Trading Genius II Course: The Holy Grail – Systems Thinking and Beyond

This is a video-on-demand course with a recording of the 4-day workshop presentation and PDF slides. You are purchasing access to the full workshop recording with all available study materials. Note that some bonus materials or resources mentioned in the course may no longer be available.

A note from Van Tharp:

My understanding in this field has significantly evolved and deepened far beyond what I taught when I first helped develop this workshop. I will explain my current thoughts, beliefs, and philosophies about my latest theory – the Matrix Thinking Meta-Model. Understanding it will help you begin to realize how YOU create everything around you. This is my most exciting and mentally stimulating work since The Matrix.

“You will learn how to see from multiple perspectives, why you should think in terms of probabilities all the time, and how to reach higher levels of consciousness. Using the Matrix Thinking frame will help you achieve an improved perspective of “you” and your world, which will generate genuine new edges in your trading — and in every area of your life.”

— Van K. Tharp

Trading Genius II Course Overview

Do You Want to Master the Craft of Trading?

In this 4-day workshop, you will learn more about yourself, your trading markets, and your systems. When you finish this workshop, you will understand what you need to do to become a Trading Genius. Even many of the Market Wizards from Jack Schwager’s famous books don’t fully understand what we will cover in the workshop. They don’t know what it means to be a Trading Genius. Instead, most of them have a great edge, but they’ll have a very hard time if it stops working. Trading Geniuses know how to develop new edges in an ever-evolving market.

Market Wizards aside, most traders don’t have an edge, useful market beliefs, or a system, and they don’t know what systems thinking is, let alone how to use systems thinking for trading. Instead, they are probably taking someone else’s advice, which mixes their own beliefs with those of the person giving the advice. This almost never works out well.

In the Trading Genius II: System Thinking workshop, we are going to show you how to look into the beliefs about how you trade and how to evolve those beliefs. By the end of the course, you’ll learn how to make the changes you need to get the results you want.

But what if your current trading is on track already? This information will take your current trading to a new height and will help you improve your trading forever, generating great results even as the markets change.

The Holy Grail of Trading is YOU!

You can’t trade a market. You can only trade your beliefs about that market. Your beliefs are what shape your reality, and the Holy Grail of trading is not a high-performing system or stock; it is you. Success in the markets comes from eliminating beliefs that are not useful and finding beliefs that are useful. How do you define a belief as useful or not? A useful belief helps you achieve your objectives.

Having clear objectives is foundational to generating great trading results. That’s why it’s important to know who you really are. You are the witness. You are the consciousness. You can tap into divine consciousness and make a hugely successful trading system (This is where trading genius comes in) in relation to your objectives.

Mastering Systems Thinking: The Missing Link in Trading Success

Van’s Systems Thinking workshop is unrelated to any one kind of trading. In fact, the course relates to trading but he does not focus on trading. It’s a psychologically oriented workshop to help you understand how systems work and how to develop mental models that help your ability to think in system terms. In Van’s context, “systems” go far beyond trading and even beyond the markets as complex dynamic systems. Van goes into scientific theory and goes out as far as the cosmos in his coverage of the subject area to help attendees think more “systematically” in trading and in the other realms of their lives.

Systems Thinking for Traders: Shaping Beliefs, Behavior, and Results

Where All of Your Success Centers… Very likely, this trader acts solely from a tactical point of view:

ID a chart pattern, create an order, and execute.

They then wait and see if their system, if they have one, has delivered a profit. And yet, there is so much more at play…

Capital markets and the traders who participate in them are both made up of complex, dynamic, and adaptive systems.

By thinking only about tactics, you miss the bigger factor shaping your success.

Your beliefs and every thought that you hold as true need to be explored in a deeper, more comprehensive way.

After all, ALL of your success as a trader, and even as a human being, centers on your beliefs.

This is where Matrix Thinking, a higher level of systems thinking, comes in…

Where you will learn more about yourself, the markets you trade, and the systems you use…

Giving you a genuine opportunity to master the craft of trading.

First, however, we need to define what systems thinking is.

What is Systems Thinking?

Systems thinking should not be considered a simple idea, but rather a combination of numerous subjects.

