How I became obscenely rich

Is Trader’s University worth it for you?

I have been asked by many different people whether Traders University is worth it. I have decided to write a post here detailing my thoughts on the course and to try to answer this question. I would recommend reading the other posts I have made about TU as well to get a full picture with my different views at different times.

Firstly, Trader’s University offer a system, or an edge, to allow you to execute your trades with a system which is more likely to win over time than lose. This edge is fully detailed and explained in the book ‘The Spread Better’s Handbook’ by Malcolm Prior. (see Buy the books link on the right hand side of this blog). The book adds some very good things which were not mentioned on the course as well.

It is extremely difficult to follow even the simplest edge. This is for a number of psychological reasons (which are outlined expertly in ‘Trading in the Zone’  by Mark Douglas).  It is therefore very helpful to have the three one to one sessions that are provided by TU to help you make sure you are following the edge correctly. You can see in my previous posts how this helped me.

If you are new to trading and have never actually placed a trade before, TU will help you to get started, by giving you the confidence to actually start and place your first bet. If you have traded before, this will be of less use.

Don’t use the broker they recommend (Echelon) as my opinion is they were rude, unfriendly and don’t open the account quick enough and want loads of documentation. (See my post on choosing a broker)

Every Wednesday night, they (TU) hold a telephone session that you can dial into and listen to, key speakers talking about the market that week. This gives an overview and other people’s opinions about what is happening now. I have only listened to this once but thought it was of great value and have been meaning to listen in again. The history of conversations is available for graduates to download after the call is over.

The most fundamental thing you will learn is how to mechanically handle risk. This is a simple calculation about where to place your stops and that you must always place them. You can learn this from almost any trading book, but they do really drum it in so you don’t forget on the course. Placing stops and managing risk is the most essential part of betting and placing ‘mental’ stops is a massive ‘no no’. Don’t do it!

The course is very friendly and I was not oversold other items they offer. The sell was definitely there, but not over bearing as I have heard others say.

They will give you a lot of confidence and you will come away feeling like you are going to be the next biggest thing on wall street, and there is a general feel that you will make 10-15% profit per month using their system.

I have not yet met anyone who has, I certainly haven’t, I am actually down since I started, but then I have not dealt with all the items discussed in the ‘Trading in the Zone’ book yet.

In conclusion I would say that if you have never placed a trade, don’t know anything about spread betting and are worried you might lose your house and the shirt of your back, and you have £2K to spare then the course is probably a good idea to get you going with confidence.

If you have placed trades before, and are looking to try to win consistently then I would recommend reading ‘Spread Betting Hand Book’ first and then ‘Trading in the zone’ second. If that doesn’t help you and really need the one to one help, then go on the course.

Do not expect to make your £2K back quickly through the knowledge you have learnt. It will take a long time to become proficient in trading just like any other skill, so stick with it and keep managing your risk.

For beginners who are looking at day trading, you would have to make a lot of mistakes before you lose the same money as the course fee (£2K) and learn a lot in the field so to speak. So, manage your risk to 1% per trade, don’t place more than 5 trades in any one day and read the above books and you can learn a lot before worst case you lose £2k on bets. So you’ll need to balance what you can learn by actually trading with what you can expect to learn on the course.

Everyone is different, so I cant say if it is definitely right for you, it certainly got me into trading, but in retrospect I could have learnt what I did with the above books. However, I needed to go on the course and meet people to find those books, so hopefully I can help you to get there quicker and miss out the expensive step of doing the course.

Good Luck what ever you decide.

Finding your edge and letting go

Quite some time ago, I decided to change my surname. I have always felt that my surname was not somehow right and did not match my character. It is a strange thing to feel as I have always believed a name is only a label, but never the less, it has always slightly bugged me. I think it might come from a comment from a girl who I fancied at school when I was about 8 or 9, who didn’t like my name.

My surname was Clark, but I have now changed it to Powers. This fits much more with my personality and to me conjures up a successful powerful person.

My parents were not too happy about the idea and it has been very difficult to discuss it with them. I had wanted to change my name after our wedding, but unfortunately discussing the name change upset my parents so much they felt strange at our wedding and wanted us to talk about it to them straight after so my wife and I went up to their house the weekend after the wedding.
They felt that it would somehow change the relationship we had and reduce the bond between us. I agreed to postpone the name change for six months, if we could pretend that I had changed it and see if it psychologically changed anything. If it adversely affected our relationship we would not change our names.

