategies
-
Professional E-Mini Futures Tactics
-
Highly Effective ETF and Mutual Fund Techniques (this is essentially
our course for learning great stock market trading
techniques).
-
Professional Day Trading Strategies
III.
Pre-requisite Material
We
have one course and one program that definitely require other
pre-requisite courses, so we’ve put these at the last level.
First
we’ll take a look at our Foundation Workshops:
How
Our Courses Work
1.
The Blueprint for Trading
Success Workshop is the ultimate course to provide you
with exactly what you need to master trading success, whether
you are a full-time professional who wants a solid foundation or
someone who would like to make a lot of money trading/investing
and eventually move into trading full time for yourself.
Dr. Tharp will walk you step- by- step through a series
of 52 pertinent questions designed to get you thinking
strategically about your trading. He will touch on all of the
specific areas that you need to address, in the order that you
need to address them. You will walk away from this workshop with
a business plan outline and an understanding of why you want to
trade, how you want to trade, the specific steps that you need
to take to create a winning trading plan that works in any
market condition and what type of trading systems you want to
incorporate into your plan. You’ll also learn some of the key
things that you need to personally master in order to be
successful. You will
learn how expectancy, position sizing, R-multiples, objectives,
the big picture and other Tharp concepts fit together. After
this workshop, you will know where you need to delve next to
increase your profits and success in the markets.
2. Peak
Performance 101. We
have identified two types of people that frequent the Van Tharp
Institute – those that believe that trading is purely
technical and a learned skill (those people tend to head for the
Systems and Strategy workshops first and eventually join us at
Peak 101), and those who already know that their thoughts and
beliefs play a huge role in their individual trading results. The
bottom line is that we can prove that trading is largely
psychological and that you must master yourself if you want
great trading results. Peak
Performance 101 is Dr. Tharp’s core psychological workshop
and his most famous course for over 15 years.
This is the workshop for anyone wanting to know how great
traders think, behave and act so that they get consistent and
profitable results, without stress. In this workshop, not only
will you learn what makes a great trader great, but you will
also find out what is holding you back. Whether it’s
overtrading, not pulling the trigger, over confidence or lack of
confidence, or just making mistake after mistake – there are
many ways that people sabotage their market experiences. Taught
exclusively by Dr Tharp, this workshop is designed to break down
any barriers that you may have, as well as teaching you specific
tasks and strategies that will improve your trading results
overnight.
3. Developing
a Winning Trading System that Fits You.
We meet many people every year who spend small fortunes buying
other people’s trading systems, and following their
recommendations and ideas – yet they still don’t win
in the markets. Is it because we think that we can’t do it
ourselves? Or is
there a holy grail that a few have mastered and when they do
they won’t share it? Well,
Jack Schwager, after writing Market
Wizards and The New
Market Wizards concluded that the secret was to develop and
trade a system that fits you.
And that’s what we help you do in this course.
Don’t be confused with thinking that “creating a
system” is having the technical know-how to develop a cutting
edge software program. That’s great if you have that skill,
but that is not a proper trading system. Anyone can create one
if they have the knowledge and commitment to do it. In this
workshop, you will learn the key components of a trading system
(there are more than most people realize), how and why they are
needed, and how to use position sizing to help you fulfill your
trading objectives.
Summary
These are the
three core workshops that form the basis of Dr. Van Tharp’s
work. But it takes commitment and discipline. Once you know how
you think and why, uncover what you really want to achieve with
your trading and then develop a specific plan to make it happen,
you can fit workable trading systems into that plan and you’ll
be well on your way to success as a trader.
We
regard them as the starting point for your trading education
regardless of your background or trading experience. Also, these
core workshops are just as valuable for the short term trader as
they are for the long term trader because what you learn is not
dependent on the market traded, or the timeframe that you choose to
trade.
However,
trading is trading, and the markets can be brutal sometimes, so
whether you choose to be a short term or a long term trader or
something in between, it is essential that you learn how to
integrate the foundation of great trading into the specific trading
style that is right for you.
From there, you can
look at specific trading strategies that might fit with who you
are and add them to your arsenal.
Our second tier
courses (Day Trading, Swing Trading, E-Mini
Futures, ETF and Mutual Fund Techniques) help you to either master
the time frame that you have chosen, or give you the tools to decide
what type of trading you are really interested in. These workshops
are packed with great strategies that really work well.
And if you’ve mastered the techniques in the Foundation
Workshops, then you should be able to adapt some or many of these
techniques so that they fit you.
These workshops also go in depth in their specific trading
area, while you simultaneously learn how to incorporate the key Van
Tharp principles and rules into the trading technique.
Professional
Day Trading Strategies
Would it be of
interest to you to trade two or three times a week for only an
hour or two a day? Well there are many elements that are required
to day trade well: good trading psychology, execution skills and a
decisive nature to name just a few. Day traders have lower risk
levels (because they do not hold trades over night) and are
afforded higher leverage as a reward for this reduced risk.