For example, systems thinking is considered:

• An integrated body of knowledge or discipline—think the Scientific method and Sir Isaac Newton. Here, the focus is on the objective or that which can be observed.
• An idea involving your mindset, or way of looking beyond the basic trading aspects of tactics. Here, we are starting to look at beliefs.
• A recurring and iterative process, requiring various inputs. These might include changes in oneself, the markets, your results in comparison to your objectives, and more. The outputs include informed decision-making about what systems to use, what position sizing strategies to employ, if and when discretion is utilized, and more.

Advanced systems thinking also involves mental maps, and how they are used to guide you while in the trading process. Here, the subjective becomes as important as the objective.

However, even this has limits, as most standard systems thinking is mostly linear thinking,

I believe I have found a new, more robust way of thinking about systems…

And it’s here where we can begin to reach new levels of awareness and increase the chances of achieving success through trading.

An Evolution in Systems Thinking:

In the past, I worked with Ken Long to get a better understanding of certain aspects of systems thinking. With a military background and a Ph.D. in decision-making under uncertainty, he provided great guidance in explaining some of the more analytical areas involving the trading process.

Recently, however, I discovered various new ways of thinking about systems and the mental maps we create around them, going beyond today’s current limits. My new concepts involve systems thought from a unique perspective, including Oneness and the applications of NLP to trading. From these, as well as what I have studied and learned over the last 35 years as your trading coach, I have developed a decidedly different model; one that involves not just a single map, but multiple layers of several different maps. It is the basis for this workshop.

 “The Map is not the Territory”

One of the key principles of systems thinking is the concept that “the map is not the territory.” Alfred Korzybski first coined the phrase back in 1931, and he explains how people confuse models of reality with reality itself.

On the first day, we will take a deep dive into the whole concept of what we perceive as reality. It’s here where you will learn that everything is made up. From this understanding, we can begin to lay the groundwork for matrix thinking and its benefits to you as a trader.

How Matrix Thinking Can Work for You:

For most of you, the need to be right is the main issue you face as traders. We were taught in school that being right is important; after all, you had to be right to get good grades. And while this served us in school, it creates major issues for traders.

The lower emotions of fear, greed, anger, grief, shame, and guilt tend to come from the need to be right.

So, imagine for a moment…

• What if you could trade from a place where not having to be right is ok?
• Where being right is much less important than making money?
• What if you could trade from a position of strength, and above those lower emotions?

Instead of fear — Peace…

Instead of anger — Joy…

And instead of greed — Satisfaction…

These higher emotions are available to you consistently…

And that is what this workshop is all about: to get you to think from a higher level…

One where you can see how you create everything in your life, including your trading results.

What You’ll Learn In This Workshop:

Day 1

• Understand that the market is a process, and you can only trade your beliefs about that process. You will learn how the human mind works and how to adopt useful beliefs. That’s where the real power comes into your life. And that power is for all aspects of your life, not just trading.
• Start to become a systems thinker. You will learn why it is so hard to become a systems thinker, and at the same time, you will get what’s necessary to move in that direction. Alfred Korzybski, in his famous book, Science and Sanity, came up with several useful principles. You’ll learn about 20 of the most important principles and how to incorporate them into how you think. You’ll also learn about the eight steps to being a strategic thinker.
• You’ll begin to understand complex systems – and trading systems certainly qualify under that category – but we’ll also show you how to use some of the models of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) to make such systems comprehensible.
• You’ll learn the power of metaphors and how to think about your trading as a metaphor. Plus, we’ll do an exercise using metaphors that will allow you to put all of this material together so that you really get it.
• The fourth form of knowledge might be called Gnosis, Samadhi, or Turiya. This is a state that you can reach through meditation, and we’ll show you its power. For example, much of what is known about the structure of the brain, the mind, and that matter was discovered through the Gnosis state and written down in the books of the Vedas over 3,000 years ago. In addition, in a modern version of that, members of the Theosophical Society predicted the discovery of subatomic particles way before they were discovered or even theorized by modern physics. What if you could get some of your knowledge this way?
• We’ll look at some common newsletters – some that you might subscribe to for thousands of dollars each year, and you will see how they are trading their beliefs, and when those beliefs might not work at all. How you might end up clashing with those beliefs and thus neutralizing the impact when they do work. For example, The Motley Fool will probably sell you portfolios of stocks that they expect to make you rich, saying how you could make 1000 times your money or more by holding on to these stocks forever. But what do you do when your portfolio is down 60%—which could easily happen—especially after the current long-bull market in stocks?
• You’ll learn how a financial planner is incentivized to give you information that will probably guarantee that you don’t have enough money to live on during your retirement. But that’s just him doing what keeps his business going and doing what big money wants him to— which is to transfer money from you to big money.
• Use all of this to design a system for making money in BTC that will outperform buy-and-hold. You’ll get to see systems thinking, strategic thinking, and using the Beyond the Matrix Thinking “BTMT” format to analyze what works. If you don’t want to buy and hold BTC, then you’ll learn a good alternative to that in this workshop.
• And lastly, we’ll explore the possibility of developing a system to trade some hot areas like cannabis stocks, 5-G, or artificial intelligence. We’ll guide you through the development of a system that’s much more powerful than just buying what a newsletter recommends and then hoping they are right about even a few of their predictions.

