Tom Hougaard in Toronto: Behind The Monitor

Behind The Monitor
A speech about the life of a high-stake day trader in stock indices and forex, and author of bestselling book Best Loser Wins, which now has sold in excess of 100,000 copies.

This is a speech about everything that goes on in the life of a professional trader, from mental preparation and chart preparation to the setups Tom is relying on, based on deep statistical analysis of intra-day patterns, as well as the lifestyle choices he has made to sustain his energy throughout the day, in his 2 decades of trading.

Tom Hougaard says about this speech:

I wanted to call the talk “Statistics & Psychology”, but Behind the Monitor is perhaps a better title. I have written this 3-hour speech especially for traders in North America, who focus their time and effort on trading the US indices, such as the Dow Index, the SP500, Russell 2000 and of course the Nasdaq 100.

After two decades of intense day-trading, and 8 years of daily live trading on my social media outlets, I am no stranger to “getting the job done”. I am a so-called “expert” in technical analysis, but I am not a fan of conventional technical analysis, because I feel it falls short of the objectives I want to achieve daily.

Instead, I have coined an expression, which I call “situational analysis”, which is mechanical in nature. It means I know exactly what to do and when and how to do it, at certain times of the day.

Of course, I am not relying on mechanical approaches alone. They make up 50% of my trading, while the other 50% is discretionary, meaning I am reading the charts.

In this talk I will reveal some of the tools I use for trading US indices. I want to make clear to you that I am not an 18-year-old YouTube trader, who never loses, and my presentation and my teachings reflect that.

Last year, in 2023, my live trading saw me execute 337 Dow Jones Index trades, and 314 Nasdaq 100 trades. My win rate in the Dow Index is just 47%, with a breakeven and loss percentage of 11% and 42% respectively. Yet, I still made more than 1450 Dow points, in just 45 minutes worth of trading a day, with two months off last year.

My Nasdaq trading is not so different from my Dow trading. I made 677 Nasdaq points in total, with a win percentage of 55%, again from only about 45 minutes worth of trading.

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?

While I want to show you some of my entry techniques, and how I go about developing sound and solid entry parameters, 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.

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 in the trading game are pretty smart people, full of confidence, 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. It is about how I am able to do what I do, with such consistency, year after year.

I will talk about strategies, based purely on price action. I will talk about the setups I rely on. I will talk about the mental preparation that I go through. I will talk about how I train. Yes, I train “charts”.

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, no one has flawless strategies. We are dealing with the unknown. No one wins all the time.

I will go behind the monitor in this speech, and I will unveil what goes on behind the scenes of a high-stake trader, from I wake up until I go to bed, what I look at, and why I look at it.

I hope to see you for an immersive talk.

Tom Hougaard

Host or Publisher Tom Hougaard