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I wasn't sure where to put this, so the powers that be can move it if they see fit. I put it here for anyone who is just starting out and wondering what it really takes to become part of that elite club of profitable traders. I lurk on several trading forums. I join a few and make a few posts. One thing that I rarely see is the painful path one took to becoming successful. So for all you beginners here is what becoming successful took. For my fellow brethren that are already in the club have a good laugh. The markets had always lured me as a kid. I would read the paper and make predictions. Sometimes they were right; sometimes not. Then one day I got that famous commodity-trading flyer, sent my money off and took the plunge. My first stab at trading was commodities and I started with $5k in 1991. I was using the strategy as outlined by the guru. The account was gone within a few months. Well that didn’t work. I thought, people do this everyday and make money why not me. So off to the library. I read every book the Memphis library had on trading and investing. I paper traded the strategies I found while I built my bankroll back up. I learned exits, set-ups, position, expectancy, market psychology, and portfolio management. I soon realized that I was reading the same thing over and over no matter which book I checked out. Time to build my strategy. I am ready to do this. I bought a new computer, Metastock Pro 6.0, and opened an account with $30k. Its 1995, and this is my shot. By 1997 I was toast again. The family life went to hell in a hand basket, and I thought I could trade through the difficult times. The result was an account with a balance of $2500. Back to the drawing board. Took care of the personal stuff. Lived like a monk raising capital. Worked nights and watched the market during the day. Took a second job on the weekends to raise more money. Then one day out of the blue, the little red and green candles started to make sense. I saw patterns develop over and over in the same spots. I placed a trade and made a profit. But I had done this before. I removed the MACD from my charts. Placed another trade and made a profit. Maybe I am on to something. Removed the channel indicator that I stumbled across. I could still see the action and new what the MACD was doing and where the action was in the channel without them even being on the chart. I even stopped drawing trend lines. It was just me and the screen. I planned every trade. I knew exactly when, where, and why I entered and exited. I was patient. I became a predator. Lurking and waiting. I took every shot the market gave me. If it started to go wrong, I got out quick and waited. If the market did not give me an opening, oh well. There is always tomorrow. By the fall of 1999, I was consistently profitable and have been ever since. For those that are waiting for the sales pitch, there isn’t one. For those that are waiting for me to expose some great secret, well there isn’t one of those either. What I will give you are a few simple pointers that I learned the hard way. And the sad part is, most will stilll learn these the hardway. 1)Take everything you read with a grain of salt. That includes this post. 2)Never pay for a system. It is just not that easy. 3)If something comes up in your life that is distracting, stop trading. 4)Plan every aspect of your trade down to the smallest detail, and plan for every possible outcome. 5)Develop your own strategy. Don’t let someone tell you that you can’t trade a simple moving average if you truly believe you can. 6)Test the strategy in the market that you will be trading. If you like the results, trade it in another totally unrelated market and see if it still holds up. 7)Paper trading is ok, but there is nothing that truly tests the strategy like hard earned cash. 8)You will have to make sacrifices in order to make it. I still do. In the middle of my learning period I was working 18 hours a day during the week and 12 on the weekend. 9)You are responsible for everything when it comes to trading. That includes stop running, bad fills, limit moves, your PC crashing. I mean everything. See #4 10)And last but probably most important, don’t be afraid of failure. Just do like Edison and go, “Well that didn’t work”. Good trading to you all.

I have put this thread together because I wanted a place which had all the links for J.Perl's TRADING WITH MARKET STATISTICS threads for easier access. Trading With Market Statistics I. Volume Histogram Trading With Market Statistics.II The Volume Weighted Average Price (VWAP) Trading with Market Statistics III. Basics of VWAP Trading Trading with Market Statistics. IV Standard Deviation Trading with Market Statistics V. Other Entry Points Trading with Market Statistics VI. Scaling In and Risk Tolerance Trading with Market Statistics VII. Breakout Trades at the PVP Trading with Market Statistics VIII. Counter Trend Trades in Symmetric Distributions Trading with Market Statistics IX. Scalping Trading with Market Statistics X. Position Trading Trading with Market Statistics XI. HUP

I do not know if this is the right thread to post this in. If it is not, kindly move it to the right one. Attached are .txt files of the data from many of the chapters of the original course and the course available on this forum. All of this had to be manually done, looking at the charts(usually with magnifying glass), reading the text, internet searching holiday dates and trying to determine the accurate D,H,L,C,V. The dates(D), on all bar & volume charts should be accurate. The P&F chart data is based on intraday data which, to the best of my knowledge, is not available, but the charts in the course show the months along the bottom and the end of each daily session with circles around the "x". Some of the P&F files have dates included, but those dates are obviously not from the 1930's, I just used those dates to import the data into my charting software, so that I could plot it. Also, on some of the data I entered false data at the beginning of the files so that some data would plot in the beginning of the chart, so one doesn't have to work right on the left egde of the chart. Chap9_PnF.txt Chap11_BS.txt Chap12_US Steel P&F data.txt Chap13_NYT1929PNF.txt Chap16_Anaconda.txt Chap16_AnaconPnF.txt Chap17_DJU1936.txt Chap17_DJU1936PF.txt Chap17_ElecP&L.txt Chap17_ElecPnF.txt Chap17_NYT1936.txt Chap21_ATT1932PnF.txt NYT 1930-1931.txt Chap16_NYT1934.txt