Today’s guest blogger is “Forex” Joe Atkins the Chief Strategist of OU Forex Trading. He blogged last week about preparing for 2010 and today he dives into what he, and most experts, consider the greatest trading tool of all: Your Mind!

Joe’s latest project “OU Forex Mastery” is now live and there are a number of excellent videos there for you to check out. So enjoy the article, comment below, and learn from his videos.

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I’m a student like everyone else here on the Trader’s Blog. Some students are more advanced or experienced, while other students are not. I’m committed to helping emerging and developing students reach their full potential by providing an educational portal of substance focusing on trading methodology that works.

Besides becoming proficient with any trading methodology, one absolute remains: you must develop above average

There’s one investing rule more important than all others. It has nothing to do with stock picking or market timing. Although about 95% of all investment commentary in the mainstream media deals with these two aspects of investing, you’d be surprised how little these actually matter.

Position sizing is what matters, says Brian Hunt, editor in chief of Stansberry Research in yesterday’s Growth Stock Wire. Trading psychologist Dr Van Tharp says its how “great traders manage their money.”

Smart position sizing is easy: never risk more than 2% of your capital on any one trade.

That’s it. We told you it wasn’t complicated. But would be surprised how few traders and investors actually follow this rule.

Here’s how it works. Take it away, Brian…

Let’s say you’re a trader with a $50,000 “grubstake.” And you’re thinking about buying Intel at $20 per share.

How many shares should you buy? Buy too much and

I understand this is a bold claim. Of course, everyone has their different opinion about what are the best trading books. In my opinion, the books discussed below are the greatest investment texts. These are the ones that I frequently turn to when I want an answer or need motivation. I hope they may be beneficial to you as well. This list is not necessarily ranked in order, although I do have my two favorites ranked as 1 and 2.

10. Trading for Dummies, by By Michael Griffis and Lita Epstein. The dark horse on the list. This was one of the first investment books I read. I still occasionally peruse it just to get a different perspective. This book gives a plain language description of trading, from the basics of how to place an order to candlesticks, to reading balance sheets. The good thing is that both technical and fundamental …

Keeping It Simple

(The following is a rebroadcast of this morning’s Currency Currents.)

I don’t know about you, but I know I get tangled too often into trading ruts.  And most of the time it’s all mental.  Let me give you a recent example.

“The dollar is due for a correction,” is what I have been telling myself for the last couple of weeks.  And the last couple of weeks I have fought the trend, even though I believe in the longer term trend. 

“The market is an easy game to play.  It is just that we are hell-bent upon making it so complicated.  That’s what makes it so difficult for us to win,” Edward Toppel writes, in his gem of a book, Zen in the Markets.

Guilty as charged I am.  Oscillators, retracements, waves, time counts, trend lines, blah, blah, blah…into infinitum head at times, making it harder than it is.  Maybe it