You are a...
Strategic Trader
Congratulations! As a Strategic Trader, you have all three core qualities of top traders. You have potential to
excel in the markets—if you are willing to do a few things.
Your Top Three Core Trader Qualities:
The ability to see the big
picture, new possibilities
and connections
between things.
Being decisive, orderly and
doing things sequentially.
Making decisions based
on logic and analysis.
First, are you willing to take complete responsibility for your trading results? There is no room to blame the market,
your broker, your education, or anything else. Second, can you change your thinking so that you treat your trading
as a business? Initially, this means writing a thorough business plan. Third, could you develop a trading system that
fits you? Most people want to start here, at the technical side and back end of trading; however, we recommend
saving this until you have completed the other tasks first. Our studies have revealed that your psychological biases
and issues will affect your trading system development if you have not taken the time to work on yourself first as the
core of your trading.
All those things just mentioned are what you can read about in our weekly Inbox Coaching newsletter. Thank you
for signing up for it. Should you find it less than useful, you can click on the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the
newsletter anytime you desire.
Helping traders become their best is our mission at the Van Tharp Institute and we’ve helped thousands of traders
do that for over 25 years. We offer excellent educational and training programs designed for both beginning and
advanced traders/investors. If you have questions or would just like more information, please visit our web site at
www.vantharp.com.
So let’s get to your report. The next page describes your trader type based on your answers. Look for what rings true
for you and keep in mind that no individual will match up exactly with a profile. Next, you’ll discover how to leverage
your strengths and challenges to become a better and more profitable trader. And finally, we list the trader types and
their potential for success in the markets.
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Strategic Trader Type
As a Strategic Trader... you have all three core qualities that are essential to being a great
trader (i.e., you have the ability to see the big picture, new possibilities and connections
between things; you make decisions based on logic and analysis and you are decisive,
orderly and do things sequentially). You have an original mind and a great drive to
implement your ideas and achieve your goals.
Trader Type Characteristics
YOU probably live in a world of ideas and strategic planning. You
value intelligence, knowledge, and being competent. These are great
qualities for a trader/investor. In fact, you have this and all three
core qualities that are essential to being a great trader (i.e., you have
the ability to see the big picture, new possibilities and connections
between things; you make decisions based on logic and analysis and
you are decisive, orderly and do things sequentially). You have an
original mind and a great drive to implement your ideas and achieve
your goals. Thus, if trading success is important to you, you’ll probably
find a way to achieve it.
You are quick to see patterns in the market and develop a perspective
that allows you to take advantage of it. Consequently, we recommend
that you study what great traders typically do. If you do, you’ll
probably become one of them.
You are an avid learner and thinker. Understanding trading and
trading systems will probably be something that is quite easy for you
to grasp. You easily understand abstract and complex theories and
can be a master of conceptual and analytical thinking.
If you become committed to trading success, you’ll probably have no
problem developing a business plan to help you succeed as a trader. In
addition, you tend to be independent, which is an essential quality of
traders, and have high standards for your performance as a trader.
As a trader, you’ll probably focus on observing the markets and
generating ideas and possibilities for generating profits. This is one of
the primary reasons that, if you commit to it, you have the potential
to be an excellent trader/investor. In addition, since you have all of
the primary qualities that most of the top traders have, if you apply
yourself, then your chances of success are very high.
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Example Trader:
Paul Tudor Jones
Our best example of a Strategic
Trader is Paul Tudor Jones. Jones
has been one of the world’s best
hedge fund managers. When the
funds he had under management
surpassed a billion dollars, he hired a
well known motivational speaker to
coach him on what we now call “topdown discipline.”
Today he lives by an unbelievable
routine and schedule because
he simply must be the best.
He’s never had a down year. His
worst performance was in 2000,
when offshore Tudor BVI Global
Portfolio fund delivered only 11.6%.
According to Forbes, Paul Tudor
Jones ranked 123 among the world’s
richest people.
Paul Tudor Jones is known for
saying, “I’m always thinking about
losing money as opposed to making
money. Don’t focus on making
money, focus on protecting what
you have.”
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TRADING STRENGTHS
Originality and drive to be your best; willingness to
follow your ideas through to completion.
Quickly see patterns and possibilities, with the ability
to rapidly hypothesize and generate low-risk
trading ideas.
