Maintaining a Positive Attitude in Trading

from Brian Tracy and Nightingale Conant:

THINK LIKE A WINNER

When I was 21 years old, a friend of mine and I decided to go off to see the world. Many of our friends were going to Europe and hitchhiking around with rucksacks. We decided to be different and go to Africa instead. It never occurred to us to ask why no one else was going to Africa. We found out later, much to our great regret.
To get to our destination in Africa, we had to cross the Sahara. We started out from London, riding bicycles across France and Spain. The labor was excruciating, the progress slow, and the pleasure was nonexistent.
In Gibraltar, we sold our bicycles and invested our last few dollars in an old Land Rover. We crossed from Gibraltar to Tangier into Algeria. We were on our way in Africa. Still, there was one obstacle between us and the greenery we were anxious to see. It was that darn old desert. We had no idea how serious and how difficult this adventure was to be.
As we moved south across the desert, we encountered endless problems, any one of which could have ended our trip and, probably, our lives. Yet, it was during this desert crossing that I learned one of the most important lessons in my life about attitude.
The French, who had controlled Algeria for many years, had marked a path across the desert with black 55- gallon oil drums. The drums were spaced exactly five kilometers apart. As we drove and came to an oil drum, the next drum, which was five kilometers ahead, would pop up on the horizon, and the last oil drum, which was five kilometers behind, would fall off the horizon. Wherever we were, we could always see two oil drums at a time — the one we had just left and the one we were headed toward. To cross one of the greatest deserts in the world, all we had to do was take it "one oil barrel at a time." We did not have to cross the entire desert at once. For me, crossing the Sahara was a metaphor for life. In order to maintain a positive attitude under all circumstances, all you have to do is take it one step, one oil barrel, at a time. As Thomas Carlyle said, "Our great business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand."
In any endeavor we can choose to be positive and constructive, sit down and think through the situation, and then begin to deal with it one oil barrel — one small achievement — at a time. Of course, this isn't always as easy as it sounds. We all must overcome the four obstacles that tend to get in the way of our maintaining a positive attitude.
OVERCOMING THE FOUR OBSTACLES TO A POSITIVE ATTITUDE
These obstacles are fear, worry, anger, and doubt. When things are not working out the way we had expected, our immediate response is to become fearful and uneasy. We are afraid that we will lose our money, waste our effort, or forfeit our emotional or physical investment in what we have done. If we are not careful, we start thinking of our potential losses rather than focusing on our potential gains.
Fear triggers worry, and we begin to use our power of imagination to create all sorts of negative images that cause us unhappiness and insomnia, and make us unable to perform efficiently. Fear and worry create anger, or what has been called the "victim complex." Instead of moving constantly forward in the direction of our dreams, we begin to react and respond, and to blame other people and other situations for our problems and challenges at hand.
Surrounding these negative emotions is the mental quality of doubt. Doubt is a fertile breeding ground for the other three negative emotions. Therefore, to eliminate these obstacles to positive thinking, you need to systematically eradicate the weakening emotion of doubt.
How do you do this? It's simple. The only real antidote to fear, worry, anger, and doubt is positive action toward the achievement of some worthwhile ideal.
Psychologists tell us that the key to dealing effectively with life is what they call "cognitive control." This is the assumption that you can think about, and concentrate on, only one thing at a time, either positive or negative. Successful people consciously choose to think about what they want, rather than what they don't want. As a result, they are continuously taking action toward their goals, rather than spending their time thinking and worrying about the current difficulties or the inevitable challenges that are sure to face them.
WHAT IS HOLDING YOU BACK?
People who never achieve success do so because they fall in love with their excuses. It isn't the actual truth about yourself and your abilities that hurts you; it is the things you consider to be true but have no basis in truth that hold you back.
We naturally fall in love with our reasons for not moving ahead. Even if someone challenges those reasons, or tells us that we have the capacity to accomplish so much more, we will often argue with them.
We attempt to prove to ourselves and others that our limitations are real, and the less justification these ideals or beliefs have, the more adamant we become in attempting to prove them to others. Richard Bach wrote this beautiful line: "Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they're yours."
So how do you change your beliefs? The starting point is to get up the courage to question these self-limiting beliefs seriously. Question your basic premises. Check your assumptions. Ask yourself, What assumptions am I making about myself or my situation that might not be true? Think about them. Remember, most of our self-limiting beliefs have no basis whatsoever in fact. They are based on information and ideas that we have accepted as true, sometimes in early childhood, and to the degree we accept them as true, they become true for us.
You can always tell what your true values and beliefs are by looking at your actions. It isn't what you say or wish or hope or intend that demonstrates what you really believe. It is only what you do. It is only the behaviors that you engage in. It is only the actions you choose to undertake. And out of your actions come all the elements of your life. You are where you are and what you are because of what you have done in the past. But the wonderful news is, the past doesn't have to hold you back. That's because we are in a perpetual state of becoming.
A STATE OF BECOMING
The clearer you are about your ideal result or future vision, the easier it is for you to alter your actions and behaviors in the short term to assure that you get where you want to be in the long term. You have no limitations on your potential except for those you believe you have. As Walter D. Wintle wrote:
The Man Who Thinks He Can
If you think you're beaten, you are;
If you think you dare not, you don't.
If you would like to win, but think you can't,
It's almost a cinch you won't.
Life's battles don't always go
To the stronger or faster man;
But sooner or later the man who wins
Is the man who thinks he can.
THINK LIKE A WINNER
Thinking like a winner is the first step to living like a winner. You will become that which you think about most of the time. You are the architect of your personality and character. Your goal, your desire, is to be as successful, happy, and prosperous as you possibly can be in every aspect of your life. Therefore, the systematic development of a positive attitude is something that you need to work on every hour of every day. Continue to work on yourself and your thinking until you reach the point where you absolutely, positively believe yourself capable of winning in anything you sincerely want to accomplish.
People succeed not because they have remarkable characteristics or qualities. The most successful people are quite ordinary, just like you and me. Most of us start off poor and confused. We spend many years getting some sort of direction in our lives. But the turning point comes when we begin to believe that we have within us that divine spark that can lead us onward and upward to the accomplishment of anything that we really want in life. So, become the man or woman who thinks, I can. And when you reach the point where you feel unshakable confidence in yourself and your abilities, nothing will be able to stop you, not even the Sahara. Just stay your course and take each challenge ... one oil barrel at a time.

