Having made the initial choice to begin investing money in the share market, traders and investors are then faced with a huge number of choices as to how they will engage the markets and begin their investing and trading journey. Many of these are choices on a range of issues that they have not even considered or thought about until they enter the financial markets. Perhaps the most critical of these choices concerns the tools and education they will use in order to achieve their desired outcomes.
Many are attracted to the markets by the promises of instant riches with little or no work, and are dazzled into believing they will become an overnight success without any prior experience or knowledge of the markets; some set out on their own journey with blind faith in their own ability and the mistaken belief that they can single-handedly take on the markets and win; some poor misguided individuals believe that a buy and hold investment strategy will be the ticket to long term success.
When first starting out, the vast majority of people do not understand what they really need in order to be successful in their trading and investing activities. They are often overwhelmed by the range and variety of products and services available to ‘help’ them become successful traders and investors – newsletters, courses, technical analysis, fundamental analysis, indicators, systems, computer programmes, software – the list goes on and on.
Then of course there is the huge amount of information available on the Internet – investor forums, trading websites, on-line newsletters, the next wiz-bang trading system, ‘free’ data, and on and on it goes. In all of this, sorting the wheat from the chaff can be a mind boggling, time consuming and often daunting process that can leave you even more confused than when you started! It is a time sapping process that distracts you from what you set out to do and one that can take years of your time, and 100’s of lost opportunities to make a profit, as you fumble around trying to isolate what works and what is just plain rubbish.
The choices to achieve success in the markets go way beyond the use of technical or fundamental analysis to decide which shares to buy and the choice of which computer programme and which trading platform to use. Of far greater importance are the concepts of trade exit, handling losing trades, money management skills and techniques, position sizing models, risk management, and the never ending process of developing and maintaining the mindset and psychological skills needed to consistently and constantly successfully engage the financial markets.
There is far more to trading and investing than ‘just making money’ – whilst this may be one of our desired outcomes, it can only be achieved WHEN we get the processes right that allow us to achieve objectivity and consistency. This will not be arrived at by logging onto a chat forum to arrive at your buy and sell decisions, reacting to the nightly news or financial review, nor will it be achieved by listening to our friend’s biases or broker reports.
To move forward in this game we need tools and rules that have been tried and tested in the battled arena of the market. Then we require a process to be able to react to our tools and rules. This is how we make money in the markets over the long term.
So before you make your next trade, think of how you’re arriving at your trading and investment decisions. If you’re lost with information overload and inconsistency, we can get you on the right path. We’ve spent over > 10 person years in researching and re-researching the market and stocks to determine and re-confirm that our timing rules, risk management rules and money management rules remain relevant and continue to deliver a significant edge in the market. We then have the research to prove that if an investor follows the rules of SPA3, over a large sample of trades and trading events that they will out-perform the market. Big statement but this is exactly what our research demonstrates!
