How to win money on the stock market

There are three main roads to make more money than others on stocks

I have read a lot of papers and articles and discussions on how to win money on the stock market. I have not read many books, which is typical me, I prefer input from many than a lot of input from some specially selected. My plans are to read some books as well, but so far there is more than enough information floating through in the other channels.

My conclusion is that there are three main roads to make more money than others in the stock market (excluding the otherwise working road of getting stock, stock options or stock information from your own company). All of my believes center around Technical Analysis:

	Finding analytical ideas not yet found by very many (finding the picks before others do, maybe even trading small margins)
	Utilizing the old basic ideas used and believed in by a great many others (finding the picks all others will rush into as well)
	Having a lot of money, spreading them in many portions and focusing hard on money management (works assuming that the stock market long term will continue to deliver more wins than losses, and the money management is cutting losses short and securing the wins).

The first two routes are most likely to beat the fund Managers.

There are many ways to lose money on the stock market

	Not to be there at all (in a statistical comparison of the margins, this means losing money)
	Having too little money (thus being cut out of wins through a number of unlucky trades)
	Not following a system that at least has a statistical positive effect (trading against the odds)
	Trading a system that does not fit your personality (not being able to follow the plan)
	Burdening your trades with the influences of old knowledge (second-guessing your trading system)
	Limiting your stock selections to a few favorites (ignoring market cycles and missing emerging companies)

Many people use trading system ideas that does not return a statistical profit. Even more use "unstructured second-guessing" of the trading ideas/systems they do have. Some people have favorite stocks where their trust for past performance limits them from utilizing the full scale of the available market. All ways are good ways to lose money, and might have a common reason: You never tested the system you are planning to use, so you are not confident enough when the trades start turning against you. The trades will start turning against you, so confidence is very important and so is being sure that the system at least statistically will deliver a profit. Without that confidence, your second-guessing is likely to get you out of winning trades to early and out of losing trades too late. Remember the saying: Let your profits run and cut your losses short. Reversing that and instead cutting your profits short and letting your losses run is unfortunate but common.

Thus: Test your trading ideas.

Either do it yourself, find a friend who can do it for you, buy a program that is good enough to test it for you, or you could take help from me. For that, I need your trading idea either in Easy language or clearly described in another way so I can enter it into Easy language myself. I will take 500 SEK for a test done in the same way as I test my own systems (I will take a lot less if I already have tested a system for you and you are doing only minor changes). I will do this only as long as few enough people want this help, I have got a full time job and do this just for the sake of interest, if it takes too much time, I will have to quit doing this. You can reach me at: mailto:mats.bengtsson@capgemini.se