Van Tharp – Core Long-Term Trading Systems: Market Outperformance and Absolute Returns

Description

About Course:

We recorded Dr. Ken Long teaching a live presentation of the two-day workshop at the Van Tharp Institute.

The eLearning course has 15 video lectures, each about 30 minutes long and the total amount of video is about 7 hours.

Ken begins the course by talking about one of his passions — adult learning.  Why would he start with that instead of trading?  First, he’s a professional educator, and the area is a personal passion for him.  In addition, he believes even a basic understanding of the subject can help you to absorb the lessons of the course more effectively.  Based on some well-documented research by one of the top adult learning theorists in the world, Ken provides a method to help you integrate what you learn in the course.  He goes into just enough of the theory to help you understand why a process of writing down certain observations and then thinking about them can help you learn more effectively.

Next, he provides a little background on how he looks at the markets and how that view of the market has to mesh with who you are as a person and how your systems work.  Also, being able to think about the market in multiple timeframes helps his overall trading and helps him have a better understanding of what the market is doing.  Further, he defines what the market is doing in a certain way that allows him to classify the market type, much like Dr. Tharp suggests.  Ken’s market type classification, however, is unique from Dr. Tharp’s and can provide students an interesting contrast.

Through this course, you’ll learn about Harry Browne’s so-called “Permanent Portfolio” as Ken analyzes the concepts behind that simple idea and its long-term performance.  Mr. Browne’s approach probably one adjustment per year and occasionally two but Ken goes on to present several options for improving the performance statistics for those interested in managing their equity a little more actively – with the anticipation of better returns.

Ken spends the last major portion of the course on this system as it has the best performance for a longer-term system that he’s been able to find.  While the system itself is simple, he makes sure everyone has a grounding in the thinking behind it and how he has adapted various ideas to craft the rules.  He has traded the system and manages his own money with it, so he’s able to provide a personal perspective on running it.  He also covers some of the testings that some other traders have done to verify its performance.

In addition, there are two group exercises – Ken is a big believer in hands-on learning.  At the live workshop, Ken broke the attendees into a number of groups for two separate exercises where they tried to maximize their returns creating strategies based on the systems taught.  You can participate in one of these exercises on your own and compare your results with the teams in the workshop.  These exercises have been eye-opening for past attendees when they find out with fairly simple strategies that every group has been able to beat – by far usually, market average returns.

What You’ll Get in This Online Course

• Nearly 7 hours of video recorded live at a Van Tharp Institute workshop organized into fifteen lectures, most are about 30 minutes long.
• Downloadable documents with Ken’s system rules for each of the six trading systems he teaches. These include all the major parts of the trading systems that Dr. Tharp describes as well as background information and possible variations on the rules.
• Ken’s supporting research documents, market type classification, and other supporting material.
• A printable document that allows you to follow the lectures looking at the same slides Ken uses without having to open or reference multiple documents during the lectures.
• The ability to watch and re-watch the lectures an unlimited number of times during your two-year subscription.

Bonus Video Excerpt:

As a bonus to Core Trading Systems, we have added a lecture by Van Tharp that was extracted from the Tharp Think Essentials eLearning course at no additional charge.

In this bonus lecture, Van discusses the importance of position sizing strategies and explains how different objectives will lead you to use different position sizing strategies. Learn about some optional position sizing strategies for long-term systems that help meet different objectives. This segment includes several objectives/position sizing strategy examples to help you clearly understand the concepts.