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THE 3 DIFFERENCES BETWEEN OPTIMISTS & PESSIMISTS In his book Learned Optimism, Dr. Seligman claims there are three fundamental differences between optimists and pessimists.

1. The optimist sees a setback as temporary, while the pessimist sees it as permanent. The optimist sees an unfortunate event — something limited in time and that has no real impact on the future. The pessimist sees a negative event as permanent, as part of life, as destiny, as an indication of more to come.
2. The optimist sees difficulties as specific, while the pessimist sees them as pervasive. When things go wrong for the optimist, he or she looks at the event as an isolated incident largely disconnected from other things that are going on in his or her life. An optimist perceives an unfortunate business incident as just that — a business incident. The pessimist would question the validity of the entire business or business direction. The pessimist would tend to feel helpless, unable to make a difference to correct the issue.
3. The optimist sees events as external, while the pessimist tends to interpret events as personal. When things go wrong, the optimist will tend to see the setback as resulting from external forces over which one has little control but which one can overcome. The pessimist takes negative events personally and as an indication of a larger pervasive personal shortcoming.

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Picture your Future Success — and Get It!

Take every opportunity to surround yourself with images of what success means to you: Get brochures on new cars you desire; get magazines containing pictures of beautiful homes, beautiful clothes, well-toned bodies, and other things you will obtain as a result of achieving the success that you are aiming for. Each time you see or visualize those images, you trigger the thoughts, feelings, and actions that make them materialize in your life. But, don't wish for them ... that is day dreaming. Think about them as absolute certainties in your future and focus on who you must be today to achieve these icons of your future success.

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6 STEPS TO ASSURE A POSITIVE ATTITUDE There are six things you can do to assure that your attitude is the very best it can be under all circumstances.

1. Whatever challenges you face, focus on the future rather than the past. Instead of worrying about who did what or who is to blame, focus on where you want to be and what you want to do. Get a clear mental image of your ideal successful future, and then take whatever action you can to begin moving in that direction. As the New Testament says, "Let the dead bury the dead." Let the past take care of itself, and get your mind, your thoughts, your mental images on the future.
   
2. Whenever you're faced with a difficulty, focus on the solution rather than on the problem. Think and talk about the ideal solution to the obstacle or setback, rather than wasting time rehashing and reflecting on the problem. Solutions are inherently positive, whereas problems are inherently negative. The instant that you begin thinking in terms of solutions, you become more positive and constructive.
   
3. Assume that something good is hidden within each difficulty or challenge. Dr. Norman Vincent Peale used to say, "Whenever God wants to give us a gift, he wraps it up in a problem." Lloyd Conant said it this way: "You don't earn the right to solve big problems until you have solved the small ones." In other words, the bigger the gift, the greater the success you have coming, the bigger the problem you will receive and must surmount.
   
4. Assume that whatever situation you are facing at the moment is exactly the right situation you need to ultimately be successful. The situation has been sent to you to help you learn something, to help you become better, to help you expand and grow. What good is it to think anything else?
   
5. In every challenge, look for a valuable lesson. Assume that every setback contains a lesson that is essential for you to learn. Only when you learn this lesson will you be smart enough and wise enough to go on and achieve the big goals that you have set for yourself. Again, since you can think about only one thing at a time, if you are busy looking for the lesson, you cannot simultaneously think about the difficulty or the obstacle. You will always find the lesson if you look for it.
   
6. Whenever you have a goal that is unachieved, a difficulty that is unresolved, or a problem that is blocking you from getting where you want to go, sit down with a pen and paper and make a list of every single thing that you could possibly do to resolve the situation. Write down every idea, ridiculous or not. The more you think on paper, the more you will take control over your conscious mind and focus it where you want — on the solution. (Don't miss The Greatest Problem Solving Tool by Earl Nightingale in the next issue of AdvantEdge).

"I am trying to take away the feeling that there is no way to succeed in an unfavorable game." -- Phantom of the Pits

How Trading Can Develop Character

from Dr. Brett-

For me, there's no better time than a long holiday weekend to step back and ask the big questions: those that deal with the meaning and significance of being a trader. These segments from my two books capture much of my sentiment on the topic.

"It is better to struggle in the service of one's dreams than to find instant success at meaningless work. The greatest joy in life, George Bernard Shaw once wrote, is being used for a purpose you recognize to be mighty. The greatest fields--those that are a calling and not a mere job--give one room to expand and develop oneself. There is only one valid reason for trading the markets, just as there is only one valid reason for being a psychologist, a dancer, or an architect: because it is your calling, the arena that best draws upon one's talents and passion for self-development." - The Psychology of Trading, p. 317.

"There are few arenas left in life where the independent individual can enact the heroic struggle...This, I believe is the eternal allure of the markets. With a reasonable stake and an online account, each person can undertake his or her own gold rush and enact the highest entrepreneurial quest. Like salmon that swim upstream to spawn, sperm that pursue the egg, and prospectors that dig for precious metal, many will be called and few chosen. It matters not. What matters is the dignity and the dimension of soul conferred by one's noblest impulses. It is not desirable to rule in hell or to serve in heaven; far preferable, to paraphrase Ayn Rand, is to fight for tomorrow's Valhalla in order to walk its halls today." - The Psychology of Trading, p. 318.

"Let us not forget what it means to be a trader. It means that I am free to own property: shares of a private company or contracts in a commodity. I can take delivery of my property and dispose of it as I wish, or I can trade it to others. My decisions are mine to make; I need not follow the dictates of those who would put other interests--those of gods, governments, or guns--above my own. If I lose, it is my loss. If I profit, the gain is mine...Without freedom, there is no trading. Trading is a celebration of economic and political freedom. Slaves are traded; they do not trade." - Enhancing Trader Performance, p. 253-4.

"What are we really developing when we train for expert performance in any domain? We develop skill and knowledge, to be sure, but we also develop more than that. We cultivate will: the ability to formulate goals and direct our actions toward reaching those goals. Every training session is a battle of will: a struggle to overcome our limitations and reach a particular performance goal...When you enhance your performance as a trader, you replace a small piece of randomness with intention. To that degree, your outcomes are self-determined. If you train yourself properly, you will become not only a successful trader, but a more self-determining human being." - Enhancing Trader Performance, p. 254-255.


