Best Loser Wins: Why Normal Thinking Never Wins the Trading Game – written by a high-stake day trader

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It paints a clear picture why 90% of retail traders lose. Some passages towards the end of the book are "borrowed" from the book Trading In The Zone by Mark Douglas, but if you didnt read that one you wont mind it. This book will guide and inspire you in ways no other trading book has. It is not about strategies and money management. It is about mind management. Tom Hougaard provides a unique and refreshingly personal account of how an ordinary trader elevated his game to incredible heights by focusing as much on his mental approach as on his technical analysis. I think there is a need to flesh out some facts to remove this holier than thou cryptic style of discussion that impedes our trading and hinders our progress. How can we understand the concept of something clearly when every thing is written like a ceremony to a masonic lodge. If market is random, as in future event is independent of the past, why bother with technical analysis?

Is the goal profits? Then the warrior spirit is to go where no one else wants to go, because the goal god dammit dictates it. But you made the lessons obscure. You designed it to look easy. But it was never easy. You made everyone believe that you could be danced with through models, through equations, through indicators, through conventional thinking and through logic. But often there is little logic to you. And I struggled to dance with you for years, until one day by chance you told me your secret. You told me to stop trying to understand you. You told me to understand myself." The whole point of the book is to provide you with the tools required to behave inhumanely. It is a training regimen to correctly perform the most uncomfortable tasks that are necessary to succeed. Things like: If you happen to engage in any kind of trading, you may have experienced this: a position is relentlessly losing you money, and it’s like some entity at the other end of the trade has decided to sink its teeth in your flesh. It won’t let go and it’s dragging you down. The market is now sentient, and it’s out for blood. Yours specifically. I don't trade Forex like a roulette game of randomness. If it's randomness, I gamble roulette. For Forex I trade, I see clarity. It's this clarity that give me strong mindset.I was invited by one of the biggest brokers in the world to give a talk about the life of a home trader. They filmed the event, which lasted a few hours. I gave the speech a provocative title: Look, there have been all kinds of financial studies about this question and being that there are so many divided both ways, is it random or is it not, does it really matter? Unless it comes up in discussion, like here, it really never enters my mind. My answer hung in the air like a morbid joke at a funeral. I had barely finished my verdict before I noticed the death stare from my boss. All these clients were long Marconi and they would go on to lose fortunes. Later that year I was on CNBC and I was asked to do a chart analysis of Marconi.

The book describes a young man travelling from America to Britain to study at a London university and subsequently being hired to work for an American investment bank. It describes what it was like to work on a trading floor and observe some of the big traders there. Now, before I can talk about the book with any kind of efficacy, I somehow have to find a way to introduce you to the character that is its author. But first, a foreword: Tom’s hard-earned wisdom explains that “ normal”consists in a number of emerging human behaviours designed to avoid pain and being uncomfortable when managing a trade. All of them, invariably, are counter-productive in the long term. This book is of course is not the first one assessing this.This gave me the confidence to push ahead with the book project, because I could see that my message resonated with an audience that wanted to move beyond the conventional teachings in trading. I started applying to university degree courses around Europe. I already had a job at a pension fund as an office trainee. After reading the book, I knew that would not be my end destination.