E-Mini Trading: Are You a Dedicated Simulator Trader?
There are a group of individual “traders” who trade for long periods of time on an e-mini trading simulator. I often come across these individuals in my trading room, and find they have been trading on a simulator for more than a year. Surprisingly, this group of individuals is far larger than I had ever imagined. Since the goal of most traders is to make money in their e-mini trading endeavors, why would a substantial group of traders choose to “pretend” trade for such a long period of time?I have spent some time talking with these individuals and encourage them to start trading 1 contract so they get a feel for trading with real money. By and large, most of my encouragement is met with no action. Which is to say that the simulator traders stay on their simulators and do not begin trading 1 contract.Why do some traders doggedly remain tied to a simulator?I have given some thought to this question, and my conclusions are based on some investigation into this phenomenon and my own observations. Some of the reasons mentioned in the literature and confirmed through talking with simulator traders are:
Fear of losing money
Fear of failure
Many simulator traders are traders who have “blown out” a futures trading account and are fearful of repeating their prior performance.
Many traders are very uncomfortable trading real money, even though they trade profitably on their simulator. When the stakes get higher, like trading with real money, their trading technique and emotional trading outlook change.
I believe the number of pure simulator traders is still smaller than the number of new traders who charge into the market without training, but it is still a sizable number. Notice in the above bullet list there is one predominant word.Fear and uncomfortable feelings.The predominant motivators in intraday e-mini trading our fear and greed. These are powerful emotions. Like many things, some people obviously have a higher fear component in their personalities than others. This makes sense. For new traders, the first time trading with their own capital can lead to nervous and very stiff trading. With good reason, e-mini traders fear losses more with real money than on a simulator. After all, this is their hard-earned cash they are putting at risk with the expectation of a move that will be profitable. Not all trades are profitable, and the stark realization (on their first losing trade) that there are both winning and losing trades is a revelation. In short, a degree of failure is a component of trading in general, and e-mini trading specifically.Many new traders are unprepared for their first losing trade, or their first losing day. In their minds, it’s not supposed to happen that way. Good trade setups should result in profitable trades; that’s the mindset of a new trader who has just completed a trading course that has promised untold profit. Of course, experienced traders realized that a losing trade is part and parcel of the e-mini trading business.There is another group of traders who are going to trade on the simulator until they can trade perfectly. I don’t trade perfectly, I don’t plan to trade perfectly, and I don’t know anyone who trades perfectly. Great traders tend to have the ability to identify high probability setups; but the ability to identify high probability setups in no way assures that the trade will be successful. The trade has a higher likelihood of being successful, but there is always a chance that it will fail. This is in a central concept to understand. Simulator traders who are looking to become perfect traders will be on the simulator for a long period of time.In summary, I have theorized that most longtime simulator traders do so based upon fear-based elements in their emotional makeup. We have enumerated some of those fears and discussed them briefly. Another group of traders wants to hone their skills into near perfection on a simulator. No one trades perfectly, that’s a fact.
Is Your Small Business Using Internet Marketing Strategies to Attract Customers Like a Magnet?