RELEVANT LINKS AND QUOTES:

Ayn Rand and Objectivism

Colin Wilson

"Dr. Miller says we are pessimistic because life seems like a very bad, very screwed-up film. If you ask "What the hell is wrong with the projector?" and go up to the control room, you find it's empty. You are the projectionist, and you should have been up there all the time." - Colin Wilson

"Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice." - Ayn Rand

Turning Goals Into Consistent Habit Patterns

from Dr. Brett-
My recent post took a look at setting effective trading goals. Properly formulated, these goals focus our development, bridging our real selves--who we are now--with our ideals. Setting goals, however, is easy compared with acting upon them over time. Many of us set well-meaning goals at the start of a year, only to forget our resolutions.

So how do we make goals actual tools for self-development? One answer that I came to in writing my new book is that goal setting must be a process of emotional commitment, not just an intellectual exercise. "The secret to goal setting," I note in the book, "is providing your goals with emotional force. If your goal is a want, you'll pursue it until the feeling of desire subsides. If your goal is a must-have, a burning need...it becomes an organizing principle, a life focus."

In Alcoholics Anonymous, the goal is sobriety. Members spend a great deal of time sharing their stories of lost relationships, lost jobs, and lost health. They openly talk about the horrors of their relapses. Why? Because this keeps them emotionally connected to their goal. AA focuses on the reasons for the goal; every single meeting members remind themselves that they are alcoholics, powerless against alcohol. They can only find sobriety in their connectedness to others and in their relationship with a Higher Power. Next to that, everything else seems inconsequential.

An effective trading journal is like an AA meeting. It is an emotional communication that reminds the trader why he or she is seeking particular goals. The vision of success, the horrors of going through massive drawdowns, the feelings of disgust at missing opportunities due to a lack of nerve or discipline: these keep us connected to our goals.

Once you're emotionally connected to a goal--clearly seeing its necessity--discipline is not necessary. You will automatically gravitate to doing what you know you need to do. It's a bit like the procrastinator: when the assignment is due in several weeks, there's no urgency. When the assignment is due the next day--with one's bonus on the line--the drive to work kicks in with full force.

It is when the perception of "Reach your goal, or else!" arises, that we act decisively. Often it's the "or else"--the clear awareness of the consequences should we not fulfill our aims--that helps turn goals into consistent actions. The man who has had a heart attack may have struggled with his diet for years. Now, aware of his mortality, he has no problem following a heart-healthy regimen. His goal, under the pressure of necessity, becomes a habit pattern.

It helps to clearly visualize what would happen should we fail to meet our goals. What would happen to us? How would we feel about ourselves? Many a drive for greatness was sparked by the hatred of mediocrity. We will ourselves forward only when stasis becomes more uncomfortable than the efforts demanded by self development.

Traits of Successful New Traders

from Dr. Brett-
In response to my recent post on trading for a living, one reader asks, "In your opinion what are the starting qualities needed to be a great trader?" This is a difficult question, because different kinds of trading require different skill sets. For example, many of the best hedge fund portfolio managers have superior analytical skills and abilities to detect themes in noisy data. Many of the best market makers have an uncanny speed of mental processing and level of concentration that enable them to stay on top of order flow throughout the day. This is why I emphasize, in the trader performance book, that matching one's style of trading to one's strengths--talents and skills--is an essential component of success.

If I had to identify qualities that distinguish "starting qualities" that are important across all traders, the following come to mind:

1) Capacity for Prudent Risk-Taking - Successful young traders are neither impulsive nor risk-averse. They are not afraid to go after markets aggressively when they perceive opportunity;

2) Capacity for Rule Governance - Successful young traders have the self-control needed to follow rules in the heat of battle, including rules of position sizing and risk management;

3) Capacity for Sustained Effort - Successful young traders can be identified by the productive time they spend on trading--research, preparation, work on themselves--outside of market hours;

4) Capacity for Emotional Resilience - All young traders will lose money early in their development and experience multiple frustrations. The successful ones will not be quick to lose self-confidence and motivation in the face of loss and frustration;

5) Capacity for Sound Reasoning - Successful young traders exhibit an ability to make sense of markets by synthesizing data and generating market and trading views. They display patience in collecting information and do not jump to conclusions based on superficial reasoning or limited data.

Finally, I would say that successful developing traders approach their work with a kind of humility. They don't know it all and they don't pretend to know it all. They absorb wisdom from mentors and markets, and they are quick to acknowledge when they're wrong, so that they can get out of bad positions and learn from their experience. Show me a stubborn young trader with a defensive ego, and I'll show you one who will fight his or her learning curve every step of the way, with predictably poor results.

If you want to identify potentially successful young traders, look at their trading journals and gauge the amount of time they spend behind the screen. The good ones will have detailed entries about markets and about themselves, with constructive ideas, goals, and feedback. The less successful traders will have sparse entries that display little effort or analysis, with no goals, no constructive direction. The good ones watch markets closely, even when not trading. The less successful ones find little reason to watch markets if they don't have a position.

Effort alone won't make a trader successful, but lack of it will almost certainly ensure failure.

Trader Self-Development

from Dr. Brett-
Successful self-coaching requires an ongoing commitment to tracking and improving performance. Here are some posts that will help guide your self-development as a trader:

* How Can I Learn Trading?

* Coaching Yourself for Profitable Performance

* Self-Efficacy and Attaining Goals

* What Contributes to Success

* Turning Goals Into Habit Patterns

* Setting Effective Goals

* A Secret to Life Success

* Finding the Heroic Within Us

Getting Unstuck: More on Procrastination

from Dr. Brett--
Consider the following scenarios:

* A trader knows that he would benefit from keeping a journal and tracking his performance, but his efforts fade out after a few days;

* A trader sees a unique opportunity in the market, but oversleeps and misses the setup;

* A trader realizes that her edge in the market is going away, but she never gets around to exploring new trading patterns and time frames.

In each of these cases, a kind of procrastination affects the trader and ultimately interferes with performance and success.

It is common to attribute procrastination to a lack of motivation, but as the recent post suggests, this may be off the mark. Efforts to motivate the procrastinator are typically fruitless. If procrastination is a kind of motivational gridlock in which individuals are paralyzed between competing values, stepping up the motivation is only likely to add to frustration and further inaction.

Take a simple example: When daughter Devon was young, I found that asking her to do her homework got nowhere. She would say that she was going to do it, but then would end up watching TV all night. Interestingly, I had the impression that she sincerely wanted to get the homework done. There was some block, however, toward acting.

