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1. Successful traders stay neutral:Staying neutral means to be emotionally detached from your trading decisions. I’ve met many day traders that were emotionally suffering for the rest of the day after losing $100 or even less and when they made $1000 they would be “on top of the world”. They are definitely not trading neutral.If you are like that, then your trading will definitely be driven by fear and greed; if you are down $100 you probably don’t want to take a loss, just because you know that you will be emotionally suffering. If you are up $1000 you might want more, even though you should take profits. Or you might end up taking profits way too early because you are afraid that the position might turn against you. The professionals don’t let the day-to­day oscillations in their account faze them. The results of one week don’t matter much, not even the monthly results. It’s just a small blip of time in their career, so the day-to-day oscillations don’t really matter. Emotional ups and downs are pretty normal for beginners. If they influence your trading decisions too much, then I would strongly advise you to go back to paper trading in order to gain the confidence you need to not let those oscilla­tions affect you too much.Staying neutral also means to see the price movements like they really are, not how you want them to be. You might all know the situation where a trade is going against you, and you start looking for other reasons why it is still a good trade and you should hold it. This is very dangerous since it leads people to breaking their stops and to lose big. Your entry and exit crite­ria has to be absolutely clear before you make a trade. Switch­ing strategies while you are in a trade is one of the worst things you can do. You can always find a reason for your position to go up or down, but you don’t see the actual price movement anymore. You are shifting from reaction to prediction! A day trader should under no circumstance try to predict future price movements. As traders we have to play the actual price movement, not what we think the movement should be! Please leave pre­diction to investors. A lot of times I see traders taking positions in stocks they know very well fundamentally. They mix trading with investing. This is very dangerous too. While there might be reasons to enter a position for a short-term trade they often end up holding it as an investment if it goes against them. Just think about Enron.Yes, there were points during the Enron sell off where a trade would have been justified. Even I held Enron for a short recovery from about $8.5 to $10. The problem is, that if you base your entry on the belief that the company is cheap and it has to recover, you will be more and more inclined to hold your position or even add to it once it goes lower. The stronger your opinion on a stock, the harder it is to make decisions based on the actual price movement. I would strongly advise you to have a separate account for fundamentally based trades. A day trading account gives you too much leverage, making it very tempting to take risks that are way too high!! I am not saying that it is not good to have expectations; everyone should know what his potential trades are most likely going to do. Should those expec­tations be wrong though, then we have to accept that and react according to what is really happening.2. They are not afraid to place a trade:Fear or a lack of confidence in your trading decisions makes it hard to enter trades in the first place. You will often find yourself letting good opportunities pass by, or you are waiting for additional confirmation that the stock is going your way, which makes you enter trades too late and you end up chasing the stocks; often getting in at the end of the movement. Fear of losing money makes it harder to take losses. To much fear will either make you not take losses at all and cause significant draw downs, or it will make you take losses to soon, before the actual stop price was hit. Confidence in your ability to make good trading decisions will help you to be patient since you know that eventually there will be good opportunities. Traders with a lack of confidence tend to look for different trading strategies every time something goes wrong for them. They are therefore never able to focus on one strategy and master it. Even if you are a experienced trader you might lose some confidence once in a while. Go back to paper trading or to trading small shares in order to get yourself back on track.3. Successful day traders only use risk capital for trading:If you are day trading with all the money you have without having another income you will be way too scared in order to make any neutral decisions. There is a saying that scared money never wins. I have yet to see a trader who was able to live off a 5K trading account without any additional income.4. They focus on a few strategies that suit them well:Many traders try to implement too many strategies at once. They think they have to make money every day. The most suc­cessful traders I know only have a few strategies that they are highly successful with, sometimes only one. The goal is to find a strategy that YOU are comfortable with and to master it. This won’t come overnight. Of course you need to have a look (and try) different strategies until you find something that you are comfortable with. Keep in mind that no strategy works in every market. Therefore it is normal to sit on the sidelines every once in a while. You don’t have to make money every day. The key is to only trade when the odds are in your favor and to stay in the game. Once you have established a “bottom line” strategy you should slowly move on and implement other strategies.5. They are patient:This starts with patience in your learning process. Take time to trade on paper for a while. You will make mistakes and it will take time to get comfortable with your trading decisions. Please make your mistakes on paper; this will keep you in the game. If you absolutely want to trade live right away please do so with a very small amount of shares. You can make a lot of mistakes if you are trading a small amount of shares. If you use your full buying power