It is now over one year later and of course there has been no detriment to the relationship, so we changed our name by deed poll. It is a very simple process and you can do it all online.

It is important to stand up for the things that matter to you and to take other people’s feelings into consideration. In the end it is my decision and my life and journey. Sometimes the balance between these two things can be difficult to find. However I have found that if I always make decisions from the most positive and truthful perspective that I can and try to make the best possible ‘guess’ at what would be the greatest overall energy gain for all the people involved, then generally I tend to make the right decisions and can look back and know I did the best thing at the time with the information I had.

This attitude of always following this formula is exactly the same as a trader’s edge. Not every time can you expect it to work, but overall I have found it is the best policy.

After realising that our name change would upset my parents, I did some research to try to learn more about names in general to make sure I was not being selfish and to put changing my name into a bigger picture.

I also wanted to see whether there was something more than blind tradition in the father passing the name on the son idea. Most people have this idea so locked into their heads as being important, they can attach more value in the name than the actual relationship between the people.

I researched the idea and concept of a family name and found it was in the 14th century that people in England adopted surnames at all. In Wales and Scotland it is was as late as the 17th century. This was mainly due to population increase and the subsequent need to identify individuals with the same first name.  Aristocrats had also had surnames for some time (about 100 years before the general population) and so the general population had something to aspire to and wanted “sir” names themselves.

Quite often names were not by family but by trade. So a potter would become Simon the potter, or a smithy with become John the smith. The ‘the’ part was later dropped and hence you get a lot of surnames that are like trades. As most trades were passed down from father to son, so the name was also passed down.  In fact, according to Wikipedia surnames generally followed seven category types. None of which were a copy of your father’s name.

In other cultures different rules apply, some cultures have the surname part first instead of last like in England. In some parts of Spain, a person takes both their Mother and Father’s name, and the names are not swapped between partners. This in effect means every member of the immediate family group has a different surname.

In the US it is becoming more popular for couples to create an entirely new name at marriage as we have done. In Canada, some aboriginal groups take the woman’s family name and not the mans.

All of this research has showed me names are very culturally specific and are arbitrary in terms of any intrinsic value other than what individuals put on its importance and about what circumstances may have affected their ancestors many centuries ago. Names now give a common bond amongst family members and promote a feeling of belonging to the family group. They also give a person their identity and help define who a person is.

Many professional people, actors and show biz people change their names and in some cases this is all it took for them to transition to success. This was probably a mind set that helped them to identify with themselves by changing the label to be more in line with what they felt there identity was or what they wanted it to be.

As we have seen from other posts and some of the books that have been reviewed, one of the most important ingredients for success is state of mind. I think that changing my name has helped me to create the state of mind much more conducive creating the right internal environment for success.

This has been a key part on my journey to financial freedom and philanthropy.

Pause on trading

I have found that once a month, it is a good idea to have a small break of a few days away from trading. I find this pause gives me time to reflect on the past month and review my mental attitude to the month.

I am reading a very good book at the moment by Mark Douglas called ‘Trading in the Zone’. This book is all about the attitude to trading. In fact, it is so good, I have not placed any more trades until I have read it to the end. This is because the information in it, is so important it makes me feel like I have been trading in the dark, and I don’t want to go forward until I have absorbed the content.

This book was discussed in my post ‘A spread betting disaster’ and was recommended to me by my mentor at Trader’s University (knowledge to action).

At the moment, where I am in the book, Mark Douglas describes how trading is psychologically unlike any other area of most of our lives. There are very few boundaries as to what we can and can not do in trading. No one is there to say ‘that’s not a good idea’ or ‘you can’t place that trade’. This freedom to be in control of your own destiny is obviously why so many people, including me, are attracted to trading, but he uncovers some interesting psychological challenges that this raises.

One of the biggest insights I have had so far is his theory that you do not need to know more about the markets. I thought I could reduce my losses significantly as I grew to know the markets better, but he shows how this is more linked to your state of mind than what the market is doing. Your trades are affected by your state of mind so much that anything the market does is almost of no consequence. This follows my belief about being responsible for your own success and losses.

He also shows that the skills you need to be a successful person in other areas of your life such as an entrepreneur are not the skills you need when trading and these same skills can lead to problems and losses.

I haven’t fully absorbed the whole point yet, and I have only read the first few chapters, but I would recommend this book  to any traders, especially spread betters who interact with the market much more frequently than long term traders.

