Page 453 - THE MARKET WHISPERER

THE MARKET WHISPERER 44 9

both choosing advance stocks suited to trading, and preparing yourself
emotionally, which improves your degree of success.

How Much Time Should You Devote to Preparation?

In theory, you can spend hours preparing, without any real benefit from
so much time invested. If you want to read financial news, you will find
its scope on a daily basis can fill entire libraries, and in the long run, most
of it is meaningless. By contrast, if you want to execute technical analysis
on hundreds of stocks, you will be spending unnecessarily long hours at
your computer screens. To focus on the core requirements and not waste
time on activities that at best will not assist and at worst cause damage,
I recommend you follow these outlines, adapting them to suit your own
personality.

Currently, as an experienced trader, thirty minutes is enough for me to
ready myself. It may be that if I devote more time, my results will improve,
but that is true for everything in life. If you roll out of bed one hour earlier
in the mornings for any business activity, you will almost certainly earn
more. But thirty minutes is the balance I set for myself between work and
play. Golfers (my real occupation…) tend to say “a bad day at golf is better
than a good day at the office.” As you start out, I recommend devoting more
time, perhaps a full hour, to preparing for your day of trading. A good one
hour of preparation should greatly assist in shortening your learning curve.
Spending a great deal longer than that on preparing will not contribute to
your success.

SMART Devote no more than one hour to preparing for your day of
MONEY trading. More than one hour contributes nothing and may
even prove harmful.

If you are a member of an online trading room, a good part of the
preparatory work will already be done for you and presented on a virtual
silver platter. This is the “daily report,” produced several hours before
trading opens. Later on, the same report is scanned and analyzed in the
trading room by the analysts about fifteen minutes before trading opens.
Traders who consider themselves professionals will not rely only on this
report, but will also personally analyze the market and the leading indexes,
while additionally searching for relevant trade ideas. Traders might
present these ideas in the trading room, so that all traders can benefit from
their work and increase their chances of success.