It is also important to note that no technology will trade for you. You are going to have to put in at least an hour or two of work daily, even more while you are learning. If this is not something that you are interested in and can dedicate time to, you will not enjoy it and you will not do well. You may be disappointed to learn that there isn’t a single, coherent path to trading success. You might think there should be a rulebook with a clearly defined set of steps to take and processes to go through. But there isn’t and beware anyone telling you there is. Does all of this mean that the training that you went through was rubbish? Not at all. The best tool that you can buy is going to be training. Learn how to read charts, find out all you can on patterns, indicators and every thing else you can get your hands on. There will be some methods and tools that will feel quite natural to you. Use those methods and tools and apply them as part of your over all trading strategy. Interesting bits and pieces picked up from training… One of the biggest pieces of advice from the professional is to find your own trading system and understand it. In fact, one went as far to say that a system that you completely understood and was 65% accurate would be more profitable that one that was 90% accurate that you didn’t understand much at all. This bit of advice would explain why a lot of software and their plug ins won’t work for people. They are not able to trace their own trends, nor can they recognize those patterns on a chart. You need to be able to trace a trend on a chart! Having said that, if you are interested in a system and have studied it, or are going to study it, by all means buy the plug in or add on. It will save you hours and hours of custom programming. Just make sure you understand why you are getting the information and signals that you are getting. “People pay too much attention to averages and crossovers and miss the most important information. The moving average cross over is never where you want to buy or sell. It’s too late. What to look at with 2 moving averages (one long and one short term) – looking for an agreement value. When both averages get close to each other people are agreeing about the value of the stock. But when there is an agreement, there will be a disagreement soon.” Darryl Guppy Pick a pattern that fits your personality Some people like to trade in and out daily, weekly and monthly. There are even people who trade on moon cycles, year and any other time period you can fathom. The point is pick a time period you are going to be comfortable with. What does your lifestyle and schedule permit? 95% think exit signals are more important than entry signals 65% of the time double bottom will fail. 75% cup and handle will fail. People are unprepared – don’t have a system Preventing and controlling losses is the most important thing to practically every technical trader out there. Technical analysis is demonstrably more risk-averse than the value investing approach. Technical trading means to trade with a plan that identifies the potential gain and the potential loss of every trade before time. The technical trader devises rules for dealing with price developments as they occur in order to realize the plan. “We are not traders. We are risk managers” Robert Deel Patrick :P PS: Special Thanks to Marilyn who helped me write this :D PPS: Post comments in the feedback if any.