Tom Hougaard in Frankfurt - Behind The Monitor

BEHIND THE MONITOR OF A FULL TIME PROFESSIONAL DAY TRADER

THIS EVENT IS IN ENGLISH

I have written a speech called Behind the Monitor. This 3-hour talk breaks with tradition because the focus is not exclusively on traditional trading topics such as indicators and price action.

Instead, this talk is about you and me. The statistics does not lie. Trading success is something very few people experience. Why is that?

I have realised that standing on a stage for 3 hours, showing “old entries” on charts, maybe even doing some live trading, is not overly useful for many people, especially newcomers to trading. Yes, it is exciting to see live trades, and it is interesting to learn setups, but setups alone do not make you a profitable trader. I want to give a talk that talks about the hidden clues to success.

The talk starts from the premise that most traders end up losing money. Now considering that most people entering the trading game are pretty smart people, people who often are full of confidence in their abilities, it stands to reason that there is something hidden in the game of trading that most people never find.

This talk is about that “hidden” thing.

Every trading day I step up and I trade live, often in front of thousands of people. I have my ups. I have my downs. I have my joys and celebrations. I have my frustrations and my “ahh for f… sake” moments, but overall, I make money fairly consistently.

Why is that?

What is it about me and my behaviour that makes for consistency in trading? Is it my superior knowledge of technical analysis? Well, that would be a lie, because my strategies are far from flawless. And may I add, so is everyone else’s. No one wins all the time.

I will go behind the monitor in this speech, and I will disclose what goes on behind the scenes when I trade, and I will share with you the 6 setups that I rely on to make money.

The event is much more than a talk about trading strategies and setups. I have had several trading mentors in my life. All of them preached the same thing: A certain technique. Pattern Recognition. Sacred Ratios. Elliott Wave Theory. You name it, I did it.

I never saw them make meaningful money trading. One openly admitted he never traded. He was the author of 3 books on candlechart trading.

Every time I learned a new technique, I thought I was destined for trading greatness. I didn’t realise my mentors were as lost as I was. They made it all about the tool and paid little or no attention to the person holding the tool.

If I failed under their tutelage, it was never the fault of the tools they taught, because the tool could always be tweaked to mean more than one thing. 61.8% or 78.6%. I rest my case.

But I carried on searching. Eventually I found the right kind of mentor, and I found the right kind of tool. The mentor was a retired elite solider. I walked with him in the mountains in Spain for two days. Then I never saw him again. The tool is what I call situational analysis, but that is a story for another time.

Most traders never get to where I am. They underestimate themselves, and so go looking for guidance in the external. There will always be someone offering you the easy answers – for a price.

Be aware. Valuable lessons are hard to come by and can almost never be bought with money. There is a different price to pay, one that only the few are prepared to pay.

I came to appreciate that there are two kinds of valuables in life. I have learned that what is valuable to most people is rarely valuable for long.

Humans dream of expensive cars and castles, and if we are lucky enough to get them, we realise they aren’t valuable at all. They were just difficult to get.

We rarely dream or invest in inner peace, good health and self-control. We can’t buy them. We must work for them, and the price is not quantifiable. It is easier to dream of a Rolex. We know the price.

What has a price tag has no lasting value. The “goods” without a price tag are priceless, both literally and metaphorically. Conquering your “self” is the gift that keeps giving, long after the present has been unwrapped.

I think of it like this. Do you want to be right using a 1-lot position, or a 100-lot position? Anybody can learn to walk across a wire, suspended 1 foot up in the air. Can you walk the same wire when it is suspended 1000 feet in the air?

It is the same wire. It is the same walk. It is the same mechanics. That is how I think of trading. I practise detachment through my visual imagination, to the point where my mind has become desensitised to the stimuli that my fear brain feeds my consciousness.

Today I traded the Dow index on the short side. I shorted £100, then another £100, and then another £100. I know. Anybody can say this. I did it live, with thousands of people watching my account.

What they didn’t know is that I have done it hundreds of times before, in my mind, practising in quiet contemplation, breathing through any stress or fear response from my fear brain. My elite solider mentor taught me this. I figured if it works for them, it will work for me.

As I said, this is where the big money is made. How big do you want to be when you are right? 1 lot? 10 lots? 100 lots? More? Perhaps the time has come to stop adding more “tools” to your trading. Perhaps the time has come to align yourself with your knowledge, internalise them, investigate your weaknesses, and then work through them with patience.

AND THAT is what my talk in Frankfurt is all about. After all – what is wisdom – what is knowledge – if you do not have the will to act upon it?

I hope to see you there.

Tom Hougaard

Host or Publisher Tom Hougaard