Day 2

• We will get to work and apply what you have learned so far, as well as answer any questions you might have about the last section.
• Use systems thinking to see maps from different perspectives and to move between maps. This is necessary for BTMT.  Systems thinking would have you believe the subjective and the objective are equally important. BTMT would have you take the approach that it is all made up. You will understand how Van uses BTMT so you can better understand his approach to everything.
• You will learn why becoming a systems (or BTMT) thinker is so important, and we will help you incorporate systems/BTMT thinking into your trading and your Trading Business Handbook.
• Understand from an NLP approach what knowledge and reality are, and why we say the map is not the territory. You will understand that you have many maps, each of which is a system, but that all of your maps together are a system. This is critical because your map is all you really know.
• Why linear thinking doesn’t work. This is what makes systems thinking so important. Think of linear thinking as staying with one perspective on one map and systems thinking as being able to shift perspectives on a map, to change a map, and to switch to a different map.
• Understand the qualities of systems thinking. We’ll help you understand complex thinking and how that complexity is related to things such as the number of elements in the system, the degree of connectivity within the systems, to what extent the elements adapt to the environment, and the degree of diversity between the elements of a system.
• Develop a trading house metaphor and understand the importance of checklists and scaffolding within the framework of systems thinking.
• We will show you how you can take a complex system (all the VTI teachings and models) and turn it into an understandable system using NLP Unified Field Theory. 

Day 3

• We will start by answering your questions about the last section.
• Much of this session will be used to play a game designed to help you begin the process of systems thinking. 
• After the game, we will tackle how the self (YOU) and the system work together – or not – depending on several factors we will discuss.
• We will study the NLP Unified Field Theory and consider how systems thinking helps us view the universe as a system.
• We will comb through the criteria that Van uses to approve trading systems for the Super Traders so you can evaluate your own trading systems using the same criteria.
• We will study several wicked problems and find how they are insolvable using linear thinking. Only Systems Thinking can help us resolve these seemingly intractable problems. 

Day 4

• We will start by answering any questions you might have about the last sections.
• We will introduce you to various “house of trading metaphors\” that could help you change how you think about a particular trading challenge. You will understand the importance of such metaphors for your trading, so you can start thinking about your own metaphors that will work for you.
• Beyond the Matrix Thinking: Gnosis. We will go over the Gnosis state in which a person’s mind is focused on only one point, thought, or goal, and all other thoughts are thrust out. Also, we will discuss developing your bond with your inner guidance.
• You’ll learn what it takes to become a trading genius. You’ll give up the need to be right, use multiple useful maps, seen from different perspectives, and systems thinking to accomplish your goals.
• How to invest/ trade in a hot area. We will review the material by taking you through an exercise of trading a hot area and how to design a system that would help you make money.