Smart business people are leveraging the power of Internet marketing strategies to attract more qualified customers to their small business. Small Businesses that you would not expect to find on the Internet are now using online marketing to draw in customers like a magnet. Traditional small business marketing methods are expensive and the results are not measurable. Positioning yourself as the expert in your field and providing valuable information to your potential customers will magically attract qualified prospects to you. This article will provide valuable small business marketing ideas to help you develop marketing strategies for your small business.My time is limited, and I have found that using the search engines is a great way to find products and services that meet my needs. The information available on the Internet lets me compare products and services and get reviews from other customers who have purchased the products I am looking for. Last week I purchased a generator for my home through the Internet, and I needed to find a local electrician to install it. I hate calling people from the yellow pages, so I decided to search the Internet for someone who could help me. I found three different electricians. Electrician A had very good information on their website about some simple electrical jobs and things to watch out for when picking an electrician. Electricians B and C simply had a “yellow page” website with a phone number and address. Because Electrician A had shared valuable information with me first, I already trusted him more, but I wanted to get three bids to make sure I paid a reasonable amount of money for my job.I sent all three electricians an email asking for a bid on my job. Then I spoke with each of them on the phone to answer their questions and give them directions to my property.Electrician B bid on the job sight unseen. Electrician A and C both made time to come out to my property and look over the job before bidding.Electrician A made a couple of good suggestions that actually saved me money and helped me avoid a costly mistake. Electrician C bid almost twice what the other two electricians did. After getting all of the bids, I chose Electrician A because he took the time to come out and look over my job, and actually helped me save money, even though he did not have the cheapest overall bid. Electrician B, who bid on my job sight unseen, had the lowest bid, but would have actually cost me more money because of the issues that Electrician A had pointed out when he took the time to come out to my property to see the job before bidding on it. Electrician C looked over the same job site as electrician A, but did not give me a lot of confidence when he did not point out the same issues that Electrician A had. The combination of a website with valuable information to help build my confidence coupled with free advice to help me save money actually won this electrician my business. This is an example of how effective marketing a small business using the Internet coupled with a consultative sales approach can help attract and win customers for your business. Because of their power to attract customers, I have implemented these Internet marketing strategies in my own small business. I have a website that has valuable information available to the prospective customers who search for my services. Because of this useful information, the customers who find me already trust what I have to say. They know something about me before we even speak with each other. This helps filter out the tire kickers and helps me leverage my time to work with only those customers who truly have an interest in my services as a small business Internet marketing coach.By reading this article you’ll learn why it is important to market your small business on the Internet. You will learn small business marketing ideas that will attract more customers to you who are already interested in what you have to offer. You will learn how to gain the trust of these customers allowing you to win more business and make more money.Why it is so important to market your small business on the InternetMore than ever, people start their search for information about products and services on the Internet. In fact, as a business medium, the Internet is growing while many other sectors of the economy are declining. Your customers are looking for you on the Internet…trust me I know this. The question is “are they going to find you when they search?” and if they do, “will they learn enough about you to trust you and contact you to do business?” Many people no longer think of the yellow pages when they are searching for information about a product or service. The major search engines are the most accessed websites on the Internet. Google has over 91 million searches per day, and Yahoo has over 60 million searches per day, together they represent 151 million searches per day. Now the population of the United States is just over 304 million and the population of the whole world is just over 6 billion (Wikipedia – Jul 2008). One out of every two people in the United States could be searching for something or one out of every 40 people in the world could be doing the same. This is a staggering number of searches every day, which reinforces the fact that people are relying on the Internet to search for and find quality information. You can see why, more than ever before, it is important to have an Internet marketing strategy for your small business.How to attract more customers to you who are already interested in what you offerOk…so now we can agree that your business should be on the Internet, but how can you be sure that your business will be found out of all of the others out there? How can you effectively market your small business on the Internet? Probably not the way you would think. Hype-based or hard selling techniques no longer work. The way to attract customers to you is to offer valuable free information to the people who find you. They will find you because you will use the same words that people are searching for when describing your products or services. This is called search engine optimization (SEO) and all it means is that when you write the content for your website or blog, you use the words that people are typing into the search engines so that they can find you when they search. If you are using a replicated website, it is very likely that it has not been optimized to be found by the search engines. Search engines hate replicated websites.Your small business marketing strategy should include writing articles about topics that are interesting to your customers. To do this, you have to figure out who your target customer is, and what they are interested in. This is probably the hardest part of your small business marketing strategy. This is the essence of attraction marketing and is how you will build an audience for your information, which in turn will draw customers to you like magic. Then it is just a matter of placing your content all over the Internet so that it is found when your customers search. If you are a local business, there are ways to localize your content, so that customers in your geographic area can find you first before you competitors when they search.How the value you provide helps you gain the trust of your customersOnce your customer types in the search words at the search engine and your content comes up, you have started building trust and credibility in their minds. The more valuable the content you offer for free, the more trust you will build. The more frequently your content comes up, the more credibility you will gain. Securing the trust of your customers is the hardest step in making the sale. Using these small business Internet marketing strategies does this hard step for you, so that when your customers come to you, they are ready to learn what you have to offer. If the valuable free content that you offer is perceived to be more valuable than that of your competitors, you will differentiate yourself in the eyes of your prospective customer. If your content comes up first on the search engines, you are guaranteed that your customer will see what you have to offer. If what you offer is of value, you have just won a customer.You too can leverage these ideas for marketing your small business on the Internet There are many tools that you can leverage today for your small business marketing strategies. Some of these include websites, blogs, articles, images, Google maps, videos, etc. In addition to these, there are many social media options to help build your reputation with your customers. These include such things as Face book, MySpace, Squidoo, and Twitter.For example, my small business has a website which I use as the hub of my business activities. I have written articles, such as the one you are reading, which are found by the search engines when my target customers type in certain search words. My articles then link back to my website for my customers to find more information about my services. In addition to my articles, I have Squidoo lenses, and a Face book page which also link back to my website. My offline marketing also has the link to my website. Again, the target of all of my marketing is to drive prospective customers to my website where they can prequalify themselves by learning more about my business and requesting more information if they are interested. Notice, I am not chasing customers, nor am I wasting my money on the yellow pages. Instead, I am attracting customers to me through the valuable information that I provide. You can easily implement these same marketing strategies for your small business also.If winning more business and making more money is important to you…If all of this information is a bit overwhelming to you, or you just don’t know how to get started, I suggest that you find someone who can guide you through developing and implementing the Internet marketing strategies for your small business. Find someone who can show you the ropes and teach you what you need to know to be self-sufficient.Don’t just sign up with anyone who claims to build or host websites, though. Not everyone knows the secret of attraction marketing like I have described for you here. Find someone who understands these concepts and has demonstrated their ability to apply them the way that I have demonstrated it to you when you found this article. When you do find someone, the more they know the more costly their time will be. Look for someone who knows just a little more than you but who isn’t so good at it they charge you a fortune. They can show you how to set up your small business marketing strategies on the Internet, or if you don’t have the time to do it, they can do it for you. Now you know how to easily win more business and make more money. Leveraging an Internet marketing strategy will help you with the hardest part of establishing any business relationship. It will help you gain the trust of your potential customers before you have even spoken with them yet. You will be able to attract more customers to you, and the ones you attract are already interested in what you have to offer. After that, all you have to do is offer great service and close the sale. These great small business marketing ideas can give you a leg up on your competitors, and help you grow your small business. Now you know why it is so important for you develop an Internet marketing strategy for your small business. As a customer, I have found that small businesses who provide valuable information to me when I am searching for products or services are much more likely to get my initial inquiry about their products or services. Businesses who are not on the Internet or who have a replicated brochure website are usually not in the running at all. In fact, I usually forget to even look in the yellow pages. My first stop to search is now the search engines like Google or yahoo. I have implemented these small business marketing strategies in my own consulting business. Now I have customers calling me, instead of me trying to chase them or spending thousands of dollars on ads that don’t bring in anyone. Give me a call or shoot me an email and I’d be happy to spend 20 minutes on a free consultation with you to get you started on the right track.
