Received this email from Victor Niederhoffer today...

What 10 steps one should take to become a successful speculator. I would start by reading the books of the 19 th century speculators, 50 years on wall street, the reminiscences of a stock operator b y markman. Next I would read the papers of cowles in the 1920's and try to compute similar statistics on runs and expectations for 5 or 10 markets Third I would get or write a program to pick out random dates from an array of prices, and see what regularities you find in it compared to picking out actual event or market based events. Fourth, I would read Malkiel's book A random walkdown wall street and update his findings with the last 2 years of data Fifth I would look at the work of Sam Eisenstadt of Value Line and see if you could replicate it in real life with update results Sixth I would start to keep daily prices , open, high, low, and close for 20 of so markets and individual stocks and go bak a few years. Seventh I would go to a good business library and look at the old Investor Statstcal Laboraortoy recors of prices to see whether it gave you an insights. Eighth I would look for times when panic was in the air, and see if therre were opportunities to bring out the canes on a systematic basis Ninth I would apprentice myself to a good speculator and ask if I could be a helpful assistant without pay for a period Tenth I would befome adept at a field I knew and then try to apply some of the insights from that field into the market. Eleventh I would get a good book on statistics like snedecor or anderson and be able to compute the usual measures of mean, variance, and regression in it. Twelfth I would read all the good financial paper on ssrn or financial analysts journal to see what anomalies are still open? Thirteenth of course would be to read bacon, ben green, and atlas shrugged. I guess there are many other steps that should be taken that I have left out especially for the speculation in individual stocks. What additional steps would you recommend. ? Which of mine seem too narrow or specialized or wrong? vic

If i were to do 10% of what is suggested here, i would need to believe in reincarnation and a couple of lives in bank in order to digest everything that is mentioned. What about searching for a market phenomenon you identify with and trade it. No need to read books of the 19 th century. Monpere said it well in one of his comment here. Now we have reduced the list to one single task instead of 10.

As far as identifying your setup, I agree. I don't think it is quite that easy nor do I think it may be necessary to all of the steps previously identified. Regardless, the challenge is not getting into a trade. It has been shown that flipping a coin and randomly entering a trade works as long as you know how to manage yourself and the trade once you are in it.

There is a reason why most people have average losing trades - they stay in losers and get out to early on their winners and the reason for that is emotions, mainly fear.

How do you eliminate fear?
How do you handle fear once it shows up?

your trading experience list Beginner? you seem a little past that

I never said I was a beginner when it comes to human behavior or that I have never read or watched a lot. However when it comes to actual trading, I'm still at bat working to get to first base.

I do have a strong background in analytical work and I've heard it said several times that this type of background can be detrimental to trading and I can see a lot of truth in that.

The good news, I hope, is that I understand why people fail at trading and what it takes in principle to succeed. What I haven't figured out is how to make me succeed at trading. I'm thinking that a group of like minded people may be able to develop a solution for all of us.

I recently had reason to look at the definition of synergy. This is what Wikipedia says "Synergy may be defined as two or more things functioning together to produce a result not independently obtainable. " Whether Wiki is right or not, I don't care. I like that definition. Now all I need is one or more things (people) working together.

BTW - I haven't joined the elite section of this room. Is it worth the time and effort to join it? The $50 is nothing.