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1. At Puretick we believe that professional traders are trained not born. You do not need special gifts to become a professional, consistent trader.
   
   
2. You need to be dedicated. If trading takes second place to other jobs or careers, you will fail. If family and social commitments take away large blocks of your time and interrupt the time you concentrate on trading, you will fail.
   
   
3. If you are afraid of losing money, you will fail. The amount of capital you devote to trading does not have to be large, but what you mark for trading must truly be “risk-capital.” It does not mean that you are borrowing $5,000.00 of your child’s education money that you will replace next year when you begin to make your fortune.
   
   
4. If you need to make market predictions that come true, you will fail. Trading is not an ego contest. It is a business. We expect you to treat this like a business.
   
   
5. Do not expect me to be nice. I am not running an etiquette service. If you want to learn to be nice, log on to the Emily Post Institute web site.
   
   
6. Think of Puretick as Marine or Navy SEALs training. We are the Top Gun program of Day Trading. Don't ask me to tolerate poor trading habits as you would not ask a Navy SEALs instructor to have a few more "cookies and milk" breaks.
   
   
7. Trading is a predatory business. I am training you to be a predator. You must develop the trait to prey upon the weak. You will not be taking money from the successful pro trader. You will be taking money from some amateur. You must be able to enjoy knowing that your last winning trade came at the expense of some poor undercapitalized slob, who just lost his job, who is gambling away his child's tuition money, and has the temerity to trade against you.

1. If you expect to sit back and have a trading Guru call out trades for you, find another trading service.
   
   
2. If you exhibit destructive behavior by posting comments in our trading room that indicate you are not prepared to follow the program --- expect to be severely verbally reprimanded in the trading room. Our traders are serious about improving their trading results. They are aspiring professional traders. They want to grow by associating with others who share the same goals. A trader not up to growing will be challenged not only by Alex or Geoff, but by other traders in our trading room.
   
   
3. If you arrive in the room late you will be chewed out. You will be trading against the top traders on the planet and I can assure you, they are prepared.
   
   
4. If you complain about our tough conditions, YOU WILL BE ATTACKED EVEN HARDER. Would you rather have me "unprofessionally attack" you, or the market to "kindly and gently" take your money from you?
   
   

1. We are not strictly technical traders
   
   
2. We are not fundamental traders
   
   
3. We believe that the most important component of successful trading is an individual trader’s personal belief system.
   
   • There are many successful professional traders employing dozens of different technical and fundamental methods and earning a very high level income from each.
   • We teach what is almost universally common to many successful traders
   • The most important "setup" is that a trader come to work every morning KNOWING that he or she is going to be a winner that day.
     

1. Start with at least $10,000 of risk capital.
   
   • For many even that is not enough
     
     
2. Treat trading EXACTLY like a business or profession. The freedom seemingly available to traders actually enables many actions or behaviors that result in trading failure. You must fight through EXCUSES that stop you from developing as a professional trader.
   
   
3. I have seen traders leave the trading room to go shopping in the middle of the trading day
   
   • Brain surgeons do not go shopping in the middle of a surgery
   • I have seen traders join the Puretick trading room and go on a vacation 2 months after joining.
   • If you opened a new restaurant in town you probably would not close it down 2 months after your grand opening to go white water rafting in the Rockies for 2 weeks.
     
     
4. What about “Real Excuses” like needing to care for an ill family member?
   
   • The short answer is that until you are firmly established in your professional trading career, “YOU MUST BE WILLING TO LIVE LIKE VERY FEW ARE WILLING FOR A COUPLE OF YEARS; SO THAT YOU CAN LIVE LIKE VERY FEW CAN THEREAFTER.”

1. The biggest mistake amateurs make is their desire to know it all in as short as time possible.
   
   
2. Every successful professional trader I know maintains at least one coach/advisor in at least one discipline.
   
   
3. Traders use motivational coaches, hypnotherapists, technical coaches, economic coaches, peer to peer advisors.
   
   
4. If you want to play do-it-yourselfer, build a cabinet down in your home/garage tool shop.
   
   
5. We can monitor “poor self-image thinking.” We can point out market conditions that set up unusual risk. We can point out overlooked opportunities.
   

