"I am always asked what makes a successful trader? It's not just one thing, I actually separate it into three parts. In one sense, it's 100% psychology because its all about your beliefs and your performance. We've actually developed a workshop called the "17 Steps Workshop" that basically provides a blueprint to all the steps you need to take in order to be successful as a trader.

Today's blog will give you information about this blueprint as well as some information about various products that I have for traders that can help you if you wanted to dig deeper into these steps.

Part one is about developing a business plan to guide you. You must know who you are, you must set objectives, you must really understand your thinking and your beliefs, you must lay out the big picture, you must develop all the systems you need (and not just trading systems), and you must develop a worse case contingency plan. For help on business planning, I have a CD series which even has some sample plans at the end. In addition, I consider completing the Peak Performance Course, so that you really know yourself, to be essential for this step.

Part two is about developing strategies that fit the big picture and strategies that will work if the big picture changes. I recommend at least three strategies here. Two that are non-correlated and fit the current big picture and one that you would expect to work well should things change. And since you can only trade your beliefs about the market, this step is very psychological. Recommendations for doing this step. First, complete the Peak Performance Course and then the Systems Home Study course. And if you prefer to attend workshops to get all of the information in an intense and concentrated format then you might also want to look at our systems workshop and our two peak performance workshops.

Part three is about working on yourself in an ongoing manner to continually evolve and improve your performance. Let's look at it this way. I think anyone can develop a system that makes 100% per year, but trading it to get that performance is something else. Why? As I've discussed below, people continually make mistakes and you must be able to correct those mistakes. And if you repeat the same mistakes over and over again, it's called self-sabotage and it means that you really need self-work. Again, here I recommend all the Peak material, and other supplemental material that we provide, such as A Course In Miracles.

If you want to know more about the 17 steps and the blueprint for trading success, then it would be very beneficial to actually attend the 17 Steps workshop. For example: in that workshop you get an outline of a worse case contingency plan that took one of my supertraders six months to complete. And the group usually doubles the size of it before the workshop is through.

However, I also plan to write a brief outline of each of the 17 steps in future editions of my own personal newsletter which is called, Tharp's Thoughts. Thus, if you are not on our particular mailing list to get that free newsletter, then I'd recommend you start today. You will need to go directly to www.iitm.com to do this.

For a basic background on all of my concepts, I'd recommend that you read each of my three books which is a great way to get started

Van