A note to readers: While Dr. Tharp’s content is timeless, this article is from our newsletter archive and may contain outdated information, missing links or images. As a trader part of your challenge is that you must make decisions based on a large amount of information. Thousands of volumes have been written on how to analyze the vast amount of investment information available. Few investment authorities will admit that most of this information is of low quality and has little predictive value. Since investment information is of such low quality, mental strategies (how you make deci ..read more

A note to readers: While Dr. Tharp’s content is timeless, this article is from our newsletter archive and may contain outdated information, missing links or images. As Byron Katie would say, “Who would you be without your story?”  My goal for every Super Trader 1 candidate is to realize that your experience of life is all made up.  When you get that, you can either make up something much more useful or you can go beyond it – like Neo did in the original Matrix movie.  That idea is a little difficult for most people to digest, but I’m going to help you at least understa ..read more

A note to readers: While Dr. Tharp’s content is timeless, this article is from our newsletter archive and may contain outdated information, missing links or images. Our mission at the Van Tharp Institute is transformation through a trading metaphor.  Today I want to share some thoughts on what that really means. First, let’s look at the roots of the word transformation.   The center of the word is form and to me that refers to the physical form.  You might call that the body you inhabit.   When you identify with your body you do a number of things.  You limit ..read more

A note to readers: While Dr. Tharp’s content is timeless, this article is from our newsletter archive and may contain outdated information, missing links or images. One of the key principles of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) is the importance of being in an optimal mental state.   In fact, I recently watched an old edition of the Dr. Oz Show in which Tony Robbins was the guest.   Tony gave a formula for achieving your goals by devoting 5 minutes each morning to three areas: 1) physical activity, 2) gratitude and 3) goals.   Tony was right, the morning routine ..read more

A note to readers: While Dr. Tharp’s content is timeless, this article is from our newsletter archive and may contain outdated information, missing links or images. PART 1 Most of you probably know by now that our mission at the Van Tharp Institute is transformation through a trading metaphor. What do I mean by transformation? In this two-part article (Part Two coming next week), I’d like to cover several ways of looking at transformation including: David Hawkins’ level of consciousness model; the Matrix Model; and Going Beyond the Matrix. Let’s look at each of these. Level of Consciousness In ..read more

A note to readers: While Dr. Tharp’s content is timeless, this article is from our newsletter archive and may contain outdated information, missing links or images. When I was in 4th grade, my parents applied for me to attend a famous school in Switzerland but I was rejected because of my grades. In hindsight, I’m glad I was rejected because it changed everything for me. Suddenly grades were important. My best friend in school, Mike Stewart, had an IQ of about 160 and he always got straight A’s. Mike became my first role model. “How did he do it?” became my primary focus. I began to learn what ..read more

A note to readers: While Dr. Tharp’s content is timeless, this article is from our newsletter archive and may contain outdated information, missing links or images. In my professional career I have two loves. The first has to do with modeling. How do people do what they do? How can I figure out how and why some people perform so far above the crowd? And equally important, how can I teach other people to do that? As I’ve said often, I am a Neurolinguistic Programming Modeler. My second love is transformation. Our company mission is transformation through a trading metaphor and my life’s work is ..read more

A note to readers: While Dr. Tharp’s content is timeless, this article is from our newsletter archive and may contain outdated information, missing links or images. In the early 2000s, I took the Avatar Wizards Course twice. The first time I took the course, I pretty much skipped over a section that seemed useless to me called Secrets and Hidden Agendas. I noticed that the people who had attended the Wizards course many times, however, were spending a lot of time on that section. Why? The object of that section was to free your attention and the basic steps of the process go something like thi ..read more

This is our final Tharp’s Thoughts newsletter – a kind of end. Rather than being the destination, however, we have arrived at a midpoint. Before we consider your journey ahead, let’s make a quick assessment of where we are.  What a long, wonderful, rich, and transformative journey we have had with Dr. Van Keith Tharp as a guide! How best do we make a brief assessment of where we are and how far we have come? How about in two ways that Van would probably appreciate: with a model and some takeaways. We will form some of Van’s primary beliefs into a simple – a very, very simple – model. It w ..read more

A note to readers: While Dr. Tharp’s content is timeless, this article is from our newsletter archive and may contain outdated information, missing links or images. If you wanted to know what peak performance trading looks like, you could examine a market genius and study how that person approaches her craft. You also could look at a genius in some other area and notice if some of his behavior could be applied to trading. In that regard, I’ve been thinking about how Einstein would think about the modern markets. I learned that one of the things Einstein did well was to dissociate. He used imag ..read more