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Van K. Tharp
Ph.D. Professional Coach for Traders and Investors

In the unique arena of professional trading coaches and consultants, Dr. Tharp stands out as an international leader in the industry. Helping others become the best trader or investor that they can be has been his mission since 1982.
Dr. Tharp offers unique learning strategies, and his techniques for producing great traders are some of the most effective in the field.
Over the years, Dr. Tharp has helped people overcome problems in areas of system development and trading psychology, and success related issues such as self-sabotage. He is the founder and president of the Van Tharp Institute, dedicated to offering high-quality educational products and services for traders and investors around the globe.
While Dr. Tharp’s expertise is in the area of finance, his mission is to touch people in a way that changes them for the better. In his books, courses, and workshops, he uses the financial metaphor to do so.
Dr. Tharp uses a combination of skills and education to fine-tune his strategies to coach, consult and teach traders and investors. He received his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Oklahoma Health Science Center in 1975. He is a certified Master Practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), a Certified Master Time Line Therapist, a certified Modeler of NLP, and an Assistant Trainer of NLP. He has used his expertise in NLP to create the successful models of trading and investing upon which so much of his work is based.
Dr. Tharp published the Market Mastery newsletter for over 10 years, and now publishes a weekly e-newsletter, Tharp’s Thoughts. He wanted to get the vital information that traders needed to as many people as possible; therefore, he decided to offer his newsletter at no charge. Before that subscriptions to his newsletters were as much as $249 per year.
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Author, Publisher, and Educator
Dr. Tharp is the author of Trading Beyond the Matrix: The Red Pill For Traders, published by Wiley & Sons, in addition to four acclaimed books published by McGraw Hill: Super Trader, Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom, the New York Times Bestseller, Safe Strategies for Financial Freedom, and Financial Freedom Through Electronic Day Trading.
Dr. Tharp is the only trading coach featured in Jack Schwager’s best-selling book, The Market Wizard’s: Interviews with Great Traders. He has been featured in Forbes, Barron’s Market Week, Technical Analysis of Stocks and Commodities, Investors Business Daily and Futures and Options World, and Trader’s Journal, just to name a few.
Dr. Tharp has collected over 5,000 successful trading profiles by studying and researching individual traders and investors, including many of the top traders and investors in the world. From these studies, he developed a model for successful trading and investing in which other people can adopt and learn. He has developed a five-volume Peak Performance Home Study Course, teaching the results of this ten-year study.

He also developed the Investment Psychology Inventory Profile to help people better understand their strengths and challenges in relation to trading or investing. As well as How to Develop a Winning Trading System That Fits You, and wrote and published The Definitive Guide to Position Sizing™.

Speaker and Presenter
The Van Tharp Institute offers workshops year-round to help traders improve performance. In addition, Dr. Tharp has designed special seminars for banks and institutions and has presented these throughout the United States, as well as Paris, Italy, Singapore, Sydney, Melbourne, Venice, London, Vienna, Stockholm, Frankfurt, Nuremberg, Hungary, and numerous other places throughout the world. He has toured Asia as a guest speaker with Dow Jones and was the keynote speaker in 2011 at the largest investment conference in Poland.
He has conducted workshops for floor traders at the CBOT, the CBOE, and the CME. He is also a regular speaker to a portfolio and hedge fund managers worldwide. He was a member of the distinguished Investment Advisory Panel of the prestigious Oxford Club-a rare honor only half dozen or so individuals have received.
Dr. Tharp is also a highly rated guest speaker at expositions and conferences throughout the world. Click here if you’d like to book Dr. Tharp as a speaker.
Dr. Tharp is an Insider
Through Van’s work personally modeling many of the top traders in the world, he has learned inside secrets of which many professionals are unaware. They truly are secrets because many of these professionals couldn’t express them in words – they were non-conscious processes. Some examples include:
- How to use position sizing strategies to meet your objectives,
- How to understand risk from many perspectives,
- How to understand the impact of mistakes,
- How market types are critical for your trading systems,
- How to do mistake coaching to manufacture R,
- How to be (at minimum) a systems thinker in order to adapt to the ever-changing market,
- And countless other helpful ideas that no one else teaches – because no one else has uncovered them.

Dr. Tharp is an Awakener
An awakener is someone who helps others raise their level of consciousness and awareness to the point where they become happy for no reason. Here are some testimonials from our students: