-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Quote from Steve Tvardek: Does anyone have any stories/experiences, good or bad, about NLP that they would care to share? I have a friend whose parents are both NLP(Edited: Neural Linguistic Programming) practicioners and he swears by it. Says it does wonders for improving ones self in all areas of life. Am considering contacting them and giving it a shot. But would like to hear from traders here first. Thanks in advance. Steve -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hi Steve: I think we all have been able to see NLP at work 'ad nauseam", i.e. Jack's unbelievable heap of BS. Commenting on your: "Says it does wonders for improving ones self in all areas of life", this most certainly does not hold for succesfully speculating in the market. I suggest you try it out on any other crazy endaevour - I don't have any time for that kind of crap. Quote-- nononsense. So Steve here are my comments briefly. As you say you have spent time doing stuff and this year you are ahead a 100K or so on your capital. I have met many people recently in a context of intermediate term trading (IBD Meetup orientation). About a quarter of a year has passed. We met on 22DEC05 to turn in home work, study some charts people brought with them and spend five minutes planning for next year. A meeting of dining from 5:30 to 6:00 and discussing to 8:00 (because of my personal health we have cut back from 9:00 to 8:00, temporarily). Now I will focus on one person in the meeting as you think of nononsense's statement of his personal success in understanding what I contribute. These are opposite types of people. The person plays ping pong and badmitten as a family tradition here and abroad. In her fifties, she enjoys investing as well. She does not contribute to the meetings except to ask about details of he process we are learning in the contxt of how I operate with supporting other's potential and their growth. She did show two charts that others introduced and she commented on how they worked for her. The group understood that she had not done as well as she wanted but she was content to speak about her relative success in terms of her past performance and in comparason to her sports orientation. Obviously some of the readers are getting what I am saying to Steve and his current opportunity. She has capitalized her IBD Meetup scenario at 40K and done two trades between meetings. (We meet every two weeks). Three other did the first trade she did all achieving bettter results than she. She traded 2,000 shares and netted nine points on BOOM. Her second trade was a stock twice as valuable and she only held for half the channel width while trading 1,000 shares for an 9 point net gain. Others were holding at the time of the meting and her redrawn lines on the chart were telling her that there was more potential than she realized. Her comments on what we could plan for next year are simple. "Make money" is what she said before anyone could contribute a comment of any sort. So she just plugs along in a growing stance as does Steve. She sees that she has potential to make some money and will probably put more of her capital into the effort as she begins to keep up with others in the group. Steve is considering entering into a situation that may have some aspects of what this badmitten playing meeting attending investor is doing. Steve has made 100K this year on some capital. The little lady has taken a quarter of a year to get far enough to do about a trade a week and make most of the channel width of that trade each time as the examples show. Picture a person who is sorting stocks on stocktables.com to yield scores of 7 at the top, ) in the middle and 1's at the bottom of her list. Picutre a person who keeps portfolios of these three groups in clearstation along side her tenured list and her hot list and her owned list. she "bulks" these in the evening each evening. On her charting screen she keeps the left 1/3 clear except for channel porjections where she wqtches the price do cycles into that annotation as the futue moves to the present. She trades weekly (meaning the cycle time she uses is the natural cycle of the price throughout the predrawn channels. She has pictures of evrything and how everything works in the context of CANSLIM, scoring, channels, formations in channels, and the P, V relationship. She is going to do as well as the rest of the group she feels. The whole group feels that having such a start is useful to them "because they can for the irst time SEE the market operating". Steve may be going to get to see the market. Nononsense probably makes a lot more money than this little lady. He doesn't, however, have the ability to see what I am talking about in any way. The little lady made 28,000 dollars in two weeks on 40,000 dollars of capital. She is doing in 8 weeks what Steve did in a year and it may be possible that Steve has more capital than the little lady is using to begin to learn by having pictures of how the markt works. Go for it Steve; be a person who makes use of your gifts and potential.
You are right of course. However let me suggest that besides the stated reasons of "giving up" on NLP some people may have a problem of being programmed. i.e. making visual pictures and coloring them and then interposing them on other pictures somehow does not work for some. Some it maybe natural and they would find Robbins stuff more doable and appealing. But you are right. I took the weekend stuff from Robbins and I also know a person who spent on the whole enchilada and it changed his life...go figure...what if a person does not want tp spend the money for the expensive seminar Robbins once wanted for a live seminar? Is Bandler's book/work so far superior of Robbins? What is the difference?
Steve, Check out Van Tharp's site- iitm.com. Much of his background is in NLP applied to trading. Some folks may say he is full of BS, but that is ok. Everyone's entiltled to their opinion. His Peak Performance home study course is good, as is the workshop. I have also used Tony Robbins material (Personal Power II), and found it helpful, but Van's material is directly applicable to trading/investing. Regards, Kevin
Thanks Kevin, I will look into your suggestions. Just so everyone is clear, I dont know much about NLP, just looking into ways that may help me possibly improve myself as a trader. If there are other methods out there that have not been touched upon here but that people have found useful, please share.
it is my contention that van tharp modeled the wrong people as traders when he did his modelling. if one uses the wrong model (wrong = inefficient) then how can peak performance/excellence be acheived? it can't. the jist of what van talks about is using 50k-100k-1million account to make money on and he ASSUMES drawdowns in much of his discourse. (hence the high account $ recommendations). he also has steered people from trading intraday (subtley and not overtly). If you understand the fractal nature of the market, you understand that there is MORE money on the table intraday, not less. Van's is Bass Ackwards thinking. I genuinely like the guy so this isn't a personal attack. Back when i first began trading his 'teaching' was useful in that i didn't blow out. however, his teaching only covers 'not blowing out' and the attendant sub-discussions. it does not cover 'how to make money at a high velocity'. 'how to develop a winning trading system that fits you'...doesn't cover the above unfortuneatly.
Dantheman, Thanks for the comments. I would tend to agree that Van's earlier work was based on futures traders and trend following, and might not have as much relevance to day traders, and other shorter term styles. I have noted that recently, Van has been focused more on day traders, as well as swing traders. Agreed- he did seem to discourage day trading in years past, but maybe he has come around! In any case, I also agree that any modelling that is built on the wrong traders will yield the wrong model, but I do not know enough about those traders that were modeled. Even if they were big account futures traders, the psych issues may still hold true for other trading methods. At Van's Peak Performance workshop that I attended in 2004, there were futures traders, day, swing, currency, position traders, hedge fund managers, as well as part timers like me, and the material applied to us all. I feel that there is much more to what he provides, other than not blowing out, but that's only my opinion. Regards, Kevin
Why is it that some people can identify empty hype when it comes to trading vendors but not when it comes to psychobabble dream merchant vendors? Let's try to make sure that we put a good pep talk into perspective and price it accordingly. Unless, of course, the nonsensical jargon is necessary to induce the placebo response. In that case, I suppose it is also essential to engage in absurd price gouging to ensure that the "subject" will associate cost with "value."
Add in the Tharp materials as well. You question about differences could also be stated as a question relating to what is the focus of their efforts for tradters. Or what can traders focus upon to make use of the differing perspectives of these people? Steve is asking this with respect to himself and particularly what can it add to what he has. It is never possible to take anything out of the mind it turns out. I do not think it is possible to program people as in programming computers. Unfortunately, it may be possible that what people are taking away with them from sessions they attended with any one mentioned in the spectrum so far, is only the experiences that they have had and the substantive content of the materials covered. This is a limitation of understanding and experience upon which a person cannot build for personal enhancement and gain. The derisive comments, so far, bear out this personal limitation that the deriders actually have. Very few her posting have commented upon their personal progress in attaining skills experience and knowledge from deploying their understandings and personal training or workshop experiences. They are in the same boat as are the deriders. So, it may be a requirement of anyone who wants to gain, to actually go through whatever is required to begin to make use of what is potentially available. Reprogramming and deprogramming are not available and what is usually sought is usually skills and the basis for using skills. Going through coming to an understanding of how NLP is used to acquire skills has not been mentioned in this thread. Nor has there been any discussion of how NLP can be part of using acquired skills. Steve "sees" that something is missing in his performance and operations. Steve "sees" that he has gone from not making money at the beginning to, now, for a period of time, making some money. I believe he also sees that there is a lot of money to be made that he is not making. It looks like the answer to the question: What do you want to do next year?" If Steve did get the answer: "make more money" and coupled it to the question of: How about using NLP?" He might go work with persons who give others the ability to use NLP for the purpose steve has. The only trouble is this. Most people who know how to give others the ability to use NLP only apply it to the things that they know about and that they do personally. Read the thread again to find this out. NLP pros only use their training to apply it to what they know about. Look particularly at the key NLP persons mentioned in the thread. To date NLP hasn't been applied to making more money by NLP pros who do not make money trading or investing. So, perhaps if some traders taught some trained NLP pros to make money trading, then the NLP pros could turn around and help the traders begin to use NLP to make money. How would this turn out. It turns out quite well as a matter of fact. As has been pointed out learning to make money doesn't take too long. Nor does learning to become licensed to practice NLP. Steve has started to make money now. He knows some NLP practitioners. If he can teach them to make money, then I think they can teach him to use NLP to acquire trading skills and to be able to make use of those acquired skills. Don't fall down on the ice........ Walk carefully on the ice.......... Perhaps it can become very clear to anyone how to learn to make money using NLP. The two sentences above are intended to instruct you in one thing only. If you want to make a lot of money, you better go about it in a way that allows you to build your brain to be able to do it. "Don't fall down on the ice" represents the wrong way. "Walk carefully on the ice" represents the correct way. NLP is about knowing how to differentiate among all the possibilites and to choose the correct possibility with which to procede. Anyone ever run into a person who exits too early? lol. How does NLP allow a person to have excellent timing? It is definitely other than reprogramming or deprogramming. are you looking past and around deprogramming and reprogramming? do you see the other spaces in which to search? Keep going.........
Van Tharp undoubtedly has a lot of good stuff however what blew it for me was his punting the work of T. Harv Eker and his book Secrets of the Millionaire Mind. I read the book and found it to be without doubt the biggest pile of crap I have ever read. I kept thinking "Keep reading, there must be a reason Van Tharp recommended this crap" Alas at the end the only reason I could think of was the he was getting some cut. A few months later, there he was recommending it again. To recommend crap like this has surely cost him a lot of credibility.