They can use tighter stops and therefore larger position
size. Successful day
traders capture the advantages of increased position sizes by
using strategies with positive expectancies and applying good
discipline to higher frequency trades.
Day
trading has its disadvantages too.
Higher leverage combined with greater trading frequency
means that negative expectancy systems get punished faster and
harder. Furthermore,
more frequent trading means that you have to overcome much higher
trading costs to be profitable.
You really need to master your personal psychology to be a
good day trader. However,
we’ve seen day traders who can make huge profits that are almost
impossible in the other forms of trading. Day traders rarely catch
really huge moves, but they exist on smaller more consistent wins.
So in this workshop, co-taught by a professional day
trader, you will learn all of the positives and negatives of being
a day trader, including how to read the markets, how to set and
keep stops, how to use position sizing, expectancy and risk to
your advantage. In the day trading workshop, you’ll get to watch
Brad Martin trade live, which alone is worth the price of the
workshop. However, you
will be learning proven and powerful strategies and tactics that
work in today’s markets time and time again.
Proven
Swing Trading Strategies
Swing
trading fills the gap between long time frames (position trading)
and intra day (day trading), yet it enjoys the benefits of both of
these styles. Swing
trading is loosely defined as trading to take advantage of the
intermediate trend, typically 2 –10 days. Swing trading has the
benefit of high trade frequency, which can help to smooth equity
curves. Many types of
swing trading capture a higher percentage of winners than the
typical position trading strategy, while keeping the benefit of
requiring little to no intra-trade baby sitting.
With swing trading, we get the increased frequency with
monitoring that can typically be done outside of trading hours and
it can also be combined with day trading, or with position
trading.
In
this workshop, you will be shown system after system – both
stocks and futures are covered—that work very well. You’ll see
dozens of real life computer captured
simulations to drive home the application of each trading system.
You won't just read and hear about good trading systems,
you'll actually apply them in the workshop. You will learn how to
use indicator-based systems, discover what technical indicators to
use and which ones to avoid and what works in a pattern system.
You will also learn the critical components of a Swing Trading
System and how to put your ideas in to a viable trading business
plan.
Highly
Effective ETF and Mutual Fund Techniques
Imagine
being able to jump in front of large mutual funds because you’ll
have learned the skills to anticipate what they are doing. For
example: if mutual fund managers are buying retail stocks, you’d
be able to get into those stocks well before they get in and
profit greatly as their activity drives prices up.
Well
that’s what this course is all about. It is
essentially our course for learning great stock market trading
techniques.
What
we talk about in this workshop is the movement of big money via
Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs) - one of the most rapidly growing
areas in the investment fund industry.
ETFs are funds that reflect the big sectors of the market.
For example, you can buy a fund that represents the Internet
sector of the market and short another that represents the retail
sector of the market. And
you can do this in seconds, as soon as you spot what the big money
is doing. So while
big money might take a week to move money around, you can jump in
ahead of them and take advantage of money flowing into the sector
you’ve just bought. The
advantages are huge. Furthermore,
Ken Long, the instructor, has done an excellent job of adopting
Van’s model for developing trading systems and some of the
systems you’ll learn come very close to what Van would describe
as “Holy Grail” systems.
However, it’s critical that you understand that you
probably won’t be able to trade these systems to make big money
until you’ve mastered the Foundation Workshop material that will
allow you to make these systems your own.
Professional
E-Mini Futures Tactics
If
you like trading futures, the most popular futures contracts are
the e-mini contracts. The
low capital requirements combined with extremely liquid markets
make this trading style (in derivative futures indexes) accessible
to a wide range of people. It offers high leverage and the ability
to control high value contracts with very little cash (or margin)
but this double-edged sword provides great potential for big
profits and equal opportunities for big losses.
So
in this BRAND NEW workshop, you will learn which of the e-mini
index futures is right for you: S&P, Russell, Dow or Nasdaq.
You’ll learn how you can trade them effectively and profitably
without losing your shirt. We’ll be teaching you how to prep for
the market before the day begins, whether it’s a trend day or
range day, what indicator and mechanical systems work and we’ll
show you state of the art execution tools and tactics to help you
maximize your profits. This is an exciting opportunity, provided
you learn how to do it right!
All
of these workshops provide excellent systems that you can adapt to
fit your own trading style.
So when you’re ready, we have the technical workshops that
will meet your needs.
Advanced
Peak Performance 202
In
our most advanced workshop you will experience a dramatic personal
reinvention. You’ll learn how to make a declaration for a trading
vision that might seem impossible now, uncover the beliefs that
shape your success, and find out what you can really accomplish.
Moreover, you’ll learn about the games we play—the most
important psychological breakthrough of the new millennium.
All the Best,
Melita Hunt
Van Tharp Institute CEO
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