When I changed my approach and asked her, "What would you like us to work on first, the math or the English?", she invariably picked one and we got the work done promptly. If the homework didn't feel imposed on her--she could choose what to work on--and especially if it felt like a shared activity, there was no procrastination. It wasn't homework that she was avoiding: it was the feeling of having to perform an imposed task by herself. Once homework became a social experience, there was no gridlock.

Now in college, Devon recently researched a topic that is particularly germane to issues of motivation and procrastination. All of us have motivational orientations directed to either the prevention of negative outcomes or the promotion of positive ones. What happens, however, when seeking a positive goal (such as finishing homework and earning a good grade) collides with a motivation to avoid an aversive state (feeling disconnected from others and unable to navigate on one's own)? At that point, pushing harder to do the homework only activates the prevention motivation to avoid isolation and threatened inadequacy. Refusing to do the homework only intensifies the promotion goal to take action toward a good grade.

What breaks the gridlock is creating a new context for one's goals that embraces both motivations. When homework became a "we" activity that she could choose for herself, Devon managed to complete assignments on time. Similarly, traders who have struggled for years in keeping a journal suddenly find it easy to use a blog or Twitter for journaling, turning the individual effort into a shared one.

Much of the help that counselors and therapists provide is helping their clients "get unstuck" by providing a new context for seeking goals. Perhaps people don't need more motivation; they just need more of the motivations that are right for them. When your car is stuck in snow, you don't simply gun the accelerator and spin your wheels. You gently rock back and forth, forward and backward, shifting the car to each side, until you get a bit of traction. Life isn't so different.

Life Lessons from Trading

from Dr. Brett-
Trading is a crucible of life: it distills, in a matter of minutes, the basic human challenge: the need to judge, plan, and seek values under conditions of risk and uncertainty. In mastering trading, we necessarily face and master ourselves. Very few arenas of life so immediately reward self-development--and punish its absence.

So many life lessons can be culled from trading and the markets:

1) Have a firm stop-loss point for all activities: jobs, relationships, and personal involvements. Successful people are successful because they cut their losing experiences short and ride winning experiences.

2) Diversification works well in life and markets. Multiple, non-correlated sources of fulfillment make it easier to take risks in any one facet of life.

3) In life as in markets, chance truly favors those who are prepared to benefit. Failing to plan truly is planning to fail.

4) Success in trading and life comes from knowing your edge, pressing it when you have the opportunity, and sitting back when that edge is no longer present.

5) Risks and rewards are always proportional. The latter, in life as in markets, requires prudent management of the former.

6) Happiness is the profit we harvest from life. All life's activities should be periodically reviewed for their return on investment.

7) Embrace change: With volatility comes opportunity, as well as danger.

8) All trends and cycles come to an end. Who anticipates the future, profits.

9) The worst decisions, in life and markets, come from extremes: overconfidence and a lack of confidence.

10) A formula for success in life and finance: never hold an investment that you would not be willing to purchase afresh today.

One Secret to Life Success

from Dr. Brett-
Back in the day when I was coordinating student counseling at a medical school, a student asked for advice about dating and finding the right person. I told him my simple formula: Go on lots of first dates, but not very many second ones. In other words, meet as many people as you can, but only get to know the ones that show promise. If you take that approach, I suggested, 10% of your dates will be promising, 80% will be OK, and 10% will provide funny stories to share with your buddies over a cold one.

The advice, of course, is a variation of "throw lots of things at the wall and see what sticks." Brainstorming lots of ideas helps you find the one or two that make a difference. I must look at 30 different market indicators or patterns before I find one worth using in trading or writing about in the blog. I'll write hundreds of blog posts before a few of them generate the kind of feedback to inspire me to write a book.

The secret to life success is that a kind of natural selection governs our own personal evolution. When we explore various "mutations" and throw them at the wall, eventually one or two of them will prove to be unusually adaptive. When we select those and run with them, success is not such an uphill battle.

But here's the thing: If you throw something at the wall and it doesn't stick, you can't take it as a sign of failure and walk away discouraged. My dating advice was that there really is no failure: only funny stories to tell after you find yourself paired up with the utterly wrong person.

So it is with a job search. I'll go to most any interview; maybe I'll like the job, maybe I won't. Maybe they'll like me; maybe they won't. But I'll make sure I learn something about the job market and what the employer is looking for. That will always help the next time around. Meanwhile, I'll save my rudest "ding" letters and share them with buddies over a cold one.

Now you understand why the trader performance book is so adamant about starting out in trading in simulation mode. That gives you the freedom to try trading lots of different markets, plenty of different patterns, time frames, styles, and setups. Without risking your capital, you have the opportunity to see what sticks; where your niche might lie.

The person who doesn't find success isn't necessarily the person without talent or skill, just like the person who hasn't found love isn't necessarily unlovable. They might just be the skilled, talented person who never threw enough at the wall to find a niche; who never went on enough first dates to find the promising second ones.

Your life is an engine of evolution and you are in charge of the selection. Take enough good swings at the ball and you'll get your hits. The only failure in life is to never swing the bat, to be so concerned about "failure" that you never select for success.

RELEVANT POST:

One beauty of trading is the set of life lessons it teaches.

Tips on Using Trading Journals

from Dr. Brett -
In my last post, we took a look at trading journals and how those can be used to improve performance. The report card format for journaling is particularly helpful for goal-setting, tracking progress, and recognizing patterns in our own trading. In this post, I'll review some of the patterns that most often appear across journal entries--and that are important to work on.

1) Patterns of Negative Self-Talk: These occur during frustrated moments in markets. We miss a trade, a trade blows through our stop, we give back our money on the day: all of these create frustration. This frustration then triggers an anger response that we direct toward ourselves. For example, we might find ourself saying, "Here it goes again! Other people are killing these markets, and I can't get it going." At that point, your frustration is no longer about the specific trade or market event, but is directed to *you as a person*. Trading should be about trading; not about you. After all, you wouldn't be boasting and crowing in the journal if the trade went your way. If you wouldn't like to hear your message coming from someone else (imagine your buddy at the workstation next to yours saying, "Whoa, dude, other people are killing these markets, and you can't get it going!") and if you wouldn't be speaking that way to your trading buddy, then you shouldn't be speaking that way to yourself. Interrupting that negative self-talk and turning your frustration toward a constructive kick in the pants ("C'mon, Brett, you know you shouldn't be trading so large in the chopfest. Let's stick with the rules!") can be very helpful in preventing frustration from snowballing.

