I spent this weekend in South Carolina with a group of traders. I was supposed to be teaching them. But they taught me a lot, too. I’ll share what I learned in this week’s letter, tell you about the free webinar tonight, give you an update about the charitable stuff that’s going on, and the Australia seminar.

Let's get on with it.

Tonight at 5:00pm Eastern US Time, we’ll be doing a free web-cast webinar thing, where I share my charts and talk about trades, the world economy, answer your questions, and more. It’s usually an hour of the more fun than currency traders should legally be allowed to have, and I hope you’ll join us.

Click here to register for the webinar:

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/931327292

The webinar will be recorded. If you register at the link above, we’ll make sure we send you a link to the archived version. It’s always more fun to be there live, of course.

Over the weekend I spent time with a group of traders in Lexington, South Carolina. Eight of us met in a conference room in a little hotel off the beaten path, about as far away from anything I’m familiar with as you can get. I didn’t know exactly what to expect. Here’s what I learned:

Transparency Brings Profits

My friends in South Carolina talked about anything. I mean anything. No subject was off limits, and they were completely open. One of our new friends talked extensively about a horrible trade which he’d taken and which was causing him a considerable amount of pain – at the time we spoke his account had lost 30% of its value due to this one trade alone.

We spent an hour of the seminar just talking about this one trade, facing the situation, and crafting a game plan for what to do next. We could have talked endlessly about how dumb it was to get into the trade in the first place, but we instead concentrated on what to do now that the trade was open and we couldn’t take back the decision. By working together, we worked up a strategy for taking the loss if it got much worse, and maximizing anything good that might happen if the trade suddenly turned around. Then we made a commitment to stay in touch about it.

There isn’t anything that you can’t face as long as you accept it, embrace it, and work with a group of experienced friends who care about your success.

Short Term Trading or Long Term Trading: Doesn’t Matter

I re-learned this again. Time and time again, I go to an expo or a conference, and I hear some guy spout off about how “long term trading is better,” or “short term news trading is the only way to make money.” These types of statements make me want to throw up. The truth is that people make money in all kinds of different ways. Methods of making money in the currency markets are as varied as the people who trade. And there is no one best, only, final strategy for making money from the markets. There never will be. The traders in the room had varied schedules, lifestyles, habits, personal commitments, financial goals, tolerances for risk – and they each ended up having an individual idea of what they wanted to do in the markets. I loved that. For those of you who are not familiar with the regions of the United States, the South is known for its good food, warm climate, and rich history.

What I love about it is the defiant commitment to the freedom to make personal decisions without outside intervention. This commitment makes for some original personalities. It’s also what makes a great trader, too.

To my friends in South Carolina, thanks for a great weekend.

A lot of you offered to have me visit with you to write my book (see last week’s newsletter about that). Wow! I appreciate that. I might get on the road and still take you up on that offer. I am making some travel plans this week and I’ll stay in touch about what kinds of trouble I find myself in.

More importantly, there were many, many more of you who offered to help with the charitable project. What stuns me is that you didn’t even know what it was about, but you offered to help anyway. I find that I’ve been blessed (there is no other way to say it) with the friendship of so many of you who are generous, kind, giving, and have the energy to do all that you do – and offer to help others.

It is no coincidence that I found a project, with the input from one of you, that promises to change the lives of a number of people in a very significant way. I will be traveling to India, probably in June, to start work on this effort. I am going to need your help. I’ll be updating you about this week-by-week and I hope that you don’t mind.

The last weekend in May, I’ll be holding a seminar in Sydney, Australia. If you’d like to come, please reply to this email or write to us here, and put “Australia” in the subject line of the message. We hope to see you there.

Happy trading!