If you want to make money trading stocks than you need to know that it is going to take more than just opening up an account with Ameritrade, Tdwaterhouse, Scottrade, or Etrade and just think that money is going to fall out of the sky.

To take control of your money and master online stock trading to make it grow you may have to abandon some of your old approaches to the market. You are going to have to relearn some key concepts.
For instance just take the word discipline.

It’s a big investment buzzword that gets thrown around a lot. You see most people are wrong at important market turning points. People have a tendency to get excited and buy at tops and then ride their positions all of the way down and sell them at the bottom.
Very few people have the discipline to sell their positions before they become big losers. In fact most investment advisors and brokers use the word "discipline" to advocate holding on while things fall on you.

They claim that "disciplined" investors invest in the stock market for the long-term and use "average cost buying" when their investments keep dropping. Their theory is that the market will go up in the long-run so you need to buy, hold, and buy more and imagine that any losses you may have now are just temporary and not real unless you sell. They think "discipline" means not selling in a panic when others get scared. They think you need to be willing to tough out losing streaks.

In reality they think “discipline” means throwing money at the stock market with no game plan at all and just holding and hoping with the courage to never give up, because it just has to go up eventually. But this so called “discipline” means potentially risking everything on the belief that the stock market has to go up for you. The problem is the market periodically wipes people out who invest like this. It happens once every ten years or so.
This is exactly what you do not want to do. You see from 2000 to now the stock market has gone nowhere. Anyone being "disciplined" enough to ignore their losses and buy more no matter what has lost money and lots of it while real opportunities to make money have passed right by them.

That's not being disciplined, that's being stupid. Stock market lambs aren't smart or being tough willed, but being totally neurotic. When you first start to learn the stock trading basics as you are now doing this is what you first realize.

But stock brokers and Wall Street make money by being in control of your money. This is stock investing 101. They know that if you sell you may move your money somewhere else and that is the last thing they want you to do. It is not so much that these people are consciously lying to you it is that they have rationalized all of their thoughts and thinking processes to align them with what is in their best interest. Most brokers and investment advisors believe the Wall Street propaganda themselves and really have no clue about how the stock market really works. Of course you also have to understand that if you have a broker or investment advisor they are actually under a lot of pressure from you to stay bullish all of the time.

It isn’t completely their fault.

Here is the deal - if your broker thought the market was topping out and called you up and convinced you to sell your positions you would most likely get extremely angry at him if the market then went higher. You would think he is crazy and probably move your money elsewhere. But if the market drops you may get upset about the market, but you won't blame him for that. He'll tell you to stay disciplined and most people will do it - because when you get down to it most people would rather lose money by holding then sell too soon and see the market go up without them when everyone is telling them to keep holding on TV. No one wants to take responsibility for their money and risk making a mistake all by themselves.

So the broker stands to lose everything by being negative on the market and being wrong and very little by being positive on the market even when it is in a bear market.

Wall Street has defined being "disciplined" as allowing them to control your money forever.
Real discipline is aligning your investment positions with reality. That means being bullish in bull markets and bearish in bear markets and correctly identifying the trend any of the stocks you may own are currently in and be willing to accept the fact that one day their trend will likely change and that is when you will want to take your profits - or cut your losses if you don't have any.

That is what discipline is really about. It’s about keeping your money working for you by keeping it at work until a bull trend ends and then moving it to another stock or market where the odds are more in your favor.

My goal in this document is to just get you started - to get your mind right so that’ll you instantly grasp stock trading basics and make money. In future articles, videos, and text files I will expand upon what I am telling you today. I will focus on all of these topics in greater detail as we get to know each other better, but today I want you to know the three things you will need to do to be a lion in the financial markets.

I’m going to briefly go over them with you today. Along with discussions of current market trends, these three things will be my main area of focus of discussion with you in many of my future emails. Just join my free newsletter to get more.

Think of this document as the preface to a book or ongoing course on stock market success.