2) Patterns of Impulsivity - Out of excitement, boredom, desire to regain profits, or overconfidence, you find yourself trading too frequently or with too much size. This, in turn, leads to uneven performance and outsized trading losses, which then produce discouragement. Many traders keep their goals--and their trading rules--taped to their screens; this helps keep them in the forebrain as a check on impulsivity. One trader I worked with actually had a brief checklist that he had to check off before placing any trade. This prevented him from acting hastily. If you can figure out the triggers that make you impulsive (sometimes these are winning trades, where you start playing with "house money"), you have a good chance to put on the brakes before you act on impulse.

3) Patterns of Fear - Particularly after losses, but sometimes after making money and being afraid of losing it, traders fail to act on good signals or do not size their trades adequately. The result is missed opportunity. Often this occurs if the trader is engaging in "catastrophizing": making a normal potential loss into something much larger. Worry, physical tension, and feelings of nervousness are great clues to track in a journal. Once you recognize your fear patterns, you can take some deep breaths, calm yourself, and focus on assessing opportunity (and focus on those trading rules). One way of breaking overwhelming fear after large losses is just to put on some small trades when your signals are good and get your rhythm and confidence back. Then you ramp back up to normal size in a gradual, but steady manner. Playing defense is not giving into fear: having rules about risk control and hanging onto a day's profits can help you distinguish the two.

Once you notice your patterns, it's easier to construct specific goals for the next day's and week's trade. The overarching goal is changing your patterns: controlling how you think and feel rather than having them control you. It's difficult to imagine changing your patterns if you're not aware of them in the first place!

RELEVANT POSTS:

Using Emotion to Change Emotion

Some 2007 Posts on Trading and Emotions

Formatting A Trading Journal for Sucess

from Dr. Brett--
My recent posts have focused on using journals to improve trading. Everyone has a journal format that (one hopes) works best for them. Here I'll suggest a format that I find particularly useful.

The reason I'm offering the suggestion is that I continue to find that traders use journals in ways that are less than constructive. The greatest mistakes in journaling, I find, are:

1) Lack of Specifics - The journal contains vague, general intentions such as, "I need to trade less aggressively", without any indication of how the trader will accomplish this. If the intent is to trade less aggressively, then the journal should create a specific goal. An example from my own trading would be: "I'll enter positions with one unit and scale in with a second unit on the first pullback in NYSE TICK when my position is profitable." Notice how this makes the general intention so much more concrete. Now I have something constructive to implement and can grade myself on the implementation. If I only say, "I need to trade less aggressively", that's not goal-setting. That's Monday-morning quarterbacking, or me just wagging my finger at myself. Self-criticism by itself never improved anyone: it's self-criticism followed by constructive problem solving that does the trick.

2) Focus on Negatives - The worst journals are the ones that simply vent fear or frustration. They recite every bad or missed trade, everything that went wrong during the day. Not only is there an absence of constructive suggestions for improvement, but there is also an absence of ideas re: what the trader has done right. The idea is to learn from what you do right, not just what you do wrong. Indeed, focusing on strengths will enhance motivation and the sense of competence and efficacy. By staying exclusively problem-focused, it's all too easy to drain motivation and optimism.

So, how can we improve the above in a format for a trading journal?

My suggestion is starting the journal with a listing of your specific goal(s) for that trading day.
Those goals should be: a) chosen from your previous day's or week's trading; and b) taken from your trading rules. The goal should be either to improve a mistake you made, or to build upon something you did right. The goal should state specifically what you expect yourself to do during the coming day, so that you can rehearse the goal in your mind before the market opens and so that you can evaluate how you performed on the goal at the end of the day.

Notice that, before creating the journal, it's important to write out your trading rules in advance: everything that you want to follow to trade well. You can't hold yourself accountable for a rule that you don't create; that's perfectionism, and it's not helpful either. Rules should clearly state how you want to size positions, enter them, exit them, set stops, set exits, scale in and out of trades, etc. Your journal will track how well you follow these rules, not just whether you make money or not.

So you start with rules, notice when you do a particularly good or poor job following the rules, and then set goals for the next day based on the good or poor performance. The journal entry then gives yourself a grade at the end of the day for how well you performed on your goals and why you earned that grade. Include your daily P/L with your grade, so that you can quickly see how your performance rises and falls with your grades.

The journal keeps you constructive, keeps you learning, and keeps you working on the things that are most important. It is not a tool for simply rehashing the day or voicing your feelings; it is your tool for self-development: your means for coaching yourself.

Dealing With Emotional Disruptions When Trading

from Dr. Brett:
Every week I get a handful of emails from blog readers wanting advice on dealing with emotional interference with their trading. Many of these readers feel that they have solid trading methods and plans, but simply cannot follow these with consistency.

In an earlier posting, I explained that there are many reasons for problems of trading discipline. Not all of these reasons are due to primary emotional problems. Many traders suffer emotional disruptions of trading because of how they are trading.

The two main trading reasons for emotional interference are:

1) Improper risk management - Many traders are trying to make a comfortable living from an inadequate capital base. They are undercapitalized relative to their income goals, and this forces them to trade too aggressively. The drawdowns, as a result, are severe and create unnecessary frustrations. As I mentioned recently to one reader's surprise, I have yet to meet a trader who can sustain a good living from an account base of $100,000 or less. Perhaps there are people who can make 50-100% on their money year after year after year, but this is not the norm even among the world's money management elite. Taking large risks in hope of such rewards creates emotional impacts that are difficult to overcome.

2) Trading methods that don't fit a trader's skills or personality - You would not believe how common this is: traders attempt to make money in ways that don't genuinely exploit their strengths. Many times, when traders don't follow their trading plans, it's because those plans don't truly fit who they are. Daytrading might not exploit the analytical skills of a trader; many traders don't have the speed of mental processing to succeed at scalping. Similarly, traders with intuitive skills might be frustrated by trying to trade mechanical rules. Traders not only need methods that possess a reliable edge; they need those methods to fit who they are. A risk-averse person won't follow an aggressive system of scaling into trades; a highly active, distractible individual won't stick with long-term investing.