though one blown stop can wipe you out. I have yet to see a trader (including myself) who didn’t blow a stop at least once!!Patience to wait for trading opportunities is very important too. As stated above, not every strategy works every day. You might have to wait a while to find a good trade. It can also happen that you have a losing streak. A good trader will not worry too much about that and will do something else. Sitting in front of your computer trying to make back losses is the worst thing you can do. I would strongly advise you to set maximum losses per day, week and overall. Stop trading immediately if your maximum losses are hit. Remember, as long as you stay in the game there will always be another day with new opportunities.6. They are great money managers:A good day trader will never risk more than 2% of his trading capital on a single trade. This means that if he has to take a stop, the amount of money he is wiling to lose will be no more than 2% of his capital. 2% is the absolute maximum. You should attempt to risk less than that. The reason why this is so important is that even if you are right 99% of the time you can still lose 10 times in a row. Every once in a while this might happen to you. Only if you risk little money you will be able to survive such a draw down.7. Successful traders – Trade with Confidence:I believe that trading with confidence is by far the single most important key to successful day trading. The most successful traders I know only use a few basic strategies. What made them so successful was the confidence in their trading strategy, their ability to stay neutral and to execute their trades according to what they see.Disclaimer: Trading financial instruments of any kind including options, futures and securities have large potential rewards, but also large potential risks. You must be aware of these risks and be willing to accept them in order to invest in these markets. Don’t trade with money you can’t afford to lose. This article is for educational purposes only.

Brand IS a competitive advantageOne of the most commonly overlooked sources of competitive advantage is brand. Branding is not just advertising, nor is it simply a catchy name for a company or product. The most important value in a brand is the value that it holds for actual customers. This value is very difficult and expensive to build – and fragile and easy to destroy. The difficulty of building and maintaining a brand is one reason why managers the world over tend to avoid spending much time or money on branding – especially in smaller companies. This is a shame, because a well-managed brand is so powerful that it can overcome almost any other competitive advantage. This one fact is the reason why larger companies with lots of managerial horsepower tend to spend a lot of time and money on branding.What makes a brand valuable?Brands are valuable simply because they cause customers to be inclined to purchase your product rather than someone else’s. In a way, a brand is shorthand for the things the customer can expect from your product. In products that hold little meaning for the customer, this might be worth less, but in markets where the customer invests his or her ego in the purchase of a particular brand, that meaning can be priceless. Let’s look at some examples to see where branding may or may not be important.First of all, let’s look at some examples of brands with tremendous pull. These brands will sell well just about anywhere they show up, because the customer associates the brand with qualities they prefer. Examples include:DisneyNintendoSonyHarley DavidsonAppleInterestingly, none of these brands has universal appeal, in that not every possible customer will prefer the attributes of the brand over their alternatives. For example, the Disney brand is applied to many products:Theme ParksMoviesLicensed products such as clothing and toysComputer gamesTime sharesCruise lineBroadway showsTelevision programmingIn each of these very different product areas, the Disney brand means something a little different. For example, in theme parks, Disney means clean, family-oriented, creatively designed, expensive and (to many) crowded. The negative elements of the Disney branding in their theme park business are inevitable – you always have to accept the negative with the positive. But the positive elements are so compelling that millions of people from around the world spend a significant portion of their income to travel to a Disney theme park.The Apple brand has a similar story. Apple carries a number of meanings, including well designed, easy to use, less popular and expensive. As with any great brand, this brand has a lot of ego invested in it for some people. This aspect of branding is more visible in computers because it is significantly more difficult and time consuming to use a computer operating system that isn’t the most popular (in other words, Microsoft). Despite this difficulty, Apple has a hard core of fans who wouldn’t think of using another brand, given a choice. Clearly, this doesn’t translate into top market share for Apple, but it is a significant advantage that has clearly kept the Apple name alive when others have fallen by the wayside. Apple’s newer products – notable the iPod – have drawn upon the positive elements of the Apple brand. The negative elements of the Apple brand have been far less problematic for the iPod because it is competing in a new product area where niche status has not been seen as a drawback. This is an excellent example of using a brand to grow beyond the core product line.Why branding is important in the global marketplaceIn an increasingly global market, branding can serve two distinct functions that may be useful to you: first, a “local” brand gives you and entrenched customer base that is more difficult (and expensive) to displace, and second, a “global” brand can give you a foot in the door when seeking to enter new geographic areas. Be forewarned: building a “global” brand is expensive, and often a “local” brand can be just as costly. Even so, the brand can be a useful offensive tool and defensive tool when you are competing with non-local companies.There is one reason why “local” brands can be more cost-effective, and