I am assuming he goes on to show how to adapt your psychology when trading, but even if he doesn’t there is enough there to really make you think. I will let you know what his conclusions are when I have finished the book.

You can get this book here: http://www.positive-change.co.uk/obscenelyrich_buybooks.htm

The books

Just a small post about books. You may already know this, but I have put together a list of books that I strongly recommend if you are following my journey to becoming rich. I have read many more books than are on the list, but only those that I think are worth reading are added.

Some of the books I have reviewed in my posts on this blog.

I have found the link for the books on Amazon and signed up to their affiliate program. This means that if you buy a book from my list by clicking on it, I get a (very) small amount of the price. I checked my ‘earnings report’ as Amazon call it and so far, since launch, these are the statistics for the books:

Books sold:                                                         £53.31

Amount I get:                                                    £3.56

Number of clicks to Amazon:                      31

Number of these that made a sale:         7

It’s not going to get me rich, but it’s fun and hopefully helpful to you.

http://www.positive-change.co.uk/obscenelyrich_buybooks.htm

Sales

Yesterday, I read something which I thought I would share as this subtly changes the way in which I am proceeding with putting my presentation to my clients together regarding the new business idea I have (see previous post).

In the book ‘Selling to Win’ (Third Edition), Richard Denny says that just as you need to keep up with new technology you must keep up with new sales methods. He talks about the old way of finding the need and selling this to your clients as outdated. He talks about finding the need, and then turning it into a want.

The idea is that if you need something, you will shop around, find the best deal and be generally more picky about where you buy something from. However, when you really want something, emotion takes over and people generally buy first and think later.

So, I am going to change my approach in my presentation to focus on the needs but use the language which evokes the ‘I want’ emotion.

Luckily all my research and work so far has been around finding the need and the pain which he does say is essential, but it is just the presentation that changes.

I will let you know how I get on.

(It is a great book by the way, and I would recommend anyone who is involved in running their own business to read it. All business owners need to know how to sell.)

It has been quite some time since I wrote about turning my business from a self employed business into a business owner’s asset where I am not doing the day to day running of the client work.

The reason for my break in writing is because I have been working on more or less the same problem for the last two months.

Something my brother said to me really hit home and started me off on a different course than I had previously taken. We were talking about some issue or other and I did not feel I should have to do something that I felt was someone else’s responsibility. He said to me, it is not a matter of what you feel you should or should not do, it is a matter of getting it done.

This really hit home for me on a number of levels. Mainly that I think somewhere inside me, I had been waiting for someone or a set of circumstances to make my business take off.

It seems strange, but I have always worked very hard, and I realised there was a mental block in creating a business asset. All I had to do, was get my mental block removed and all would be OK. It is a matter of doing whatever it takes, regardless of whether you should have to do things or not.

I reviewed the fundamentals of creating a successful business. The basic tenet of business is that you must fulfil a need in the market, or better find the pain in the market and fix it.

I have always known this, but on a fundamental level ignored it. I have always assumed I knew roughly what was needed and then tried to sell that. It was like I didn’t think I should have to go back to basics and examine the industry I have known for over 10 years.

I forced myself to challenge this believe and reviewed all of the projects and client work I have ever done. I looked for problems, irritations, delays, over budget projects and bad customer experiences. I spoke to other people in the industry to find out their issues and problems and spoke to my previous clients to see what issues they have had.

I catalogued all of these issues and grouped together problems into common areas. It was surprising to me that some subtle changes and some fundamental changes were needed in the industry to address some very common and re-occurring issues.

I reviewed these common issues to find out if anyone else was addressing these concerns with their companies and processes. It turns out that some are, and most are not. These same problems are still occurring in all of the top agencies in the country.

I then spent many weeks putting together a new process that can overcome all of the difficulties that are listed in the catalogue of issues. The process includes running projects, hiring the right people, contracts, meetings, ways of working and is completely focused around how much value can be given quickly to my clients.

I have shown this process to my business mentor and to my directors. There have been a few changes and I am now putting together a presentation to present the process to my existing clients and potential new clients.

I will approach them for their advice in the first place and see if they are interested in the concept. I will use their feedback to refine the process and incorporate that into the ongoing refinement of the business system.

My hope is that many of the companies I approach will be interested enough to give us their projects.

I have scoped out an office space outside of my house and agreed a flexible number of desks with the Regus Office group. I have not taken anything yet as i will wait for the first project to be won.

I will let you know how the feedback goes and how I get on with progressing forward the business.