When emotional disruptions of trading *are* primarily due to emotional factors and not one's trading approach (or lack thereof), there are short-term techniques to change patterns of behavior that are quite effective. A little while ago, I helped write a training guide for helping professionals that summarizes these techniques; my upcoming book for traders has two chapters that are self-help manuals to hands-on change methods. For many people, months and months and years and years of psychotherapy are not necessary to change their patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving. There are short-term change approaches that have been extensively studied in controlled research and validated for their effectiveness.

Unfortunately, most coaches and mentors of traders have not been trained in these brief methods. They try to help traders by repeating simplistic strategies that can be found in the self-help section of any bookstore. Not surprisingly, these strategies don't dent emotional patterns that seem to have a will of their own.

For 19 years at a medical school in Upstate New York, I not only applied brief therapy methods to medical students, physicians, and other professionals; I also taught these methods to the helpers training to be psychologists and psychiatrists. So it's natural that I try to teach some of these psychological skills to professional traders.

Here are some free resources from my personal site that might help you better understand the common emotional disruptions of trading:

Behavioral Patterns That Sabotage Traders - Part One

Behavioral Patterns That Sabotage Traders - Part Two

Changing How We Cope

Expose Yourself

Finding Solutions: How Traders Can Become Their Own Therapists

Remapping the Mind: Cognitive Therapy for Traders

Turning Your Trading Around - Part One

Turning Your Trading Around - Part Two

Turning Your Trading Around - Part Three

After you read those, feel free to email me with any questions about application. (My email address is included in the "About Me" section to the right). I'll post questions and responses to this blog over the holiday weekend. As I so often say to traders I work with, my goal isn't to become your psychologist. My goal is to enable you to be your own shrink.

How to Change Yourself

from Dr. Brett:
People come to psychologists to make changes in their lives. Sometimes, those changes are to build upon strengths. Other times, the changes are to solve problems.

We have a “real” self—the person we think we are—and an “ideal” self: the person we would like to be.

The psychologist’s job is to bring us a bit closer to that ideal self, either by changing our real selves, redefining our ideals, or both.

But how do people change? How do we move closer to our ideals?

A most important psychological principle is that everything we do and everyone we interact with is a kind of mirror. We experience ourselves through our activities and contacts and, over time, those experiences are internalized and become part of our self –concepts.

A work task mirrors for us whether or not we’re capable, creative, and reliable. An interaction with a valued person mirrors for us whether or not we’re liked, loved, and valued.

People do not change in a vacuum. They change because they enter into situations that mirror new experiences of themselves. Being in a loving relationship after having been in bad relationships or being in a fulfilling job after having been mired in low-level work can be profound change experiences.

This is why counseling and therapy works: it provides a significant relationship as a medium for fresh, positive mirroring experiences. A depressed or abused person who feels worthless finds in therapy a validating experience that gradually becomes part of the self.

This is a key principle: We are the sum of our mirroring experiences. If we are in unfulfilling, frustrating situations in work and love, we will experience ourselves negatively. If we are in situations that bring out the best in us, we will develop positive views of ourselves.

The psychologist George Kelly realized the power of mirroring and developed an approach to change that he called “fixed-role therapy”. In a nutshell, he asked his clients to invent a person who represented their ideal self in some fashion. This fictional character was given a name and described (in writing) in great detail.

Once this ideal character was defined, the challenge was to play-act that character in a variety of life situations. In other words, Kelly had people role-play their ideals, making sure they stayed strictly in character.

What Kelly found was that, over time, people received positive feedback about these enactments that made them easier to sustain over time. Eventually, the ideal behaviors didn’t feel like an act at all. They became part of the person’s repertoire.

If you want to make a change, you won’t do it by talking yourself into it or through motivation. Rather, find a social context in which you can be the change you want to make. The resulting feedback will be the mirror by which you’ll experience yourself as your ideal and make that ideal a genuine part of you.

A big part of being happy and successful is finding the right set of life mirrors. And *that* is why finding your trading niche is so important.

RELEVANT POSTS:

The Devon Principle

Becoming Your Own Trading Coach

from Dr. Brett:
In a recent post, I suggested that coaching for traders could be valuable if properly structured. But is it possible for traders to coach themselves for success? Can the process of expertise development be self-generated?

There is actually a fair amount of research on this topic. The general conclusion of this work, which I review in my upcoming book, is that the importance of mentoring to performance success is specific to each performance field. Team sports, for instance, universally rely upon coaching for expertise development. It is impossible, for instance, for an individual to become proficient at a game such as ice hockey without having a team to practice with.

Other sports and performance fields are more entrepreneurial. Chess, jazz music, and poker are examples of fields where high levels of attainment can be achieved through individual practice and a minimum of formal instruction. These are fields in which learners can execute performances on their own, obtain feedback, and steadily make improvements. Many of the jazz greats, for example, developed their talent by playing night after night in local clubs.

The research of Benjamin Bloom and his colleagues at the University of Chicago suggests that the role of mentors varies across the learning curve. Early in development, a coach teaches basics, as in the case of a Little League coach or a beginning piano teacher. Later, practice becomes more structured and extended as part of competence and expertise development. A coach at these later phases needs to have a solid mastery of the performance activity to structure practice properly and provide meaningful feedback.

Many of the highly successful traders I've known and worked with have acquired their skills through self-development and a relative minimum of guidance from senior traders. In these situations, we can break down their learning activities into four components that I call P3R:

• Prepare
• Plan
• Perform
• Review

Prepare refers to activities that orient the performer to the upcoming challenge. Running drills helps prepare a football team for a game; reviewing charts and market data prepares a trader for the upcoming trading session.

Plan relies on an assessment of strengths and weaknesses to guide how the performance will be undertaken. A military leader develops a battle plan out of intelligence information about the enemy and an evaluation of his own troop strength and strategic position. A trader's plan includes the patterns he or she will trade, the capital to be allocated to trades, allowable risk, etc.

Perform is the execution of a plan, with mid-course correction as needed. A basketball team will call time out if the performance is not going according to plan. A trader may reassess a plan in light of unexpected economic news and a price breakout.

Review comes after a performance, as part of assessing what was done right and wrong. The military leader conducts an after-action review following a mission to tweak the overall battle plan and correct any weaknesses that might have emerged. A trader utilizes review to identify flaws in trading plans and the execution of those plans, using the feedback to begin a new cycle of Prepare.

Notice that, in good mentorship, Prepare-Plan-Perform-Review is a cycle, not a linear sequence. The idea is to create learning loops in which you the performer/student can also be the mentor/teacher. Incorporating structured feedback into future preparation and planning is key to self-coaching.

