Making Money!
Some 90% of all traders ultimately fail at making money. It’s a pretty dire statistic. These are people who go for huge gains and end up taking huge losses. Especially if you’re just starting out, it’s wise not to scoff at a couple hundred dollars—and definitely not a couple hundred dollars a day.
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This is a lesson you might have missed on our most recent webinar for STT Pro users with lead trainer Tim Bohen. Tim is nothing if not steadfast, patient, and dedicated when it comes to making money (and life, in general). (More like the tortoise, less like the hare.)
“If you could make $100 a day consistently, you have the ability to make $500 a day consistently, or $1,000 a day—consistently,” Tim told STT Pro users.
If you employ constant repetition, you will be amazed at the difference.
“The more you get the process down, the more potential you have to scale,” says Tim. “Even if you are just starting out right now with a small account, if you could make $100 a day after commissions, you would be surprised how quickly your account grows. Now you go from a couple of thousands in your account to a few months down the road when you have $5,000 or $10,000. Then you can start looking to make $500 a day.”
What so many people get wrong about trading, says Tim, is that they try to go from point A to point B in a month or 6 months.
But, as STT Pro users will learn, making money doesn’t work that way. Tim’s seen so many traders through the years making huge gains and then disappear because they saw too much success too quickly, scaled up too fast and too aggressively, and then blew up their accounts, giving away all of the gains—or even money that wasn’t their own.
“I’ve seen traders making $100,000 in 6 months to actually having a negative account,” says Tim. “That is actually possible in trading if you don’t follow the rules that I’m trying to teach you in these webinars.”
That’s exactly why Tim is still around, and still making money, a decade after he started trading.
So why, more precisely, do 90% of traders fail? Because they don’t have a plan—and they don’t have the patience to have a plan. If your plan is simply to make money and doesn’t get any more detailed than that–plan for failure.
Every trade Tim makes has a plan, or he doesn’t go through with it. That’s exactly what attracted him to STT in the first place, and why he became STT’s lead trainer. STT provides all the tools to see all of the data you need in order to make the right trade plan.
For Tim, a trade plan absolutely must:
- Have a clear entry goal
- Have a defined stop loss
- A thought process that involves looking at a trade each day, assigning a value to that trade and deciding whether it’s worth making it. This is due diligence, and you’ll get nowhere without it.
Greed has no place in the life of a successful trader. Greed is an emotion that clouds judgment and overrules patience and consistency.
Stock tips from your buddies (or Twitter) without a plan, also don’t work.
So, let’s take a look at the traders who DO make it work. The first thing you need to understand is that the most successful traders don’t win every time. But the most consistently profitable traders ALWAYS have a plan.
Jim Cramer is a good example. He only has a 35% win rate, yet he is a massively successful hedge fund manager who has gone on to write books and host CNBC’s Mad Money. He can lose a small percent on a stock and then make 20% on the next trade—rinse and repeat, over and over again. That’s the key to becoming consistently profitable.
So if your mind has a problem working out how somehow can win only 1/3 of the time and still be considered wildly successful—this is how.
And if you join Tim on STT Pro, he’ll teach you how to get up to a 70% win rate with the right plan that allows you to cut your losses and be a consistent winner.
With Tim’s help, you can take your techniques, strategies, and plans and turn them into a consistently profitable system on STT. You get Tim from 9-9:45 every morning and you can see him on your computer screen, your mobile phone, your smart TV. Every morning, Tim goes over anywhere from 2 to 15 potential trades, while Tim himself typically trades no more than one or two stocks at a time in order to maintain focus. In the morning, he’s busy building watch lists for you and then details specific trade plans for specific stocks that day. At the end of the day, he goes back to live screen to look at things ahead of the market close.
But always, always, there’s a very specific plan. So, that’s Tim’s lesson #1: Keep it simple, stupid, and don’t bother trying to trade without a plan that goes beyond “making money.”
For more words of wisdom from Tim, check out STT’s podcast episode 1 on Steady Trade.