You could probably generate a trading business plan
and trading systems quite easily and naturally.
TRADING CHALLENGES
You may be so logical that you don’t recognize when
emotions are causing you to self-destruct.
You have a strong desire to be right, even to the extent
of perfectionism. This might cause you to never actually
trade because you continually are trying to develop or
buy better systems.
You may be susceptible to the loss trap. Therefore, you
may not honor your stops because you want to be right
about your trades.
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Leveraging your strengths and
addressing your challenges as
a Strategic Trader
As a Strategic Trader, you have high aspirations and standards and are more than capable of doing things
well on your own. However, we know you want to be the very best and learn from the very best.
LEVERAGING YOUR STRENGTHS
Strength #1 – Originality, Drive
You have the kind of psychological profile that lends itself to success in the
markets. Now that you know that, what do you do? Start here...
Read the Article “What Is Involved in Peak Performance Trading?”
Strength #2 – Rapidly Identify Patterns
If you are trading, are you using a complete and well thought out system? Do you
know what a complete trading system entails? If not, your trading results would
benefit greatly by understanding that and as a Strategic Trader, you can excel at
systems development.
Read the Article “What Is a Trading System?”
Strength #3 – Ability to Plan
You could probably generate a trading business plan and trading systems quite
easily and naturally. Professional traders use a business plan as a guide for their
business and trading systems as guides to their trading. Do you view your trading
as a business yet? Are you trading systems? If not, read the following article.
Read the Article “17 Steps”
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As a Strategic Trader, you have high aspirations and standards
and are more than capable of doing things well on your own.
However, we know you want to be the very best and learn
from the very best.
ADDRESSING YOUR CHALLENGES
Challenge #1 – Recognizing Mistakes: Logic over Emotion
As a Strategic Trader you are probably so logical, that you don’t even recognize
when your emotions are causing you to self-destruct. You must overcome the
tendency to have your logic hinder your ability to recognize mistakes; repeated
mistakes equal self-sabotage.
Read the Article “Mistakes”
Challenge #2 – Perfectionism
You have a strong desire to be right, even to the extent of perfectionism. This
might cause you to never actually trade because you are trying to develop or buy
better systems continually.
You probably don’t need people telling you what to do and may even find that
your perfectionism has served you in many ways throughout your life. However,
in the trading arena it would be practical to avoid perfectionism so that you are
able to learn the best ways to evaluate trading systems.
Read the Article “The Fundamentals of Tharp Think”
Challenge #3 – Need to be Right
You may not honor your stops because you want to be right about your trades.
This can lead to an even bigger issue and make you susceptible to the “loss trap.”
To win at trading, you must learn about the loss trap and how to overcome it.
Read the Article “The Loss Trap”
Read on for Additional Resources....
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ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
In addition to the articles mentioned above, the Van Tharp Institute
has numerous books, courses, and aids to help the Strategic
Trader improve.
As a very logical person, you may struggle at first with the idea that
you don’t trade the markets, but instead you trade your beliefs
about the markets. In Van’s book, Trading Beyond the Matrix, the
chapter, “Understanding the Impact of Beliefs and How I Create My
Experience” will give you tremendous insights into understanding
what this means and how it can have a huge impact on your trading.
Also, you’ll likely relate to many of the traders who have written
chapters for this book. While it is never specified, many of them have
the same trader type as you.
As a Strategic Trader, you like clarity in your information. Van
provided a lot of information on successful trading plainly organized
in his book Super Trader: Make Consistent Profits in Good and Bad
Markets. The five sections of the book delve into the key areas for
every trader to focus on for success: working on yourself, business
planning, trading systems, position sizing, and monitoring your
psychology. Whether these terms are familiar or brand new to you,
Super Trader’s fifty chapters are all short and each has one or two
actionable ideas to help you improve your trading. It was Van’s
favorite book and there are fun parts in it you would probably enjoy.
The second edition of the Trade your Way to Financial Freedom book
contains a number of chapters that Strategic Traders would find
especially useful. The book has a lot of material on trading systems.
Most companies that offer trading systems sell a setup and an
entry as the whole system but that is only a part (and a relatively
unimportant part) of what we view as a trading system. The book
includes discussions of several trading systems and a number of
ideas that can be easily turned into systems. Strategic Traders have a
natural inclination to put this kind of information to great use.
