I know…yes…this contradicts everything most people have been trained to think: “work hard and you will reach your goals in life”.
Well…let me ask you this – how many people do you know that work all month long 7 to 9 hour days and barely bring home a $3,000 paycheck?
There is nothing wrong with working hard. My father worked a 9 to 5 job for over 35 years and I respect that. He did everything he could do to support the family.
But the HUGE difference between my father and YOU and ME is that he didn’t have another option…
If he had a way to bring those paychecks home without working so hard I can GUARANTEE he would have left his day job and enjoyed life as it should be enjoyed!
You can trade for a living. It has been done before, and it’s being done right now, today, by people who started with nothing, learned to trade and are making a good living at it. The best make fortunes, most fail, out of lack of discipline or experience.
Successful guerilla stock traders make money by betting on short term price swings. The idea is to buy when the market tells us prices are rising and sell when the uptrend runs out of steam. On the flip side, we can bet on a decline and sell short when our analysis points to a downtrend, covering when the downtrend starts bottoming out. The concept is simple, but implementing it requires a high level of skill.
It is hard to become a doctor or lawyer, but even harder to become a good trader. Beginners often assume they can make money because they have a college degree, are good with computers, and have had much success in business.
Balancing your mind is just as important as analyzing markets. The sum total of your life experiences influence your perceptions, making it a key aspect of your success or failure. Managing risk and protecting yourself on the downside is essential for surviving the inevitable drawdowns and prospering in the long run. Psychology, market analysis, and money management—you have to master all three to become a success.
There are two main approaches that guerilla traders use to profit from crowd behavior. The first is momentum trading – buy when a ripple starts running through the crowd, sending the market higher, and sell when that ripple starts losing speed. We will not enter at the exact bottom, nor exit at the 
exact top with this strategy. It is a challenge to identify a new trend while it’s still young. As the trend speeds up and the crowd becomes exuberant, amateurs fall in love with their positions. They use personification to make a stock more than it really is. They start using emotional terms of endearment such as “she, he, baby”. They start using terms based on the emotion of greed when referring to the stock they are in such as, “This is my take it to the bank stock”, “this baby is going to let me retire”, “this is my retire in Bermuda stock”, “this stock is going all the way”, “this stock is the next Walmart”, “this stock is the next Microsoft”, “this stock is going to make me rich”. Professionals remain calm and emotionally detached and they monitor the trend’s speed. As soon as they find that the crowd is returning to its normal sleepiness, they take profits without waiting for a reversal.
The other method is the countertrend strategy. Beginners love to trade against trends (“let’s buy, this market can’t go any lower!”), but most are killed on a price spike that fails to reverse. As Alexander Elder once taught me, “A man who likes peeing against the wind has no right to complain about his cleaning bills”. Professionals can trade against trends only because they are ready to run at the first sign of trouble. Before you bet on a reversal, be sure your exit strategy and money management are fine-tuned. The biggest mistake newbie traders make is doing the contrarian thing by betting against the current trend. They may nail it once or twice, but over the long run, they lose everything with this strategy.
I hope you enjoyed this article and leave any comments you have below. Thank you and happy improved trading.
Lance Jepsen
President, GuerillaStockTrading.com
Your Trading Coach
(because everyone, even Tiger Woods, needs a coach)