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People are always looking for the real secrets of trading success, but their mental biases always have them looking in the wrong places and at the wrong things. Consequently, they search for magical trading systems with 75% accuracy or better or for great entry systems that they think will help them pick the right stock. Picking the right stock has nothing to do with success and neither does the accuracy of your stock picking.

Practically all Market Wizards agree that the key ingredients to your success are:

(1) the golden rule of trading — cut your losses short and let your profits run.

(2) that part of your trading system that tells you how much.

(3) the discipline to do both.

When you think about the golden rule of trading, it basically describes exits—how you abort losses and ride winners. When you think about Position Sizing, it basically controls how much you risk on any given trade.

Dr. Tharp has designed the Secrets of the Masters Trading Game to help traders learn the secrets to trading success before they trade the markets. This game totally de-emphasizes entry or stock picking and instead requires that you focus on the most important aspects of trading. Position Sizing and letting your profits run. The new game has ten levels that get progressively more difficult to master. However, once traders have mastered these principles, they will know they have mastered some of the key skills to trading success.

Download the game to your computer by clicking on the Tradeing Success header link above. You will have the opportunity to play levels one through three of the game for FREE.

If you choose to purchase the Secrets of the Masters Trading Game, which includes unlimited access to levels 4-10, all you will have to do is order on line. The entire game is $195. Once you order the game we will give you a personal access code that will allow you to play all levels of the Secrets of the Masters Trading Game.

I have found the game to very helpful, and I have played it over and over again with different money management programs. It’s one thing to read about the mind traps that traders create regarding probabilities and the gambler’s fallacy, or to read that random number series can contain protracted winning and losing streaks, but playing a simulation that feels like trading really drives home the lessons about discipline, systems, and expectancy. Playing the game over time helps reinforce the idea that you get the same probability distributions as everyone else, and that your trading plan will need to address this fact through money management, position sizing, trading rules etc.

I have found that it also helps you change the way you frame the activity of trading, because the game focuses on systems results and strips away entries, setups and the other false control illusions that traders inevitably get wrapped up in. At first it didn’t feel like trading, because it didn’t focus on the things that I did when I traded, but gradually it did.

It dawned on me that I might not be focusing on the right areas. The opportunity to view a trading system as the random distribution of hundreds or thousands of independent trials changed my view about my ability to change the markets, and focusing on maximizing system outcomes has given me a fresh perspective on trading, systems development, and risk.

The Secrets of the Masters Trading Game by Dr. Van Tharp is one of the finest tools I've used to improve my trading. A trading game designed for real world trading. Excellent to say the least. Click the Trading Success header link above for more information and the free trial.

Good day and good trading.

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