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. www.vantharp.com 1 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. www.vantharp.com 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.” 2 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. www.vantharp.com 3 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” www.vantharp.com 4 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.... www.vantharp.com 5 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. www.vantharp.com 6 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 www.vantharp.com 7 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 www.vantharp.com 8 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. www.vantharp.com 9