The Van Tharp Institute Blog

Trading at a peak performance level requires that you know exactly how to react under any circumstances. What happens if you are holding 8,000 shares of IBM and it suddenly drops 3 points? What will you do? What if you are day-trading S&Ps with about five open contracts when suddenly you get a call from…

I’m now 70 years old, but, if I can, I plan to continue to do what I do for at least another 25 to 30 years. Warren Buffet is still running Berkshire Hathaway at 86 and his partner, Charlie Munger is still effective and 92. So I plan to do the same. Effective this year…

Some readers might recall that Dr. Ken Long and I developed a Systems Thinking Workshop last summer. The initial reason for that course was that Ken Long has a master’s degree in systems thinking and a doctoral degree in decision making under uncertainty. We realized that a good understanding of systems thinking really helped people…

One of my clients gave me a book by Carol Dweck called Theories of Self: Their Role in Motivation, Personality, and Development. In it, Dr. Dweck states: My work is developed around the idea that people develop beliefs that organize their world and give meaning to their experiences. These beliefs may be called meaning systems…

In any endeavor in life, you have up and down periods. Dealing with the market has many such up and down periods. In order to profit from the up periods, you have to tolerate or even “enjoy” the down periods. I’m an NLP modeler. That means if someone does something well, I can figure out…

One of the key exercises I have my Super Traders do is a full life review. The essence of the exercise is to write down as many memories as you can for each year of your life. Furthermore, you also look at the beliefs you formed in each year of your life. When confronted with…

Most people don’t understand that they need a trading system if they are to make money in the markets. Most importantly, that system must fit you, your objectives, your psychology, and your beliefs, for you to be able to trade it effectively. Furthermore, that system, at minimum, needs an abort signal (when you know you…

I first started this business of helping traders and investors in 1982. Those first years in business coincided with the start of the great bull market in stocks that lasted from 1982 through 1999. My first clients, however, were mostly futures and option traders; we had very few stock traders. Equity traders really didn’t make…