Still looking for that trading plan......

There are two groups, one that blows into town, loads up some software, open an account at some broker were you can trade low margin, get on a chat room somewhere and is ready to follow someone in order to walk the yellow brick road. Well, within a couple of weeks they are gone......just a shooting star.

Then you have a group, that works on actually developing something called a trading plan. Where they read articles, study charts, talk to fellow traders about a number of things, join a user group, paper trade, open an account and trade one contract or maybe even two......doesn't matter how much money they could throw at the market.

The sad reality of these two groups is simple. We could agree the first group is out of here, you can see it coming. But the second group, there is still only a 10% chance of success. I hear those odds all the time.....90% will blow out at some point and that might be true. But consider this, William Dennis, senior research fellow for the National Federation of Independent Business' Education Foundation analyzes a survey of 36,000 households each year for the Wells Fargo/NFIB Series on Business Starts and Stops. The latest one, available on the NFIB's Web site, www.nfibonline.com, reported that 2.9 million businesses were launched in 1997, involving nearly 4 million people. Another 1 million people purchased 700,000 existing businesses that year. The NFIB estimates 39% are profitable, 30% break even, and 30% lose money. Their data showed that annual failure rates were greater than 9% when failure was defined simply as "discontinuance of ownership." The authors also concluded that cumulatively 64.2% of the businesses failed in a 10-year period.

All you have to do is drive down your own Main Street and think of all the businesses that have come and gone, while you are on your way to Starbucks. So having a 90% failure doesn't mean you will fail does it. I remember back in 2001 during the TradingMarkets.com conference in Las Vegas, Louis Borsellino was a guest speaker and talked about this.....he even went on to say that of the 10% that are left standing only 10% of them will reach the level they all dream about. But, after giving out these odds only 2 people got up and left out of 300. So you do believe in yourself, your education and your ability to reach your level of desire.

But where are you looking, in all the wrong places......?????