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As a Strategic Trader, we know you have a strong commitment to
become the best you can be. If you are ready to back that up with
some time and effort, we recommend the Peak Performance Home
Study Course. Strategic Traders will find value in all five volumes but
we’d like to point out three of them in particular. Volume 2 covers
the topic of stress. Strategic Traders tend to be highly logical and the
stress process can involve some illogical inputs. This means that you
might not recognize stress, yet your trading will endure the effects
of that stress. Volume 4 on discipline would also be very valuable
for you. Discipline involves feelings, which, as a Strategic Trader, you
are not attuned to understand. This blind area for you can lead to
self-sabotage. Have you ever known what you should do but then do
something else? That’s self-sabotage and as strange as it may sound
to your highly logical brain, recognizing your feelings will help you be
more successful. The 5th volume on sound decisions will help you
improve an area that is already strong for you. Learn the importance
of decision strategies to help you make even better decisions.
Learn how to use your analytical skills to understand risk and how
to put risk to work for you. Along with the Peak Performance Home
Study, you can also take the Investment Psychology Inventory
Profile assessment to examine in even further detail your strengths
and weaknesses.
To view and learn more about our entire line of products, please visit:
www.vantharp.com/home-study
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List of Tharp Trader types and
their potential for success in the markets
High potential for market success:
Strategic Trader
Planning Trader
Good potential for trading success with some work:
Detailed Trader
Facilitative Trader
Innovative Trader
Spontaneous Trader
Independent Trader
Administrative Trader
Values Driven Trader
Socially Responsible Trader
Accurate Trader
Adventurous Trader
Potential for trading success with lots of work or have others manage their money:
Supportive Trader
Artistic Trader
Fun Loving Trader
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THANK YOU for taking the Tharp Trader Test, which evaluates
psychological tendencies relating to how you gather, store,
comprehend and act upon information and input. After modeling
and studying thousands of traders, we’re able to help you
understand a little about yourself with just a few questions, based
on a much lengthier profile that we use to evaluate traders. This test
was designed simply to introduce you to some of the issues that
affect your trading.
After all, YOU are the single most important factor in your trading
performance but how well do you understand that? How well do you
know yourself, and what kind of internal forces are at work when
you trade? The Tharp Trader Test helps you identify strengths that
should help you trade and challenges that may interfere with your
trading. It also helps evaluate your possession of the three core
qualities of top traders:
1
The ability to see the big picture, new possibilities and
connections between things.
2
Making decisions based on logic and analysis.
3
Being decisive, orderly and doing things sequentially.
For more information, click on the links in this report or visit
our website:
www.vantharp.com
You will start receiving your Inbox Coaching newsletter soon! Look
for monthly market condition updates and a monthly cryptoassets
update.
Also, be sure to read each section of the Tharp Think Concepts if you
have not already. These concepts take the mystery out of trading by
helping you understand who you are as a trader, how your personal
psychology can work for you instead of against you, how to think
about and manage risk, and how to develop winning trading systems.
Again, thank you very much for taking the Tharp Trader Test and
good luck to you!
Sincerely,
The Van Tharp Institute
Dr. Van K Tharp, armed with a Ph.D.
in psychology and several losing
experiences in the market, realized
that perhaps the poor results that
he’d been getting in the markets had
more to do with him than the markets
themselves. So his quest began for
how he could become a better trader.
He conducted in-depth research to
determine the qualities that great
traders and investors had, and his
research uncovered ten distinct areas
that were important to trading success.
These studies led to the creation of a
176 question test called the Investment Psychology Inventory Profile
based around these ten areas, and
after testing thousands of traders over
many years, it has proven to be a great
indicator of success in the markets.
The Tharp Trader Test is a mini version
of this extensive test that is designed
to provide a snapshot of the various
types of traders that Dr. Tharp has
identified.
What if you have read this report and only some of it or even very little of it seems to apply to you? That’s possible. To make this test fast to take
(and very low cost!), we kept the sampling questions to a minimum; the resulting trader profile is merely a rough estimate of who you are. If it
seems off-base, you could consider taking the test again or simply just be aware that the results in this profile are not you; they are an extremely
simple model of you. In most cases, however, we have found it to be fairly accurate. If a more scientifically rigorous psychological profile interests
you, we offer that on our website in the products section.
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