Two Reasons Why Traders Fail

The world of market speculating is made up of everyone from the active day trader to the longer term investor, to major corporations and banks worldwide, speculating in all kinds of markets and asset classes, people all around the globe pushing buy and sell buttons each day in hopes of achieving income, wealth, profits. Never in history have there been so many books written on how to speculate in markets. 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, ask? How is it that hardly any investors ever come close to achieving their financial goals? How can this be? The answer is twofold and is the focus of this piece.

Conventional Technical Analysis

First, it’s because 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. If proper market speculating was as easy as reading a book, wouldn’t every librarian be a multi-millionaire?

Buy Price

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. When you go to buy a car and you’re at the dealership and see the car you have your heart set on with a price of $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?” Of course you don’t, you likely offer $17,000 or something like that. In trading, most people wait for confirmation of higher prices and then buy, which is the opposite of how they buy things outside of trading, this makes no sense.

I once had a gentleman go through our training program; I will never forget the day I met him and spoke to him about the program. He approached me and said he wanted to learn how to trade. I said, “Before we commit to this, let’s have a conversation or two and make sure this is right for you.” You see, I always want to make sure whoever is coming into the training program has the best chance at succeeding. I don’t want to waste their time or mine. My first question was, “What do you do for a living now?” He happened to own and run a pizza chain that he had just sold. As soon as he said that, I knew he had the best chance at doing this because he already knew how to make money buying and selling. In fact, there was nothing about buying and selling in a market that I could teach him that he didn’t already know. I will explain this in a minute.

Our first lesson went like this… I asked him to tell me about his business and he did. He explained that the whole business comes down to the price of cheese. I asked him three simple questions:

1. What is the average price of cheese? “Around $2.00 a pound,” he said.

2. If the cheese you buy is selling at $4.00 a pound, how much will you buy? He said, “As much as I need.”

3. If the cheese is selling at $1.00 a pound, how much will you buy? “As much as I can and store it,” he said.

I then told him that he was already a great trader and that there was nothing I could teach him about trading that he didn’t already know. What I could teach him however, is EXACLTY what this proper buying and selling looks like on a price chart. He was already buying and selling in a market properly, he just didn’t know what that looked like on a price chart. This was an easy task for me because he already had the foundation of how you make money buying and selling down and had made plenty of money from it. The most important part of today’s article for you to understand is this:

The more you can bring the mindset and rules that you use on a daily basis to purchase everyday items at the grocery store, appliance store and so on, into your market speculating, the better you will do. Do you ever use coupons to save some money? If you do, you already know how to buy at a low price. Take that same exact mindset and action into your trading world. The mass illusion is that proper trading is somehow different than how we properly buy things in everyday life.

Many so-called professionals like to complicate the process with smoke, mirrors, curtains and slight of hand. They do this to trick you so that you will transfer some of your account into theirs without you realizing it. The key for you is to keep everything “real”. Use your simple logic filter to ensure you will not lose some or all of your account to illusion.

There is nothing wrong with following the rules of a trading book, just make sure you are the author and that your strategy has you buying at wholesale prices and selling at retail prices. To do this, start with using all the powerful buying and selling knowledge you already possess and use on a daily basis outside of the trading world. Bring this key but simple strategy into trading and you will soon be spotting “sales” all over the place.

Hope this was helpful, have a great day.

Learn to Trade Now