Trading journals are a time-honored tool for self-mentoring, structuring and documenting the P3R process. Increasingly, we're seeing online tools for journaling that incorporate graphics and market data into the trading journal. Platforms such as CQG mark charts with the points at which you made trades and worked orders in the book, allowing you to add your own comments. These can be readily printed out for future reference and review. Programs such as Trader DNA allow users to print out charts of trading results and tables of performance, summarizing a variety of performance metrics that highlight strengths and weaknesses.

I'm increasingly impressed with the Stock Tickr program, which now has a Pro version that integrates an online journal with charts of one's trades and statistics about trading results. Users of the program have the option to keep their journals private or share with others in the Stock Tickr community. This latter option opens the door to peer mentorship and coaching.

The most valuable service I can perform for traders, I believe, is not to become their trading coach, but to help them mentor themselves. My upcoming presentation at the Futures Trading Summit will be largely devoted to this topic, stressing ways that traders can accelerate their own development. My hope is also that the morning market updates and trading Weblog can also help traders better Prepare, Plan, Perform, and Review their way to success. A list of additional resources to aid your mentorship is available on the Trader Development page of my personal site.

One Difference Between Good and GREAT Traders

The good trader limits risk, but the great trader also maximizes opportunity. -- Brett Steenbarger

Overlooked Qualities of Successful Traders

From TraderFeed and Brett Steenbarger:
One of the things I most enjoy about working with traders in various settings--prop firms, hedge funds, and investment banks--is the opportunity to see how successful traders actually succeed. I'm constantly amazed at the variety of strategies and skills that can be joined to create profitable approaches to trading and investing.

During this most recent road trip, four characteristics of successful traders--ones that are commonly overlooked--have jumped out at me, and I thought I'd pass along:

1) The Constant Desire to Improve - I met with a group of traders who have been successful over a period of many years. Nevertheless, they were participating in day-long meetings, including a seminar with me, to build on their success for the coming year. It was very clear that they are continually searching for new opportunities and strategies. They also value continuing education, keeping up to date with what's happening in their areas. They track their performance and, individually as well as a group, are setting very specific goals for improvement.

2) The Ability to Press Their Advantage - The really good traders are aggressive; no doubt about it. When they're seeing the market well and have good ideas, they aren't shy about using their size and pressing their advantage. Lesser traders are very quick to take profits and are risk averse re: losing those profits. The very successful traders keep their risk management, but don't hesitate to become more aggressive when they see opportunity. They remind me of boxers who, seeing opponents hurt, will go for the kill. The less successful traders seem to lack that killer instinct.

3) Emotional Resilience - The very successful traders have a great attitude about losing. They know it's going to happen. They don't take it personally. If anything, they try to find learning experiences from losses. Elsewhere I have written about how good traders view a losing trade as "paying for information". A trade with an edge that doesn't go their way either tells them something important about the market, or it tells them something about their execution. Either way, it's a potential learning experience. Resilience means that the excellent traders trade well out of a hole. They can be down money for day, week, or quarter and continue to make the same good trades they would normally make.

4) Creativity - We normally think of creativity as a trait that belongs to artists, but it also is quite noticeable among traders who have been successful over many years. They find edges in the most unlikely places. They look at interesting relationships within the market they're trading, and they find unique relationships from one market to another. One trader very recently told me of a strategy that exploited the way one market was priced related to a similar market at certain time periods. I would have never thought of that idea in a million years. He was making consistent money from the concept.

As I write about these four qualities, I'm struck by how they also can be found among very successful athletes, entrepreneurs, and performing artists. When you're a career trader, you truly are an entrepreneur, running your own business. Many of the same enterprising qualities we find in the business world are present in spades among excellent traders.

Three Relentless Steps Toward Becoming a Great Trader

From Brett Steenbarger:
One of the goals of my book Enhancing Trader Performance was to figure out what makes successful performers tick--in any field of endeavor. What I learned in researching the field was that talent--inborn abilities--are necessary for success, but not sufficient. It's how people channel their talents by structuring their learning processes (i.e., their building of skills) that ultimately determines whether or not they become elite performers. Here are three straightforward ways you can structure your learning to make the most of your talents:

1) Keep score. Relentlessly. When Lance Armstrong's performance team works with him, no aspect of performance is ignored. They measure his stance in the bike to minimize wind resistance; they measure his pedaling frequency to maximize his speed and minimize his effort; and they tweak the design of the bike to achieve every possible edge. His cycling performance may be art, but behind it is plenty of science. So it is in other performance domains, from NASCAR to chess to ballet: the greats study what they do to constantly improve. Take a look at the performance metrics that professional traders collect to figure out their strengths and weaknesses. They figure out how they perform in rising, falling, and flat markets; they evaluate their performance as a function of being long or short and as a function of time of day. Keeping score builds the motivation to continuously improve, but it also tells you which improvements to make. Track every trade you make: How much did it go against you while you were in the trade? How much did it go your way after you exited? How could you have recognized that it was a winner (so that you could have scaled in with more size) or a loser (so that you could have exited with minimal loss)? The really great performers make themselves a subject of study.

2) Study the market. Relentlessly. There's a reason why the great basketball and football coaches review game tapes obsessively with their teams. There's also a reason why chess grandmasters play and replay games from past tournaments. So much of performance--especially in trading--boils down to pattern recognition, and so much of pattern recognition boils down to multiple, high-quality exposures to the marketplace. A program that I use called Market Delta breaks down trades by their size and by whether they were transacted at the market bid or offer. That way, we can see if large traders are leaning to the buy or sell side. A replay feature in the program enables us to review each market day and see how the buying or selling unfolded. This provides us with many more of those high-quality market exposures than we could ever hope to get from simple live trading. In my book, I mention a learning technique used by many of the most successful traders I've known: they videotape their trading and then review the tapes after the close. It's a great way to review what the markets did--and how you responded. After a while, the patterns jump out at you.