Ten Top Fallacies of Branding
Having done brand development for the past 20 years, it is a cause of amazement to find how frequently most companies use other creative or advertising avatars as stand-ins for a true brand. If you are a marketing consultant, odds are high you have heard these top excuses for branding.Here are the top 10 Fallacies of Branding heard from clients, and a “tough love” (TL) response.Fallacy #1: I’ve/we’ve been in business a long time – my customers know what we stand for.TL: Please show us your data. Because we bet they don’t. If we talk to 10 customers about you, we will get 10 different answers. We will. We know this because we’ve never done a brand project where customers responded how executives thought they would respond. Some of the customer responses you won’t like. And most likely, what they actually think of you isn’t quite (or at all) what you’d like them to think of you.Fallacy #2: We have a logo done (by the CEO’s nephew), and that is our brand.TL: What is the meaning behind the logo? Is there a story? What is it meant to convey? What is your promise to your customers that they will experience each and every time they connect with you? Is your logo hinting at that promise? When your customers see that logo, do they immediately know what to expect? Do they even recognize the logo? Does the color of the logo convey meaning about your brand? Can customers name your company when they see the logo? Is the logo original and differentiated?Fallacy #3: We have a website and that is our brand.TL: How does your website operationalize your promise to your customers? Does what your website says match with what you are trying to deliver? Is the website an offshoot of your brand position, promise, personality and core messages? (And are those written down anywhere so you can leverage these across all your communications?) What kind of brand experience do you customers have when they visit?Fallacy #4: We have an advertising campaign, and our brand is communicated through that.TL: Oh, you have a brand campaign? How does this campaign move the needle on your customer’s brand experience? Is it building brand loyalty? Is it moving you higher in their consideration set? How does it communicate your brand promise? Are you resonating emotionally? How do you know? Or… is your campaign really a product campaign or leads generation campaign?Fallacy #5: Our CEO has created our mission, vision and guiding principles, and that’s our brand.TL: Please, please don’t confuse these with a brand. And please prove to us these are original, well thought-out (not just a writing exercise), and are ingrained into your culture. Please demonstrate us how these are carried out in your company. Show us how these principles provide a foundation for your brand. (If you can, then cheers! We use that as input to the brand.)Fallacy #6: We know what our customers want. We talk to them all the time.TL: Yes, we know. You’re talking to them about how you’re serving them now and you’re having a lot of transactional conversations. When have you asked what they need in the future? Have you asked them if there is something they want that you are not doing? Have you hired a third-party to ask them tough questions (because they may not tell you the hard truth to your face?) Do you have quantifiable numbers that show you how you’re doing with customers compared with competitors? What is it they would like you to stop doing? Have you probed enough into their buying and usage patterns to identify a need they haven’t even thought of yet? Do you have enough customer responses to trust betting bet several million dollars on a new product or service?Fallacy#7: Our advertising agency had a creative session, and told us what our brand is.TL: Really? Because top brands are based on original internal and external research and data. Specifically about you. So branding isn’t simply a creative exercise, it’s a strategic process tied directly to your company plan that uses data to shape strategy. Your brand informs your go-to-market approach, is operationalized through how you interact with customers, defines and deeply informs you about your priority customer segments. It will guide your product offerings, your R&D and even who you hire. Creative is highly necessary to give a brand “lift” but it comes last, not first.Fallacy #8: We use the same colors from our logo on everything, so we look really consistent.TL: Please don’t confuse consistency with meaning. Consistency is excellent, if it is reinforcing the important meaning behind, and the selection of, your brand. What do your colors mean? What do your colors convey to your customers? How do you use them to support your brand promise?Fallacy #9: Our customers know our name.TL: No, no and no. Some customers know your name. Many customers cannot remember you if you asked them to list companies or brands in your category without help (unaided awareness.) Many customers will be able to name the number one company in your category. Hopefully, it’s you. If not, you have brand work to do. If your customers do remember your name, can they say what you stand for? And does what they say match with what you want them to say? What about customers no longer doing business with you – have they forgotten your name? Oh, and what about potential customers? Do they know your name?Fallacy#10: We think we’re the leader, so we really don’t need a brand.TL: Leaders need brands to stay leaders. Because if your competition gets smart and gets branded, you’ve got some serious competition in the wings. If you truly are the leader (and we’d love for that to be true), how did you become the leader? Can you replicate what you did again and again – in new markets, among new customers, with new products or lines of business? Why not bottle what makes you so great and ensure you never, ever lose the recipe to the secret sauce?