futures trading, making profits, foreign currencies, make money

At every step, you've been careful to plan meticulously, to lis ten to only the best forecasters, to work with only proven systems, to employ the best and brightest minds in short, to use only the best laid plans. Still, for some reason, nothing works out as it's supposed to. Welcome to the wonderful world of futures trading, where almost nothing turns out as expected. You are flooded with forecasts for the economy, for interest rates, for gold, for foreign currencies, but rarely does any forecast turn out to be accurate.

Newsletter writers boast of sensational track records, even though only a few of their readers renew their subscriptions.

Economists and advisers appear on FNN and at seminars to explain sensibly and convincingly why some event is inevitable. But the event never comes to pass or it occurs much later than anticipated.

Despite the plausible ideas, the computer-tested systems, the economic wisdom, the refined techniques, the documented track records, and the commonsense approaches, practically nothing in the economic or trading world works out as everyone was assured it would.

Some traders do make money over time. Actually, some traders do quite well consistently, over long periods of time. Those profits are made in spite of events that don't unfold as promised. If you doubt this last statement, simply dig out last year's forecast issues of various newsletters. Read what the writer predicted was going to happen this year. Ask yourself how valuable those forecasts were. Make sure you read the original: the review and retelling may differ considerably.

Remember how H. Ross Perot, during the 1992 Presidential campaign, "guaranteed" us that there would be a catastrophic bank failure and we would see the demise of the FDIC during mid-December 1992?

Tune in to tonight's news analysis. Experts rarely agree on the significance of what's happening in the present, much less in the future.

The professional analysts-predictors strike an "I knew it was going to happen" stance because they feel it is necessary in their business. Each feels he or she must be in command of the situation, on top of the markets, aware of what is happening and what is going to happen. After all, their competitors are putting up the same false front.

Traders have their own reasons for keeping the real results secret. They risk their self-esteem along with their money when they trade. They don't want to appear to be the only losers when everyone else seems to be doing so well.

Most traders go on expecting the future to evolve predictably; they are positive that there's a reliable system and that other people have found it. They keep searching for a fi nancial Rosetta Stone, but they never find it.

No one can tell when bonds will peak or how far they will fall. Human traders aren't able to predict the future in any reliable way. For every example of an investment forecast that came true, I can point to four or five that didn't—and some of both kinds may have come from the same forecaster.

When you give up the hope that some adviser, some system, some source of inside tips is going to give you a shortcut to wealth, you'll finally begin to gain control over your trading future. It will finally dawn on you that no one trades the market. Not you, hot the "experts/' not the technoids, not those institutions with three-story computers, no one. We all trade our own personal belief systems. When you recognize this truth, a whole new trading world opens up.

Trading is a psychological game. Economic, fundamental, mechanical, or technical strategies mostly don't work. As I write this, a recent issue of Futures magazine reports that, out of 231 professionally managed funds, only 33 are showing a gain about halfway through the calendar year. Only 3 out of 231, or just over 1 percent, are showing gains of more than 10 percent. 1 That translates to 87 percent losers and only 1 percent up more than 10 percent for the year. Remember, these are the results for the highest paid professionals managing some of the largest public funds in the world.

These traders have the biggest computers and the best information in the world available to them. But the markets are not computers and they cannot be understood by computers. There is an easy way to know exactly when computers will be come successful as traders: as soon as they can tell the difference between a cat and a dog.

Trading the markets offers fantastic opportunities for making profits but it is at the same time the most self-revealing ca reer anyone can choose.

We learn that understanding ourselves is the key to profit-making decisions and strategies. We see that, beyond the mon etary results, there are rewards inherent in the activity of trading. A total approach for understanding the market re quires strategy and tactics that let us understand ourselves as well as the markets.

We learn that the underlying structure of the market is a mirror of the underlying structure in each individual trader. The challenge is to harmonize our own individual underlying (and usually unseen) structure with that of the market.

Our search for success might be compared to the quest for the holy grail: we're looking for that one idea that will guarantee that we can be consistent winners. I propose that our quest can be summed up in five words: Want what the market wants. That goal is very simple but not always easy.

All of our frustrations and losses come from one source. We had expectations that were not met. When we want what the market wants, we have no frustrations. By aligning our own underlying structure with that of the market, we have no unfulfilled expectations.

With this approach, trading is a low-stress way to live. We learn that we can get into a psychological "no-risk" structure and have fun. We realize that if trading is not fun, we are doing something wrong, and the market, which is our only teacher, will always always tell us exactly what is wrong and where our errors lie.