Recent VanTharp's Articles
How You Process Information Influences Your...
As a trader part of your challenge is that you must make decisions based on a large amount of information. Thousands of volumes have been written on how to analyze the vast amount of investment information available. Few investment authorities will admit that most of this information is of low qu...
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Dr. Van Tharp's Trading Secrets
Secret 1 The first secretof trading success is having Discipline. A good trader must have the discipline to make sure that they do not make mistakes, and a mistake is not following your rules. And if you don't have enough rules to guide your behavior, then anything you do is a mistake. Sec...
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Judgmental “Heuristics” Or Biases and...
So far in this series, we have looked at biases regarding randomness, which is the tendency people have to seek patterns where none exist and to invent the existence of unjustified causal relationships. Because people attempt to understand and make order out of the market, they assume that the lo...
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Judgmental “Heuristics” Or Biases and...
Last week we looked at the randomness bias, which is the tendency people have to seek patterns where none exist and to invent the existence of unjustified causal relationships. Because people attempt to understand and make order out of the market, they assume that the longer a trend continues, th...
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Judgmental “Heuristics” Or Biases and...
At any given instant, over two billion bits of information impinge upon your senses. Yet consciously, we can only process “7 +or - 2 chunks” of information.This tremendous reduction in information necessary to act upon external signals or make decisions is accomplished through various “heuristic”...
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Overcoming a Stuck State of Mind
When you are marching toward some goal, like trading excellence, you might do so by overcoming obstacles. When your focus is on problems you have, such as the lack of funds or limited resources or limited knowledge, you are probably going to generate feelings of guilt, anger or frustration in you...
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Learn to “Dissociate”
If you think about Peak Performance trading you could look at a market genius and how that person approaches their craft. However, you could also look at a genius from some other area and notice if some of their behavior could be usefully applied to trading. In that regard, I’ve been thinking abo...
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Trade Through "Mindfulness" - Part 2
Last week, I raised an interesting idea for you. What would happen if you could just pay attention to what the market is doing right now? What if you could just be totally in the present with no preconceived ideas or biases to influence you. Quite likely, trading that way would take your results ...
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Trade Through "Mindfulness" - Part 1
What would happen if you could just pay attention to what the market is doing right now? You’d be totally in the present with no preconceived ideas or biases to influence you. If you did that, your trading would probably accelerate to a new level. Well, you can trade that way if you practice mind...
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Know When to Really Bet Your Hand
As I mentioned previously, one of my hobbies is playing poker and I can do it for free online. When I visit a casino and play poker, I usually make money. However, I used to have trouble making money when I’m playing with a lot of bad players. The problem is that they all stay with me and one of ...
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Keep It Simple
This applies to so many things in life and it also applies to anything you might do in trading or investing. Keep things simple.Your mind only has a conscious capacity of about seven chunks of information. You cannot hold anything more than that in consciousness. Have someone give you a series of...
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Enjoy the Obstacles
In any endeavor in life, you have up and down periods. Dealing with the market has many such up and down periods. In order to profit from the up periods, you have to tolerate or even “enjoy” the down periods. In order to enjoy the profits, you have to got through losses. And perhaps if would be u...
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Traits of Top Traders/Investors
Quite often I get asked the question, “what are the qualities that most top traders/investors have?” Furthermore, I’m also asked, “Can those traits be developed?” While there are many, many traits that I’ve noticed in top traders, I though I’d pick four of them in this tip and talk about each of ...
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Do an Honest Self-Appraisal
What’s a peak performance trader? He or she is someone who is totally committed to being the best, to doing whatever it takes to be the best, that feels totally responsible for whatever happens to them, and thus can learn from mistakes. These people typically have a business plan for trading, bec...
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Make Friends with Your Inner Interpreter
Some of you may have seen this exercise before, but our experiences change over time so exercises like this are worth repeating.Think about some problem you have with your trading.It could be almost any problem.Perhaps you have trouble taking profits too soon.You might get angry when a trade gets...
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