Position sizing is limited to the following:

• You may trade up to $50,000 with a maximum of five trades or as few as one $50,000 trade. Or you could even have one position of $50,000 as your trade and five different exits of $10K each from that position
• The value of each position can be $10,000 each, or the $50,000 may be divided up as desired (i.e $25,000, $10,000, $5,000, $5,000, $5,000)
• You could have one position of $10,000 and enter/exit five different times, totaling $50,000
• You are allowed a maximum of five entries and five exits
• The positions can be buy-and-hold, where you enter on day one of trading and exit on the last day

Selection of Positions:

• This must be clear:
• For example, you might say, “I’m going to trade the first five recommendations of a particular newsletter when those trades meet the criteria I’ve submitted”
• I’m going to trade five different stocks from a particular asset class, such as (AI, 5G, MJ, or the 10 hottest stocks on the NASDAQ). See example in 2b-iii, 1 and 2.
• You can trade anything that has a published open and closed price.
• No trading on leverage, so no futures (but you could trade cash crude oil or an ETF representing some commodity) and no options. The only exception is a leveraged ETF.
• You cannot go short because that requires margin. The only exception is an inverse ETF (i.e USDD-US Dollar Down).
• You can Trade leverage ETFs (i.e, S&P500 times 3)

Possible Objectives:

• Make Money and beat the S&P 500
• Finish 1^st or in the top five
• Beat Dr. Tharp and RJ
• Learn more about how you trade by putting it into the BTMT format. For example, if you follow a newsletter, then you get the beliefs of the newsletter. Find out how those might clash with your beliefs. Improve on the newsletter performance  (i.e, see what Van did with Motley Fool portfolio, Steve Sjuggerud’s True Wealth, or one of the crypto portfolios on Day one of the workshop).

We can not stress how important this workshop can be for successful trading. The workshop could quickly pay for itself in preventing one loss you may have otherwise taken or from the profits of one new idea. More importantly, what you learn from this workshop will benefit you for a lifetime.

I believe this Systems Thinking Workshop can deliver new insights into both yourself and your trading. With me as your guide, you will leave with a different perspective on new, useful beliefs and discover what is possible for your trading and beyond.

To your success,

— Van K. Tharp

About Your Instructor, Dr. Van Tharp

Dr. Van K. Tharp is the renowned founder of the Van Tharp Institute and one of the world’s leading trading performance coaches. With a Ph.D. in psychology and over 30 years of experience modeling top traders, Dr. Tharp is best known for transforming the way people approach trading and investing. He is the only trading coach featured in Jack Schwager’s best-selling classic Market Wizards: Interviews with Top Traders—a testament to his expertise and impact in the field.

Dr. Tharp is the author of 11 influential books on trading psychology, position sizing, and peak performance, including Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom and Super Trader. His pioneering work on the psychological aspects of trading has helped thousands of traders worldwide break through mental barriers and achieve consistent success.

Recognized globally, Dr. Tharp has been featured in Forbes, Barron’s, Investor’s Business Daily, Technical Analysis of Stocks and Commodities, and other major financial publications. His workshops, coaching programs, and home study courses are considered among the most respected and transformative in the industry.

This course isn’t just another trading program—it’s a lifetime resource. The lessons you’ll learn can elevate not only your trading results but also your personal development. Don’t just take our word for it—scroll below to read what students and professional traders have said about their experience with Dr. Tharp’s training.

Testimonials for Van’s Books, Courses, and Workshops

“I read your two books and found them extremely interesting. I’m incorporating your strategies into my personal life and finances…I have read a great number of books and articles on these subjects. However, I found your strategies much more logical and original than any other ones.”

— L. Ginette, Quebec City, Canada

“I want to take this opportunity to thank you for the life-changing training experience I had five years ago at your seminar in North Carolina… My trading has resulted in over 2 million in profit this year… prior to my experience in your program five years ago, I would have to say I had never been a truly profitable trader. My sincerest thanks and appreciation for the study you have made of “modeling” other professional successful traders and imparting their correct psychological habits and techniques to those of us who desire to attain the status of trader for profit.”

— J.C.

“Just wanted to drop you a line to thank you for all your help and to give you some feedback on my progress… after completing your course and developing a game plan and journal, I started back to trading…To make a long story short, I have had 8 trades since the end of July when I started trading. I lost four and was profitable on four. The last two were also quite spectacular, netting a total of over $37,000 in two weeks…your course and inventory Profile helped me to get a hand on my more self-defeating tendencies.”

— E.W.

Read more testimonials.

Frequently Ask Questions