www.Trade2Win.com
In Jack Schwager's interview with Linda Bradford Raschke in The New Market Wizards, Market Wizard Raschke says this in response to a question about the difficulty of adjusting to the "isolation of trading from home":
For the first four years, being off the floor was great--no distractions, no outside opinions. Last year, however, the isolation started to really bother me. I got lonely. I tried talking to other traders on the phone during the day, but I found that it was distracting and lowered my productivity. I also tried establishing a trading office with another trader - I recognize that isolation has become a problem, and I keep on trying to find different solutions.
FIGURE 1: The home page of Trade2win.com
While you have to hunt a little to ferret out traders willing to admit it, trading is a lonely business and that isolation doesn't always work in the trader's favor. What the absence of distraction brings, the echo chamber of one's own thoughts can often take away as the trader, to steal a line, begins debating with him- or herself. Though the world of trading is anything but sense-deprived, the lifestyle of the individual retail trader is not unlike living in a sensory deprivation tank: what starts out as an exploration of one's psychological and emotional limits can devolve into a "room full of mirrors" filled with the kind of doubt, second-guessing, and paranoia that is often our undoing as traders.
I've found a few solutions to this syndrome, mostly in the form of Internet message-boards and chatrooms, many of them full of people not too different from me. But we are all joined by the desire to divine future price movement from past price movement in spite of everything we've been told by numerous nonbelievers who fail to share our obsession--er, passion.
Now I can add another solution to this growing list: Trade2Win.com. United Kingdom-based Trade2Win has been around since 2001, and through a variety of incarnations and designs, the website continues to be a place where traders, technical analysts, and everyone in between can gather to share war stories, favorite (or hated) charts of trading past, or new secrets to success. More than just a simple message-board, Trade2Win is a place where some of the bigger names in technical analysis have contributed articles, observations, and "think pieces," just for the betterment of those of us in the trading hoi polloi.
YOUR FRIENDS IN TRADE2 WIN
Trade2Win consists of 14 different departments: a discussion board, events diary, knowledge lab, trading review, image gallery, news headlines, trading competition report, recent articles, traders' store, seminars, journals, live chat, members' poll, and trading books. On the surface, that might sound like an overwhelming array of options for the average trader just looking to see what other traders thought about the market last week. Or to find out how the Trader's Expo went last month. Or what the best way to draw trendlines really is. Or what software might be best for trading options. - You get the point.
What is nice is that Trade2Win is laid out in such a way that all of these departments are easy to find and participate in. Either by way of the toolbar across the top of the website or just by scrolling down the main page, visitors to Trade2Win will encounter discussions, essays, lists, and links to respond to just about every concern, question, or conundrum the market presents them with.
Looking closely at some of the major (or at least most highly detailed) departments gives an even better sense of the breadth of Trade2Win. The discussion board includes comments and responses on a variety of topics including foreign exchange, US indexes, US stocks, spread betting, programming, trading hardware, daytrading, and more. Companies such as FXCM and Brainstorm sponsor the subgroups in the discussion board, and they appear to be both fairly active and up to date.
The events message-board allows traders and trading educators to post information about upcoming events that might be of interest to traders. Insofar as Trade2Win is based in the UK, it is little surprise that many of the events listed appear to be located in London or southwest England. But this is truly a member-driven phenomenon; as more traders from other parts of the world (or even other parts of Great Britain!) become aware of Trade2Win, I do not doubt that the "events diary" will feature a more diverse set of workshops, seminars, and other trader-based happenings in other parts of the world.
Both the discussion board and the event diary are located on the left side of the webpage. Below these items are similar, message-board type sections. "Trading reviews" includes reviews of software, datafeeds, and software from vendors like Gecko Software, data providers like BJ's Realtime Data, and trading educators like Alan Farley and Steve Nison.
Under this is an interesting section called "Image gallery." Here is where those charts that always seem to be thumbtacked to your cubicle wall at the office eventually wind up--posted on the Internet for traders the world over to gaze at, awed. Okay, maybe not awed. But the idea of an image gallery is one of the more impressive parts of Trade2Win. After all, technical analysis is very much a visual art and however artfully those thousands of words are deployed, it is hard to beat the clarity of a perfect head and shoulders top, for example, frozen in real-time just as it is breaking down.
Last among this group of discussion-board sections is the Sharecast News Wire. Here economic, financial, and market news is listed, providing traders with at least a sense of the social context in which their trading occurs.
INSIDE TRADE2WIN
One of the newer areas of Trade2Win is the Knowledge Lab. While still under construction, the Knowledge Lab is intended to function as a major online resource for traders looking to understand both some of the more basic concepts in technical analysis and trading, as well as some of the more sophisticated aspects of tackling the markets with Japanese candlesticks, Fibonacci ratios, even tips on blending fundamental market approaches into a generally technical market methodology. Some of the contributions to Knowledge Lab include observations and commentary from Ed Rombach of Thompson Financial, Cornelius Luca, Jim Wyckoff, Brett Steenbarger, and Stephen Bigalow. Excerpts from recent articles from the Knowledge Lab are posted on the home page to help alert visitors to and members of Trade2Win when new content is available.
Outside of these features, a few other items at Trade2Win are worth noting. There is a Trader's Store that includes books, CDs, and DVDs on trading and technical analysis, as well as educational material from trader "academies" such as Pristine.com. Veteran traders also use Trade2Win to offer trading seminars to newbies (and new-to-stocks-bies!), such as the series currently on NASDAQ Level II direct access trading and another titled "Day Trading Chart Set Ups & Strategies."
Trading journals are also kept at Trade2Win, giving traders a chance to peek over the shoulders of others, to learn from their mistakes and perhaps become inspired by their successes. An Irc-based live chat gives traders who'd rather rap in real time than leave a message in a discussion group a chance for some commentary and conversation. Currently, Trade2Win provides two chat rooms: one geared toward UK and US markets and the other toward foreign exchange trading.
All work and no play makes Jack and Jane dull traders, so Trade2Win includes a pair of just-for-fun features that will likely encourage a few fence-sitting traders to give the website a shot. The first is the member poll, which currently asks, "Where will the US discount rate end 2005?" Call it the squawkback poll for the cyberset, because not only can you vote as a registered member of Trade2Win, but you can also argue about the results (er, elaborate on your carefully thought-out opinion) in the poll discussion board.
Even more engaging is Trade2Win's "members only" trading competition. Trade2Win sponsors two monthly trading competitions. One is called the "Share Competition," in which the goal is to simply grow a virtual account of 50,000 pounds by trading only shares in British companies (incidentally, the top trader in the competition is up some 64% with the month about half done). The second contest is called "Dow Competition," in which the goal is to correctly pick the direction the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) will close at the end of the week.
Although still a work in progress in some ways, Trade2Win already boasts enough features for those traders interested in learning new techniques, picking up tips from professional traders and market technicians, or just meeting with and hearing from other traders. Features like the picture gallery remind new visitors that online conversations and message-board exchanges are about more than just idle gossip and the latest rumor. Traders and technicians can actually show the rest of the trading community what they are looking at in the market, giving other traders and technicians the opportunity to, in effect, peer-review their observations and opinions.
While it is true that steely-eyed focus and unyielding independence are key to success both as a technical analyst as well as a trader, the sort of sensory deprivation many traders and analysts subject themselves to--especially at the beginning of their careers as traders and analysts--can be as counterproductive as it can be helpful.
After all, we've seen what sensory deprivation did to the likes of William Hurt in the movie Altered States. Spending days in a tank filled with water and running down the halls like a caveman is no way to win as a trader. And trading to win is what the Trade2Win online community is all about.
--David Penn, Technical Writer
Originally published in the October 2005 issue of Technical Analysis of STOCKS & COMMODITIES magazine. All rights reserved. © Copyright 2005, Technical Analysis, Inc.