I’ll tell you where I won’t be – Peak Performance Seminars 101 and 203 next month. Tharpy is at it again peddling his programs. I don’t know the difference between the Van Tharp Institute compared to his IITM operation, but I do know this: I can save you at least $4999.00
Seven money-making benefits await you in a one-of-a-kind workshop. You will make more consistent profits, keep your losses smaller, and be more relaxed about your trading.
1. Learn the three ingredients of success. You must know this information, at least unconsciously, if you are to prosper. These three mental ingredients are a must in any task you do in order to perform like a “Market Wizard.” Most people don’t even know about them, which is why success is so difficult to duplicate. But after the Peak Performance 101 Workshop, you’ll thoroughly understand how these three key ingredients can control your life. Most of all, you’ll learn how you can control them.
Dude, the “market wizards” got rich without a lot of what Tharpy preaches. And when a journalist from Forbes visited Tharpy’s seminar and training operation way back in 1997 he couldn’t find exceptional value or much substance to make an article out of… Believe me, not much has changed – and that was when market conditions were most favorable to trading independently and making a small fortune. Now it’s rather silly to compete when Tharpy’s been ranting since 2004 that we’re in a secular bear market. And for all his ranting – you didn’t make any money, nor did he make any money from the bear market prediction because he couldn’t find an effective way to trade that “belief.”
At any rate he’s already discussed his “three ingredients for success bit” in books and magazine articles – and no one wrote to the editors to say they got rich… The books are just promotional literature for seminars.
2. Understand the components of a low-risk idea. The trick to compounding your personal wealth is to trade low-risk ideas. Low-risk ideas are found everywherenot just in conservative investments. In fact, a great deal of wealth is made from following low-risk ideas in highly speculative arenas such as options and futures. But you must understand what makes up a low-risk idea. It’s not what you think.
If there are so many low-risk ideas out there maybe you’d find it surprising to hear that he can’t come up with any of them for his email newsletter over the past six years, and he doesn’t trade the markets – so he is not able to effectively compound any personal wealth by his own direct efforts within the investment markets. If you want to make $500,000 US, all you have to do is trade 500,000 shares and if the share price moves in your favor one point and you can capture that movement you have made $500,000. Tharpy doesn’t do that; he’d rather sell 1,000 people a two seminar package for $4,999 without any of the market risk. If you make money you’ll credit him and buy more stuff. If you lose you’ll blame yourself and buy from him to get more training. That’s the kind of racket he’s got: there’s no performance measurement tied to his revenues. After years of reading his stuff – he’s never been able to directly help himself profit in the investment markets, and I don’t believe he can help me.
3. Understand why position sizing strategies are critical to your bottom line results! Few people understand this key concept. Yet it means the difference between consistent top performance and average mediocre performance for most people. We’ll teach you position sizing based trading so you will have the same risk and exposure in the market day after day. Think how calm you could be, knowing that your risk is always the same.
Dude, what he’s saying here is that investing in the markets is gambling. True. So he advocates risking one percent or less of your capital per event/trade. There’s no quality filter. Do you think this guy ever would have bet on buying Google shares in 2004 and holding on to them for two to three years? No, all he could talk about at that time was his belief about the immediate and unavoidable bear market environment – which didn’t happen until 2008 and 1st quarter 2009 – and by that time he stopped using his bear market tracker/indicator. He had no clue to focus on buying Apple Computer shares in 2004, or even Chinese stocks or other international markets before they went up 100 percent or more. This approach has nothing to do with identifying strong market forces that could move a stock far enough to make you a small fortune or fortune in a reasonable amount of time – be it a year or within several years.
4. Learn 15 ways to develop rock-solid discipline in your trading. Discipline really means controlling your mental state. Unfortunately, most people allow their mental state to control them. In contrast, real winners maintain discipline that allows them to charge ahead of others in the field. If you play in a zero-sum trading game, like futures, you need to know every trick. These are the real secrets that separate successful traders and investors from the average person.
The reason Tharpy has discipline is because he doesn’t trade – his objective isn’t to make a fortune trading – it’s to make an income giving you an education. And that’s the safest bet for him because if he loses his own money in the markets he loses credibility. Dude, people cannot easily become disciplined in any area of life, dieting, exercise, improving in hobbies/projects that interest them, etc. and it would be foolish to think that when you throw in the element of money – gambling in the markets, that it allows for constant improvement in tackling your impediments to discipline. What he doesn’t explain is that the markets by their very nature are based on the majority of people not performing well or losing money to allow for the overachievers. The original “market wizards” are no longer the wizards they used to be or were purported to be because the market environment changed and they couldn’t maintain their performance, while the newer market wizards lost money during the 2000 to 2002 stock market decline and those that hung on as a going concern did so because they had sufficient money left to trade with and were able to adapt to the shift in the marketplace. And if self-made independent market wizards who had years of experience and good systems had trouble competing and trading profitably – what makes you think some silly seminar is going to turn you into a trading star?