Tharp's Thoughts Weekly Newsletter (View On-Line)

• Article The Good News About What's Happening in the World by Van K. Tharp, Ph.D.
• Trading Education Schedule Now Available Through November
• TradingTip Phantom Revival in Residential Real Estate by D.R. Barton, Jr.

Peak Performance 101, August 24-26, with Van Tharp

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The Good News About What's Happening in the World

by Van K. Tharp, Ph.D.

Last week, I wrote an article (click here) about the big picture and how dismal it seems, so today, let's look on the bright side of things.

The first piece of good news is that the big picture always brings opportunity to those who are aware of what’s going on and can take advantage of it. For example, Dr. Ken Long has been able to get his students to make 1R-2R per day in all three of the live trading workshops he’s conducted over the last year. If you did that every day for the next 150 days, you’d make 150R-300R. If you were able to do that and had a decent-sized account, you could make a nice living.

To accomplish this type of trading, you must understand what I call the “Tharp Think” principles (see my book Super Trader). To apply these principles effectively, you must transform yourself to the point where applying them becomes easy.

Which brings me to the second piece of good news: Under the conditions present today, transformation is easier than ever. You can transform yourself so that you can make good returns in today’s market!

The Big Breakthrough in Transformation

Psychiatrist, physician and author Dr. David Hawkins has spent years researching human consciousness. In his Ph.D. thesis, he postulated that human consciousness can be measured on a log scale that goes from 0 to 1,000, as shown in the table below. Alongside Hawkins’ scale, I’ve included similar human consciousness scales from the Sedona Method and Dynamism (a form of psychological consulting I went through about 10 years ago), as well as the mental states that seem to accompany them.

According to Hawkins' scale, the level between positive and negative consciousness is about 200. Throughout most of the last 5,000 years, he says, humanity has been below 200, an area of negativity and self-destruction. In 1987, it was at about 190, and the only thing that kept humanity from self-destructing was the existence of one or two beings with very high consciousness levels who balanced things out on the planet. Like Buddha, Jesus and Krishna, these beings achieved a consciousness level of 1,000, the highest end of the scale.

Do I know if this scale is accurate? No, I have no idea. But I do know that it’s useful. I like it because I think it explains a lot about trading success. I would guess, for example, that good trading is nearly impossible for people whose consciousness is below 350–the level of acceptance. In fact, I believe that as your consciousness goes higher, trading gets easier and easier.

When a trader’s consciousness is between 500 and 600, just seeing what the market is doing and going with the flow starts to seem easy. At that level, there is very little chatter going on in your head. You seem to notice the flow of the markets and can take advantage of that flow.

Human consciousness has been going up for as long as I’ve been doing coaching work with traders. People are more accepting of transformation, and it’s becoming easier and easier to accomplish. Lately, in my Super Trader Program, I’ve been seeing people make huge shifts in consciousness in a period of about a year.

I now teach a workshop called Peak 203 in which we help people increase their level of happiness. For most attendees, we’ve been able to see noticeable, permanent changes in consciousness in just three days, changes that only strengthen over the six-week follow-up period. How do I know that?  Because we measure each person’s happiness using a scale before and after the workshop. I consider your level of happiness to be a direct measure of your level of consciousness.

Super Trader Journeys

I’m currently finishing up a new book called Super Trader Journeys: Trading Beyond the Matrix. In it, I describe three levels of transformation, with five chapters devoted to each level. The levels include:

1. Adopting Tharp Think (principles adopted from my modeling work with good traders).
2. Making major psychological changes so that Tharp Think principles are possible.
3. Changing one’s level of consciousness.

I now have a spreadsheet-based happiness test whereby my Super Traders rate themselves frequently and graph their progress as a function of time. They can estimate how they would have answered the test for each year of their life and I’ve had them do just that. The graphs below show changes in the happiness level for two Super Trader candidates who contributed chapters on how their consciousness has changed.

The first one is by an engineer who once considered suicide.

The negative part of the scale represents the part of his life during which he contemplated suicide (before he was part of our program). The area in gray represents the years since he joined the Super Trader program. I think the results are amazing.

The second graph covers another one of my Super Trader candidates who was employed as a professional trader until he decided that he wasn’t going to learn anything about trading through his job. Again, notice the dramatic improvement in happiness.

This particular Super Trader candidate considers his birth and the first few years of his life to be very connected, and you can see that belief reflected in the graph. During his teen years, his happiness level dropped precipitously into negative territory and stayed there throughout his twenties. Notice, though, that since joining the Super Trader Program in his early thirties, it has quickly climbed back to its original positive position. These are not isolated incidents I’m picking out; they’re the norm now for most people doing the psychological work in the Super Trader Program.

What’s Happening Now

Most of you probably know that the Mayan Calendar ends on the Winter Solstice this year.  To some, this is nothing. To others, it’s the end of the world. To still others, it’s a transition to another age of mankind. The third belief is a useful belief, so I’m in that camp.

Many of you know that I’ve been a Oneness blessing giver since 2008 and a Oneness trainer since late 2010. The Oneness Blessing is purported to be a transfer of divine energy that helps wake people up (i.e., elevate their consciousness to above 600). Sri Amma-Bhagavan, the two founders of the movement, claim to be Avatars for the awakening of humanity. They claim that awakening requires divine energy and that it is done through the Oneness Blessing.

In David Hawkins’ new Nightingale-Conant Program on healing, he claims that human consciousness is now firmly above 200. This tends to suggest that something is happening.

Amma-Bhagavan, the two people who started the Oneness movement in the late 1980s, expect to have awakened 70,000 people (with consciousness above 600) by the end of this year. 70,000 awake people are enough to wake up the 7 billion people on the planet. What’s more, the divine energy has been rapidly increasing over the last year. At the beginning of the year, they claimed that there were 11,000 awake people on the planet; by June 21st, the number had risen to over 40,000.

While I can’t say for sure that those large numbers are accurate, I can say that in the last six months, the number of people I personally know who are either awake or possibly awake has dramatically increased to about 90. Many of these are Super Traders who now go into awakened states with some regularity.

I have no idea if humanity will awaken shortly, but I do know that since I’ve been a Oneness Blessing Giver, some amazing things have happened both to me and to people who’ve been receiving regular blessings. My belief is and always has been that you should go with what seems to be working.

Here are just a few of the things I’ve noticed:

• During the Oneness Awakening Course in which I became a blessing giver, I experienced an entire day during which I was totally filled with bliss and laughed for no reason at all. Before that day in July of 2008, I’d never had such an experience, but I’ve had many since.
• Many of my clients who receive regular blessings report similar blissful states.
• After my wife took the Oneness Awakening Course, she spent three or four days in an awakened state during which her sensory acuity was extremely sharp.
• I’ve seen people solve major psychological issues—issues that, years ago, might have taken weeks to solve–in a matter of hours, using the same techniques. Only now, the Oneness Blessing also comes into play.
• I’ve become connected to my Internal Guidance in a way that I could never have imagined four or five years ago. For more information, see my article in Tharp’s Thoughts entitled, "Van Tharp's Journey Down the Rabbit Hole" (click here).
• One of my Super Trader candidates has spent nearly six months in an awakened state since the last Super Trader Summit, when we did a supercharged Oneness Awakening Course.
• When we do our psychological workshops (Peak 101, 202, and 203), we typically give Oneness Blessings. As a result, we see amazing changes occurring in people in just a few short days.
• And the list goes on.

Do I believe that humanity is awakening? I have no idea. I know I’m certainly not there yet. But is something happening? Most definitely, and I’m seeing it everywhere.
My plan is to stick with what’s working, so we’ll do at least three more Oneness Awakening courses through the Van Tharp Institute in 2012, plus four more Peak Performance workshops (i.e. 101, 202, and 203).

• On Monday, August 6th, we’ll be hosting two one-hour Oneness Meditation events with Skip Miller. These will be at 6:30 pm and 8:15 pm.
• On August 24-26, we’ll be doing a Peak Performance 101 workshop (this workshop is the prerequisite for peak 202, peak 203 and the Super Trader Program).
• On August 28-30th, we’ll be doing another Peak 203 workshop. If our track record continues, most of the attendees should increase their happiness scores by at least 20 points over the three days. You’ll learn some great techniques to keep yourself in the flow, where trading is easy.
• On September 8-9, we’ll host a Sensory Enlightenment Workshop by special oneness trainer, counselor, author, lecturer and friend, Stuart Mooney. Currently, we only have 10 slots left for this workshop. You can find out what it’s like to be awake by reading Stuart’s book, American Buddha.
• We will be doing our next Oneness Awakening Workshop on October 6th and 7th.
• We will have another combination of the Peak 101 and Peak 202 workshops from Oct 19th through Oct 26th.