3) Read. Relentlessly. Particularly for the independent trader, trading can be an extremely isolating activity. It's easy to get locked in your own head, your own ideas. If you look at the life histories of expert performers in various fields, you find that most of them have not been isolated. They have had mentors at various points in their careers to help them learn and grow. How can you pick the brains of the world's greatest traders and investors? Books and blogs offer one important avenue. True, there are many fluff books and self-absorbed blogs, but there are a few written by the pros that are worth their weight in gold. Right now, I'm reading Inside the House of Money by Steven Drobny. It's a wonderful collection of interviews that gets inside the heads of global macro traders. I'm also reading Ken Fisher's new text, The Only Three Questions That Count. He explodes a number of market myths and models a way of thinking about markets that has led him to consistent success as a money manager. Take a look at blogs written by Barry Ritholtz and Bill Cara; read the extensive Q&A sessions posted by Charles Kirk in his Members section. You may not agree with all their conclusions, but you'll learn how they think about markets. That is mentorship-by-observation.

It takes a relentless pursuit of excellence to become excellent: that is what I learned from my performance research. You can only sustain such a pursuit if you truly love what you're doing; if it captivates your very being. If you're not relentless in your pursuit of trading success, perhaps it's not that you need discipline or motivation. Perhaps trading is not the domain in which you were meant to excel. What my daughter Devon taught me is that somehow, somewhere there is a kind of productive activity you were meant to do. And when you find it, you will be relentless, because you want to be doing nothing else.

Six Keys for Trading Success

From Traderfeed and Brett Steenbarger:
In my last post, I mentioned that a generous blog reader shared his intraday trading approach with me last week. His ideas seemed sound, so I suggested that he contact Henry Carstens, an experienced systems developer. Henry, I told him, could test his trading ideas and perhaps suggest improvements, while avoiding the problem of curve-fitting. The reader, trusting that Henry and I would not divulge the particulars of his method, patiently explained his setups with numerous examples. Within a matter of hours, Henry had backtested the ideas over the past five years of trading. What Henry's report revealed tells us quite a bit about what it takes to be successful as an intraday trader. My subsequent conversations with the trader revealed yet more. Here are six lessons from our experience with a successful short-term trader:

1) The successful trader is selective. The trader's approach took about 1300 trades in a five-year period, or about one a day. It spent more time out of the market than in the market. As a result, it did not rack up huge commission overhead. Instead, it only took very high percentage trades. Without any optimization whatsoever on Henry's part, the system had almost 80% of trades as winners. This selectivity makes for very high risk-adjusted returns. Most of the time, the trader's capital was not at risk. He only entered the market when he could make money consistently. He had clear ideas regarding execution that enabled him to get into the market at favorable prices, minimizing losses when the trade didn't work out and maximizing gains when he got the moves to his target.

2) The successful trader has made the approach his or her own. When I talked with the trader by phone, I sometimes had trouble following his thinking. He spoke quickly about hitting the red line or the brown line on his charts and casually mentioned important trading ranges and levels. It was clear that this way of trading had become part of him. The way he set up his charts is the way he thinks. No doubt this internalization helps him see when the market is acting normally and when it is not, enabling him to quickly act upon opportunity or threat. Only considerable experience, watching markets day after day and studying charts upon charts, makes it possible to internalize a method to that degree.

3) The successful trader has found a niche. The trader did not just send me one or two charts illustrating his method; he sent dozens. On the phone, when he talked about his approach, there was real enthusiasm in his voice. It was clear that this kind of trading had captured his interests, skills, and talents. That creates a virtuous cycle in which success leads to more excitement which leads to more learning, which creates further success. He didn't try to trade instruments or time frames for which his approach--and his skills--were not suited. He focused on his strengths.

4) The successful trader is creative. I think it's fair to say that his approach is a short-term trend-following method. His way of evaluating the market trend, however, is unique. He is definitely not just looking at the same old 14-period oscillator that comes pre-programmed in most charting applications. Similarly, he has clear stop points and price targets, but these are defined in a unique way, based upon the market conditions he's observing. This "out-of-the-box" thinking style is common to successful traders, I've found. They look at markets in unique ways that help them capture shifts in supply and demand.

5) The successful trader is always seeking improvement. If our trader is already successful, why does he need to talk with Henry? He knew that, by sharing his ideas, he would learn a great deal about the strengths and weaknesses of his trading. Sure enough, Henry found that the average size of the trader's losers was larger than it needed to be. A simple modification of stop-loss rules improved the system's performance meaningfully. Similarly, by putting a filter on the system--only taking trades if certain conditions were met--the average profit per trade went up significantly. That could aid position sizing. The trader knew he had something good, but good wasn't good enough. He wanted better.

6) The successful trader is persistent. One thing I want to stress: the trader's methods were very sound--and Henry found ways to make them better--but they were not perfect. Out of about sixty months analyzed, fourteen were losers. The drawdowns were not hellacious, but there were periods of flat performance and drawdown. What that means is that a successful trader needs to have the confidence to ride out these periods of poorer performance to get to the periods of success. That is one reason why it's so important to find a way of trading that you can make your own. You're more likely to stick with a method that fits with how you think (and that fits with your skills) than if it's something you've blindly copied from others. Our trader believes in his method, and that gives him the brass ones to hang in there during relatively lean periods.

Note that our trader is not a mechanical systems trader. What Henry did was test out his major ideas and identify their strengths and weaknesses if they were traded consistently, with discipline, as if they were a system. If you are a successful trader, this is a valuable exercise. It will break your trading into components and show you how each component is contributing to profitability. It very often shows how the components can be slightly modified to produce even better results. By looking under the hood, so to speak, and making a couple of adjustments, we can meaningfully improve upon our success. There are very few trading strategies that cannot be programmed and tested, including complex chart and indicator patterns. The results can be most enlightening.

Phantom's Gift - one of the best trading books -- and it's FREE!

Here is a link to a document that I downloaded (it is free) from the Futures Magazine website:

http://phantomsgift.4shared.com/

This document is my Bible of trading. It doesn't teach technical analysis or trading methodology, but is more about the immutable laws of trading success and trading philosophy. It is written (it is done interview style) by Phantom, a veteran futures trader who has made great sums of money in the futures markets.

I believe that in every realm, there are laws that control success in that realm. Phantom's Gift teaches many of those laws. I will, from time to time, refer to the "Rules" taught by Phantom in his book, as well as other laws that I have learned.

I met Phantom years ago in a forum for Forex traders. He became what I considered to be a mentor, but I eventually lost track of him and haven't had any contact with him for about 3 years or so. I would very much like to renew acquaintance, if anyone knows him and can help me renew our friendship.

By the way: this shared folder is hosted by 4shared.com, a wonderful website for sharing files. You can open an account with them yourself by clicking on the link below my profile at the right side of this page.