The world of market speculating is made up of everyone from the active day trader to the longer term investor, speculating in all kinds of markets and asset classes. People all around the globe push buy and sell buttons each day in hopes of achieving income and wealth. Never in history have there been so many books written on how to speculate in markets for traders and investors. Each weekend in many cities around the world, there are educational seminars given on how to “get rich” from trading. With so much education on how to properly speculate in markets out there, why is it that most people lose money? How can this be? The answer is twofold and is the focus of this piece.

First, it’s because of the content of most of the books and seminars. Most books and seminars are loaded with conventional Technical and Fundamental analysis which tends to teach you how to buy when everyone else buys and sell when everyone else sells (herd mentality), which is high risk, low reward, and low probability. Conventional Technical analysis is based on pattern recognition that has people buying after price has rallied and also offers buy and sell signals based on indicators and oscillators that always lag price, which means high risk buying and selling. Conventional Fundamental analysis offers buy signals only after good news is present and company numbers are solid. Where do you think the price of a stock is by the time this good news is offered to you? If you guessed high, you’re correct almost always. Remember, the only way to be consistently profitable when buying and selling in markets is to have a strategy that has people buying after you buy, at higher prices than you paid and selling after you sell, at lower prices than you sold at. Conventional Technical and Fundamental analysis does not help us in this regard; the basic principles of these two ways of thinking ensure you will buy and sell with the herd, when it’s too late, which means high risk and NO EDGE. Come on, if proper market speculating were as easy as reading a book, wouldn’t everyone be a millionaires?

The second reason most people lose money in the global trading markets, which is really part of reason number one, is that they throw all simple logic out the window. Let’s say you go to buy a car and you’re at the dealership and see the car you have your heart set on, and you see the price is $20,000. Do you go to the dealer and say; “I like this $20,000 car so much, I want to pay you $30,000 for it?”… Continue Reading