I founded Puretick with the idea that if I could eventually learn to become a consistent, professional trader after 4 years of unprofitable results, I could teach most aspiring traders to trade better in a shorter learning curve.

I had been a successful investor/money manager from 1981 to 1995. My emphasis had been long term investing in out of favor stocks; “Contrarian Investor” as others might label it. This kind of investing followed the school of people like David Dreman of Forbes and his own management firm. By design we made the assumption that the crowd was usually wrong and given time, the market would correct the extreme emotionalism of the majority of investors.

This method worked well in building large stock positions over time and taking advantage of long term capital gains.

It proved horrible when I began to day trade futures!

We had until the market close to be right. There was little room to fight the market. What had to be successfully employed was a method of trading with the crowd---only getting there 3 minutes before the crowd did.

After four years of “refusing to give up,” with the help of my mentors, and a structured building of my experiences and setbacks, I was able to chose some of the best day trading methods that fit my style. More important, I also changed THAT PART OF MY PERSONALITY that permitted me to assume as mine, the tried and proven ideas of successful traders before me.

So in the Puretick trading room, I will spend the most time teaching students how to constantly think of the risk of a potential trade rather than how much money one can make.

Of course, for structure, we will over and over use a few of the many technical setups I have learned over the years.

Four to five times per day I will sound a trading alert (after demonstrating by a current chart the setup about to take place). Newer traders will still be encouraged to place these trades on a simulator, not trade cash. They can more easily learn the reasons for the trade when they are not distracted by the fear and greed of watching their real time equity go up and down.

Here is the hard part. Any trading guru or book can throw a setup at you and you can start trading it tomorrow. Why do many futures traders fail when so many books and advisors exist? Because these setups occur more times when other market conditions lower the probabilities of a successful outcome.

The ability to recognize, under fire of the real market condition, when trading probabilities are reduced, and risk is greater, can only come with experience. We will be able to add our experience to what you undergo as you grow with us, thereby reducing the total time of the learning curve.

Lastly, TRADING IS A PROFESSION. Or if you prefer, TRADING IS STARTING YOUR OWN BUSINESS. It is an insult to all professional traders to think that you can sign up to my trading room tomorrow, and be making a thousand dollars per day each and every day by next Friday.

 Let’s be real. If that were true, everyone would leave Harvard tomorrow morning and join Puretick. Every restaurant would close tomorrow and all the owners would be trading the S & P 500.

So let’s approach your enrollment at Puretick as you would your enrollment tomorrow at Yale Law School. Expect to work as hard. Read the books we recommend. Practice. Study. Ask questions.
 

EXPECT TO MAKE MISTAKES

Don’t expect to have 2 part time jobs and three years from now graduate magna cum laude. Have some money put away. The losses you will take over the next year should be considered your tuition. If you do it our way you will “spend” a heck of a lot less than the over $200,000 one would need at a great law or medical school.

You must work at trading at the same level you would work to become a professional athlete. NO MORE EXCUSES. Sign up for this room when you are prepared to make this a career. Unfortunately, no one tells you this. The financial community is happy to let you fill out a brief application, send them $3,000 and open an account. They do not tell you that the next trade you take may be a bet against a world class trader. This is the only profession that allows a rank amateur to compete in an arena alongside accomplished pros without the amateur proving any education or other credentials.

You could not walk on to the field on Monday Night Football and ask to be allowed to play quarterback for a few minutes; the U.S. open would not let you play a tennis match because you “challenged a pro” to prove one could beat you. John’s Hopkins does not allow newbie brain surgeons to pinch hit for an hour.

Why doesn’t the futures trading exchanges require basic training for new traders? Maybe the pros want to take your money faster.

                                                                                                                                                                                Successfully yours:

                                                                                                                                                                                 Alex L. Wasilewski - Senior Trader