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CHAPTER ADDENDUM
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Let me share with you some vital research that has affected the world's Olympic teams since 1972 and will influence your trading and your life. Around 1952, several universities decided to study how to increase the effectiveness of various methods of improving athletic performance. Athletic performance was chosen because slight differences can be easily measured. For example, if a sprinter has been running the 100- meter dash for years, and, because of a training-method change, the sprinter's time improves even a fraction of a second, that change and its result become very significant. Similarly, if a competitive weight lifter is able to improve the maximum lift only a few pounds, that is significant.

These researchers were investigating the connection between motivation and results. They divided their sample population into two groups. The first group had a common psychological profile of doing an activity for the reward or payoff attached to that activity. For example, a high school freshman basketball player spent two hours after team practice each day shooting foul shots because the coach had said that, to make the varsity team, at least a 65 percent scoring average from the foul line was required. The payoff was: making the varsity team. Another hopeful was doing bench presses in the gym so that he would have a great chest and, when summer came, he would be more attractive to females on the beach. Payoff: attention from the females. An older man was a daily jogger because he feared a possible heart attack and had become convinced that jogging would increase his life span. Pay­off: a longer life. The common characteristic in these examples from the first group was that the activity was being performed for the deferred reward or later payoff.

The second group, which was much smaller in number, differed from the first group in that they found the reward for each activity inherent in the activity itself! A freshman high school basketball player was staying after practice and shooting foul shots just because he liked to shoot foul shots. A weight lifter found his reward at the bench press in seeing whether he could press five pounds more than he had pressed the day before. An older jogger kept jogging because he enjoyed the endorphins that he felt after the first few blocks. The difference between these groups was vital, and the bottom line was astounding! The second group's improvement was not only four to six times as great but it occurred much faster! This study was replicated in dozens of universities with essentially the same results (Garf ield, 1986).

In my own experience in working with thousands of traders, I have found that the greatest and most successful traders find their main reward in the activity of trading itself. Granted that most of us were originally attracted to trading by the idea of making a lot of money "without working for it," but I have found that the best and brightest get their kicks from actually doing the trading.

Nothing significant came from the universities' research, which was originally done in the early 1950s, until some athletics trainers from Bulgaria were visiting the United States and ran across the research. At that time, the East and the West were actively competing on all fronts—military, economic, and athletic. The Bulgarian trainers went back to the Eastern block countries with the American research in hand and completely changed their training methods.

This culminated in the East's sweeping the medals in the 1976 Summer Olympic Games in Montreal. Our defense, after being soundly beaten in almost every sport, was to accuse the Eastern block countries' athletes of using drugs. How else could they be the best in everything? However, drug tests on over 6,000 athletes turned up only two positives, and either or both could be attributed to ingestion of antihistamine tablets. The "secret" was that the East had trained the athletes so that their rewards and payoffs were inherent in the activity itself rather than being postponed for the day when they might win an Olympic medal.

The lesson here is: Do you really enjoy the act of trading? Or do you suffer from fear and greed every minute you are in the market? If you suffer, it is because you don't understand either the market and/or yourself. Most traders win or lose to the same degree that they understand themselves. Finding your own individual underlying and unseen structure is what Level Four and Level Five address.

World-class traders see the market itself as a support mechanism. Amateurs and/or less successful traders see the market as threatening. That difference is critical in achieving the last two levels and becoming an expert trader.

In Level Four, we will investigate the psychological side of trading. We will look at our own unique personal hardware, the neural wiring and interconnections in our brain, and our own personal choice of which software programs we want to run in our own brain.

REVIEW QUESTIONS

1. What is the importance of always looking for and using Profitunity Planned Trading (PPT)?

What are the advantages of using PPT trading tech
niques rather than just trading along with a comfortable
volume of contracts and using fractal trading tech
niques?

•  What are the advantages of using the Profitunity Trad
ing Partner worksheet?

•  What is the first column to fill in on the worksheet and
why is it important to fill it in first?

•  What is the second column to fill in and why should it be
second?

•  Why do you need to deal with two different time frames
(the current one plus a significantly higher time frame)
while trading?

•  What are the two or three primary trading signals?

•  Why shouldn't you just take these signals automatically
and create a mechanical system for trading the market?

•  What factors are involved in making an executive decip
sion about trading?

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