To begin your transformational journey, we’d encourage you to attend as many of these events as you can.

About the Author: Trading coach and author Van K. Tharp, Ph.D. is widely recognized for his best-selling books and outstanding Peak Performance Home Study program—a highly regarded classic that is suitable for all levels of traders and investors. You can learn more about Van Tharp at www.vantharp.com.

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Trading Tip

Phantom Revival in Residential Real Estate

by D.R. Barton, Jr.

One of the great macro investing lessons I’ve learned from various mentors is: when too many people get on one side of a market, it’s only a matter of time before the correction toward the other side happens. This concept works in smaller time frames as well, of course, but both booms and bubbles are born when almost everyone leans one way.

It seems that residential housing speculators and investors are getting excited lately and rushing over to one side. This especially appears to be the case in those markets that were hit hardest by the collapse of the real estate bubble, like Las Vegas. 

Let’s investigate some data on what’s driving the revival in residential real estate speculation and then make an educated forecast on the intermediate to longer-term outlook. Spoiler alert: in my view, the current upturn in the residential market has been driven by forces that are unsustainable, and the real recovery in the housing market is likely decades away.

Anecdotes & Data, Connecting the Dots

I live in a relatively small university town in the northeastern part of the U.S., and we’ve been lucky. The college economic model has helped stabilize the local market, and the swings in our housing market haven’t been as dramatic as those in other areas of the country. Consequently, our region hasn’t been hit quite as hard by the real estate crisis. Recently, however, I’ve seen a big increase in “I buy houses for cash” signs around. My friends in real estate here tell me that business is way up and that empty houses are moving again.

Let’s go out west for a moment. I know a really good businessman in Las Vegas who told me that distressed properties in his area have actually become hard to find now. They get snatched up as quickly as they arrive on the market. 

In fact, data shows that sales of distressed properties are actually dropping—largely because so many of them have already been bought. But home buyers aren’t the ones buying most of them—investors (or speculators, if you prefer) are. Briefing.com reports that first-time home buyers accounted for only 34% of purchased properties in May (the most recent month for which data is available; June data will be released on 7/19). This is down from an average of 45% during more “normal periods.”

As investors have bought and rented out distressed properties, existing home sales have dropped off too, though not at a disturbing rate. But when you also consider that banks are holding many more vacant properties off the market (the oft-referred-to shadow inventory), you suddenly begin to realize that things aren’t as rosy as they might seem at first glance. Here’s a chart showing those vacant properties stats (from Lance Roberts):

So, despite investors snatching up distressed properties, banks are actually holding more of them off the market. Most likely, the banks want to avoid writing down the asset value of these vacant properties on their books, something they have to do if they relist them at a lower price.

Is Money Truly Tight, or Just Slow?

My business friend in Las Vegas told me that the main problem right now for home buyers there is getting financing. When it comes to lending, banks still have a tight grip on the purse strings. But if the Fed has printed a lot of money recently, why would that be so? Let’s see if we can find any clues.

M2 is now the Fed’s benchmark for money supply, and M2V, the velocity of money supply, is how fast that money is being turned over. With that in mind, the following graph, from the Fed itself, shows the disturbing continued drop in the circulation rate of cash:

Granted, the Fed has printed a lot of extra money, but the rate at which that money is moving through the entire financial system is at the lowest point ever recorded. 

The Bottom Line

Here’s the bottom line: data shows that speculators (cash buyers) are driving this minor real estate market revival. Unfortunately, that activity benefits the economy far less than the construction of new homes by buyers who will live in them. What's worse, there's very little indication that such homebuilding and buying will pick up any time soon.

The current real estate environment is interesting enough to dig into a bit deeper. Next week, we’ll look at some demographic data and other goodies that will help us understand this major driver for the economy and the markets. Until then,

Great Trading,
D. R.

About the Author: A passion for the systematic approach to the markets and a lifelong love of teaching and learning have propelled D.R. Barton, Jr. to the top of the investment and trading arena. He is a regularly featured guest on both Report on Business TV and WTOP News Radio in Washington, D.C., and has been a guest on Bloomberg Radio. His articles have appeared on SmartMoney.com and Financial Advisor magazine. You may contact D.R. at "drbarton" at "vantharp.com".

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