Mark D.Cook lost all his capital several times while learning to trade including one occasion when he lost more than his entire net worth! In 1982 he sold naked calls on Cities Service that expired deep in the money. His account dropped from $165,000 to a deficit of $350,000 in a matter of days. In that occasion he made a total loss of $815,000 in his family’s accounts. But, he didn’t gave up and after five years Mark had totally recovered from the loss.
He is a trader for more then 30 years and he operates from his family’s farmhouse in East Sparta, Ohio. Mark started to trade stocks in 1977 with his first stock the Columbia Pictures. He bought that stock because the movie ‘Close Encounters Of The Third Kind’, which was being released those days and that was strictly fundamental reason. In the early 1980’s he was intrigued with options and start to trade with it, after wich he turned on in to the technical analysing. At the beginning of his trading he looked on a long time horizon and back then, he would hold tradables for months. As the years went by, he progressed into a shorter and shorter time frame, after wich he became a pure technical short term trader.
Mark developed the Cook Cumulative TickSM indicator and in 1989 Cook finished second in the US Investing Championship, but latter on acclaim by winning the 1992 U.S. Investment Championship with an astounding 563.8% return. His ‘Tick’ indicator measures the number of NYSE stocks whose last trade was an uptick minus the number whose last trade was a downtick. When the ‘tick’ indicator is above or below a neutral band the ‘cumulative tick indicator’ starts to add or subtract the ticks from a cumulative total. This works as an over brought and over sold indicator. When it reaches extremes of bullish or bearish readings the market tends to reverse direction.
His fame has grown to the extent he has toured China, Singapore and Australia, the only American speaker on those trading tours in 2007 and 2008. Mark’s goals are to have all his mentoring students become million dollar profitable traders in their careers. His motto is: ‘Work hard and the trading will be profitable. Success is consistency and perseverance’.
My favorite Mark’s quote is: “To succeed as a trader, one needs complete commitment. Those seeking shortcuts are doomed to failure. And even if you do everything right, you should still expect to, lose money during the first five years. These are cold, hard facts that many would-be traders prefer not to hear or believe, but ignoring them doesn’t change the reality.” – Mark D. Cook
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