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[dc]I[/dc] want to share some more information about the training course I am creating. I have been planning to do this course in a few different ways in a few different contexts over the years, and I will be borrowing substantially from material that I’ve used with Waverly Advisors to train interns in-house. Much of the material is already done (and some of it was 4-5 years in development.) When I thought about doing this, I wanted to create a course that was, above all, practical, and that focused on developing and applying the skills of trading. Nothing can make you a profitable trader—no book, no course, no mentor, no method, no system. There is no mystery why this is true; it is simply because markets are too competitive, meaning that there are no huge edges to be exploited, and that behavioral factors, your behavior, is a critical component of your success. Many books will tell you that it is not difficult to find a method that works in the market, and that nearly all of traders’ problems can be traced back to psychology. I don’t think that is true. I think it is very difficult to find a method that works in the market, but it is perhaps even more difficult for most individual traders to apply such a method consistently and with discipline.

Having said that, the goal of this course is to give you the tools you need and perhaps to guide you along the path to your development. If you’ve been struggling with other systems and ideas, have had some success but not the degree of success you wanted, or, on the other hand, if you just don’t know where to start, then this course may give you some of the missing links. I think it will be useful for the trader who is starting from the ground up, but there also should be value for someone who wants to incorporate these ideas into her own process. For instance, imagine you are a fundamental stock picker, and you don’t want to abandon that discipline. You should be able to take the tools, techniques, and perspectives I will share and find ways that they can enhance your existing process.

The course will be structured in four parts:

• The Foundation of Profitable Trading: (3 weeks) focuses on the math behind profitable trading, and different ways to find an edge in the market.
• The Patterns of Profitable Trading: (5 weeks) each week focuses on a specific trading pattern with the student doing testing and analysis to verify the pattern in live market data. This is also a critical part of developing your own system and approach based on these patterns.
• The Skills of Profitable Trading: (6 weeks) extends the work of the previous section by drilling deeper into some patterns, looking at ways to combine tools, screen for trades, and working to understand the consequence of decisions in the marketplace.
• Special Topics (5 weeks): This is the section that may be expanded or, perhaps, delayed, depending on how complicated production turns out to be for the rest of the course. Currently, I plan to do a week on these topics: daytrading, system development/system-assisted discretionary trading, options I, options II, and long-term investing.

This is a solid and logical progression that is based off of training material I developed over the years for in-house Waverly Advisors interns and as a companion to the book. I believe that it’s no exaggeration to say that this course is as good a generalist’s course in technical analysis as exists anywhere, at any price, and, just to reiterate, this material is and will always be free. There’s no upsell to an “advanced” trading course. (I’d argue that there’s no such thing as advanced trading, but that’s another discussion.)

I’ve also developed a number of psychological tools and techniques that I will share in this course. In the Foundation section, the psychological work begins with self-inventory. I will share an interesting exercise I developed that help build intuition and “right brain” thinking about markets–so much of this course is heavily quantitative, and this more inductive approach is a necessary counterbalance. I have several decades experience as a hypnotherapist, going back to my college days when I actively explored biofeedback and other tools to enhance my performance and learning as a classical pianist. I will create companion modules using trance techniques that guide you through relaxation, enhanced focus and learning states, and also that may also lead you to being able to monitor your own state and interrupt the patterns of self-sabotage that plague so many traders. Each week has, in addition to the heavy-duty market material, a psychological component that focuses on things like managing giveback in positions, resilience, the critical topic of discipline, finding the flow state, accessing and managing intuition, etc. All of this work is designed to be very practical and to work hand in hand with the  objective, statistical perspective I will encourage you to develop in the other sections of each week’s work.

I’m excited about this course. This will be a lot of work, both for me and for you, but I’m not aware of anything out there that combines all of these elements in this depth. Tell your friends, and I appreciate whatever help anyone can give me to spread the word. This is truly a case where the more the merrier, as I hope to also build a community (a tribe?) of traders of all levels interacting around this material. I am finishing up the infrastructure to support that community, and then will start actually recording course modules in the very near future. Stay tuned, and I’ll post a more detailed syllabus on this blog in the next few days.

Registration for the course is now open at this link, which you can also bookmark. That will be the landing page once the course is up and running.