Van Tharp – How to Develop a Winning Trading System That Fits You

Van Tharp – How to Develop a Winning Trading System That Fits You

What’s Included in the Audio Program:

This program has 20 sections of audio material (formerly in cd format, now in MP3 format)

11 CDs (now 11 sections) of newer material and 9 CDs (now 9 sections) from the classic home study course covering information no longer taught in our Systems Development workshop.

This audio program was recorded live from two separate workshops. It contains a complete three-day seminar taught exclusively by Dr. Van Tharp and covers little-known secrets for developing customized, winning trading systems. This is timeless information, and therefore it is not linked to any particular market or timeframe.

We also retained sections from the original systems development recording from years back because this original article contains material that is no longer covered in the workshops and can only be found on this audio program.

Many of our clients listen to these audio files over and over and over again just to get all the subtle details they sometimes miss on the earlier reviews.

NEW: We are happy to now have MP3 files instead of CDs. We realize most of our students no longer preferred the CD format and were converting the CDs to MP3s. Now we’ve done the hard part for you and converted the material which will be downloadable from our elearning.vantharp.com site.

Material covered includes:

• The psychological pitfalls of system development
• Understanding that you only trade your beliefs about the market and not the market itself
• Critical concepts of system development including some of Dr. Tharp’s trademark concepts—expectancy, R-multiples™, System Quality Number® score and position sizing™ strategies
• You will learn trading concepts that work in areas such as trend following, band trading, value trading, mental scenario trading, seasonal tendencies, spread trading, and arbitrage
• Among many other things, this program will familiarize you with the critical parts of a system, give you good examples of each element, and help you develop appropriate setups, and an appropriate entry and stop loss
• The home study course also includes a comprehensive 340+ page manual that acts as a guide, a workbook, and an instructor through your system building journey

Course Objectives:

• To familiarize you with the psychological pitfalls of system development. At the very least, it’s critical that you understand that you only trade your beliefs about the market, not the market itself.
• To help you understand the fundamental concepts and steps in system development, including expectancy, R-multiples, system quality and position sizing strategies.
• To help you understand the power of objectives and how objectives influence your results, to give you practice strategizing with some objectives in our simulations, and to help you know what is required of system development objectives. If you understand the power and importance of objectives and use this strategizing to meet them, your whole approach to system development will change.
• To help you understand some of the key concepts that you could trade that actually work-
  • Trend following especially trends based on fundamentals
  • Band trading
  • Value trading where the value is defined as buying things at pennies on the dollar
  • Mental scenario trading
  • Seasonal tendencies when these are “real” and not statistical abnormalities
  • Spread trading and arbitrage
• To help you define “R” in your trading and develop appropriate setups, entry, and a stop loss.
• To familiarize you with the key parts of a system and give you good examples of each part.
• To help you decide what criteria you might have to meet before you are willing to trade a system. These are going to be based on your own values, not someone else’s.
• To make you more familiar with the key to meeting your objectives—position sizing strategies—so that you have a good chance of meeting your objectives.
• To teach you how to determine the quality of your system is whether it is a Forex day trading system or a stock value investing system.

What Kind of Trader Are You?

Are you a low-risk investor who just wants to make small, consistent profits each month with only an occasional loss? Learn how to develop a system that will allow you to develop a unique methodology that will give you that kind of consistency!

Are you a gutsy trader who’d like to make yearly profits of 100%, 200% or even 1,000% per year? It’s possible, although risky, and you can learn that, too. The interesting thing is that you can do it in such a way that the only money you are risking is the money you’ve already made from the market. That’s real leverage!

Only about 5% of the world’s traders and 10% of the world’s investors, consistently make big money. What these winners do is not complex. In fact, simplicity is one of the keys to making money. And you can do it too! I’ve modeled this process and can teach you how to develop your own trading system that fits your own style of trading.

Why develop my own system? Isn’t it easier to just go buy a system with proven results?

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of trading systems that work. But most people, after purchasing a pre-existing system, will not follow the system and trade it exactly as it was intended. Why not? Because the system doesn’t fit them or their style of trading.

One of the biggest secrets of successful trading is finding a trading system that fits you. In fact, Jack Schwager, after interviewing enough “market wizards” to write two books, concluded that the most important characteristic of all good traders was that they had found a system or methodology that was right for them.

When someone else develops a system for you, you don’t know what biases they might have. But when you develop your own system, it will be compatible with your own beliefs, objectives, personality, and edges. And that will make it much easier for you to trade.

Furthermore, most of the system development software currently available promotes trading biases that can be detrimental to overall trading success. Most system development software is designed because people want to be able to predict the markets perfectly. As a result, you can buy software now for a few hundred dollars that will allow you to overlay numerous studies over past market data. Within a few minutes, you can begin to think that the markets are perfectly predictable. And that belief will stay with you until you attempt to trade the real market instead of the historically optimized market. Many trading accounts have plummeted from this very thinking. One “sure-thing” trade placed without proper position sizing can wipe some traders completely out of the game.

Our job in this course is to teach you what you need to know to develop your own system. The material you will learn is not market or time-frame specific. So whether you trade stocks, futures, currencies or gold, etc., or whether you place 50 trades per day or 50 trades per year, you will learn all of the components that work in any system.

Three Critical Secrets You Can Adopt to Develop a Superb Wealth-Building Formula:

1. Developing Sound Objectives-

This is the most critical task of system development. If you do this one function correctly, it will take at least half of your time during the development process. When you learn what it is, you’ll say, “Of course it’s important!” but you’ll still probably spend very little time on it. To develop a system that fits you, you need to think about what you want. It’s not a trivial task.

There are at least 30 questions you need to address when you develop a trading system. Dr. Tharp takes you through each item so you’ll know exactly what’s essential for you.

2. 10 Key Components-

Most people ignore six or seven of the key components of system development when they do their research. In fact, you’ll never see a book on system development that covers more than six of them. That’s the limitation the average trader has in doing research. You want big profits with as little risk as possible, so you want every advantage possible when you start to develop such a system.

You should be able to take advantage of eight of these components easily after hearing this audio recording. And, with a little more effort, you’ll be able to use all 10. If you use all ten parts with competence, you’ll be among the top one-tenth of one percent of all traders and investors in the world.

3. Position Sizing Strategies-

Most people concentrate on entry—the least important element in system development. And they ignore position sizing strategies—the most crucial aspect. Through this home study course, you will learn position sizing algorithms that peak performers use. Also, you’ll learn position sizing algorithms that will help you lower your overall risk, while at the same time, helping you achieve more consistent performance.

If you concentrate on these three secrets—which 95% of all traders and investors ignore—you can vault yourself into a class that only a few have been able to achieve.

If you’re more adventurous, we’ll show you how to go for massive returns using the market’s money. When you use these super money making techniques, you could make 1,000% on your money each year, risking mostly the money that the market has given you.

You’ll learn the secret behind how one trader turned $10,000 into $1.1 million in less than a year. He traded a volatility breakout system, but the key to his profits was his position sizing method.

Also, we’ll also show you how another group of traders has taken over $100 million out of the market over the last ten years! They traded a channel breakout system, but the real key to their success was the money management. Learn the advantages and disadvantages of both these styles. This sort of adventurous trading is very risky. You could lose a substantial amount of money if you’re not careful. As a result, we’ll show you all the pitfalls so that you thoroughly understand the risk involved.

Ten Money Making Secrets You Will Learn

1. Get specific ideas for making better market entry and exit decisions
2. Learn specific position sizing ideas from the author of the Definitive Guide to Position Sizing
3. Be introduced to the psychological pitfalls that hold back so many people. Just knowing about them will help you avoid them
4. Work through Dr. Tharp’s model of how to design, develop, and customize a trading system
5. Learn new approaches to the markets and new techniques for analyzing them.There are 15 concepts behind most trading systems. Most concepts, even the most popular ones, are meaningless. But you’ll learn about ones that work best
6. Receive practical trading ideas
7. Be introduced to a random-entry trading that earns between 0.5 percent and 11 percent per year on various historical tests
8. Better understand how expectancy is shaped by your exits from the market
9. Use the System Quality Number score to compare day trading systems in one market to long-term investing systems in another
10. Fifty percent of system development is designing sound objectives. You’ll hear ideas on how to develop sound trading objectives

Access to the Experts

Imagine being in a room full of professional traders and investors. Each of them controls at least $5,000,000 in trading funds. Some of them control over a billion dollars. And these top traders and investors are gathered together to help you develop the perfect trading system for you!

What if you could ask them any questions you wanted and they would give you honest, straightforward answers? Think about all the secrets you’d learn.

What would happen to your profits if you applied that material and used it to develop a system that was perfect for you and your personality? The results would be incredible.

It sounds great, but how could you meet all of these top traders and professionals? And if you did, how would you know what to ask them? Would they tell you the truth?

You can have the same experience with this home study course! Market Wizard Trading Coach, Dr. Van K. Tharp, has done the work for you! Dr. Van K. Tharp is a very consistent, astute, and systematic researcher of human behavior. He has personally interviewed hundreds of top traders to determine what makes them excel in their profession and collected psychological profiles from over 5,000 traders and investors.

With this information, he carefully crafted a model that people like you can adopt to improve your skills.

“If one person can achieve great success, then that skill can be taught to others—in fact, to almost anyone. I’ve proven this formula in helping to develop top traders and investors. Now, I want to offer you the same incredible opportunity to make big money.”—Van K. Tharp Ph.D.

Is This Study Program Right For You?

Are you willing to roll up your sleeves and work at designing objectives and risk parameters for yourself? If you are, and you’re eager to apply the principles we teach you, you’ll love this home study.

We’ll teach you how to use all the system building blocks to design a trading system so that you’ll end up with a system that’s just right for you! In the process of learning how to do this, you’ll probably come up with dozens of winning methods that will work because they’ll be based on criteria that fit your situation. Remember, we do not give you a system that has already been developed. That would defeat the whole idea of developing a system that fits you. This audio series is about giving you the tools you need to design your system.

What the Home Study Program Is Not

Developing a trading system encompasses many parameters including the capital you have available, the type of markets you’re trading, the kind of money management rules you are applying to your trades, your psychology, and other resources which are available to you. Our audio series is comprehensive in that it discusses each of these aspects.

However, it is not a step-by-step program focusing on a particular type of trading system. That would defeat the purpose of the course—only you can decide what’s right for you based on your specific objectives. We don’t give you specific trading systems. Instead, we provide you with trading ideas that make a lot of money, and we show you how to adapt them to make them your own. And we do it because that’s the only way you’ll ever trade it. When you understand that, you’ll be on your way towards developing an ideal system for you.