a good tool for defending your home turf from foreign competition: brand success is built upon three critical factors:1. Understanding the key values in the mind of your customer2. Knowing how to put the customer’s values into your product or service3. Effectively associating your brand with those valuesTwo of these factors, understanding your customer and associating your brand with values, are very much defined by culture. Thus, someone from outside your culture – and this could even be someone who speaks the same language from a different region – will find it much more difficult to get an accurate read on what your customer’s key values are, and how to convince the customer that his product or service embodies those values. This is not saying that a foreign competitor cannot do this – just that it’s a lot more expensive and difficult.How to evaluate your brandObjectively evaluating your brand is difficult, especially if you want to put an exact dollar number on it. Fortunately, this is usually not required for good strategic decision making. Still, it’s a good idea to have at least a general concept of the value of your brand when you are considering strategic options.The most objective way to evaluate your brand is to measure the outcomes that occur with and without the use of your brand. Sometimes this is simple, because the way you market may well lend itself to testing different hypothesis about your brand. For example, a seminar company might test mailing brochures that feature (or don’t feature) specific brands, to find out the extent to which one of those brands is pulling in attendees at the seminars. Likewise, if you have the wherewithal, you might go so far as to test selling a “generic” version of your product in the marketplace to see if it can carry the same price as your current brand – at acceptable volumes. This is a little more difficult with retail products, as some retailers will insist on only stocking brand name products on their shelves. In addition, retail stores – especially large chains – typically demand some kind of compensation for the use of their shelf space, which makes retail brand testing quite expensive.If testing is out of the question, you can also approximate brand value by looking at the popularity and price of competing brands with little or no brand power. If you don’t have an absolutely generic “no-name” competitor, it can be difficult to be objective about this – after all, how do you decide which competitor has the least brand power? Also, there may be some confusion about value because there are several components to the success of a brand:Brand Sales = (Cost + Margin) * VolumeIf you were to attempt a calculation of brand value, you would be faced with extracting non-brand factors which affect these three numbers. For example, cost can go up or down depending on operation skills, management, underlying cost structure, and purchasing skills. Margin may be driven by brand power, pricing skill, and power in the distribution/retail channels. And volume can be affected by both cost and margin, brand power, and distribution network, as well as underlying demand for the products or services being offered.Even so, at the end of the day your brand gets you one of two measurable outcomes: margin or volume. Comparing your margins to the competition is one way to assess the value of your brand, if you take heed of the caveat about other factors which may change margin. Comparing volume is less likely to yield a good estimate of brand value, because you can – in many markets – drive higher volumes with no brand value at all by charging lower prices. This, by the way, is a terrible strategy to be following if you are concerned about cheaper foreign competition, because there are significant costs that you simply will not be able to beat your foreign competitors on.So your brand isn’t that valuable – is there hope?In some cases, companies run into a “brick wall” when they objectively evaluate their own brand. This can be caused by a number of factors, but the outcome is the same: some brands just don’t mean anything to the customer, and so do not carry any premium in the marketplace. Naturally, such brands offer little defense against inexpensive foreign competition, and companies that rely too heavily on brand power that doesn’t really exist inevitably get into hot water as foreign competition uses its compelling power – the lower price – to erode the market share of domestic competitors.Is there a “crash course” way to build brand? Yes – but it’s inherently risky and not for the faint of heart. This is because branding is driven by the brains of our customers, not our desires. In order to build a strong, positive awareness of your brand in a hurry, you will have to do something that stands out. By “stands out” we don’t mean “is a bit better” – we mean something that is truly remarkable, or, in other words “worthy of remark”. Customers don’t make remarks about brands that are a little better – they remark on differences that they find really interesting.An excellent example of something remarkable is the Honda Element. This is a truly distinctive design in the overcrowded sport utility vehicle market. The design is, in fact, so unusual that it almost never made it into production. Marketing people at Honda were extremely uncomfortable that the design was so different from any other brand in the SUV market that they wanted to scrap it. The designers won the fight to manufacture a small number of Elements as a “niche” product, along with a more mainstream design. By the end of the first year of production, the Element was outselling the “safe” design by five to one!The lesson here is clear: if you are behind some savvy competitors, you should be prepared to seriously consider strategic options that make you uncomfortable. We wouldn’t recommend betting the farm on outlandish new brands – in most cases – but we would suggest that having one or two every couple of years might just push your brand into the lead by giving you a reputation for having edgy, innovative products.Copyright 2007 by Center for Simplified Strategic Planning, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan – Reprint permission granted with full attribution.