If you're "of an age," shall we say, there's no doubt you at least remember Pac-Man, even if you didn't spend hours playing it... like I did.
I remember back in 1981, when I was 16 years old, Pac-Man showed up in the arcade down the street, and that was "it" for me. I was hooked.
I was okay at the game; I'd get two or three screens in before I was reaching for yet another quarter to feed the machine.
But there was always this one guy that came in and just crushed the game, going screen after screen after screen and notching insanely, untouchably high scores.
I wanted to be "that guy." I had to master and beat what I thought was the coolest game in the world.
I was going to need a lot more quarters - and it would be a few years before I started making money in the markets.
Here's what I did - and why it can help you rack up incredibly high "scores" of your own...
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Pac-Man Set Me Up for Incredible Trading Success
A successful trade is one where you set a goal, make a plan, and get in and out with a profit.
A successful Pac-Man game... well, that's a little subjective. All things considered, if you can score 150,000 points or more, you're on fire. You're playing a great game.
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So, those are the kinds of numbers this arcade superstar was putting up, winning screen after screen. I mean, this dude was relentless. He was on the joystick for hours and hours. He'd never let the game go until it finally stopped him.
(Turns out, due to the limitations of the hardware at the time, the farthest a Pac-Man player can go one on of these machines is 256 levels, and the maximum score possible is 3,333,360 points.)
Now, you might remember, at an arcade, a stellar performance like that tends to draw a crowd of admirers and fans - a big group of people sort of huddled around the winning player, cheering them on... or, in my case, studying their each and every move trying to pick up on the best strategy.
It wasn't long before I figured out what I needed to do to step up my Pac-Man game in a big way.
The key to victory: patterns. Memorizing patterns. The layout of the screens... the path the cartoon "ghosts" would take when they chased me - and how they moved when Pac-Man ate a "power pellet" and turned the tables on them.
It all works according to a pattern, and if you can memorize and move to the patterns, it won't be long before it's your three initials up there on the all-time high scores.
And that's it. That's all this unbeatable Pac-Man wizard did. He watched. He learned a pattern.
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So did I.
It took me hours and hours of play to finally nail it, but I did it. I don't even want to think about how many quarters I burned through going through screen after screen, but really - can you put a price tag on satisfaction like that?
Trading profitably is a lot like Pac-Man or any other pattern-based video game.
That's why, a couple of years after I mastered Pac-Man, I created the Money Calendar. It's designed to look at the very best performing stocks on the market. It analyzes huge blocks of price data going back a decade to establish patterns of likely behavior.
The Money Calendar can tell us, for instance, that a certain stock has gone down an average of, say, $1.30 a share in mid-November in eight of the past ten years.
That puts us "behind the shoulder" of the stock and shows us that if we make a bearish trade on this stock, targeting that kind of price decline, we stand a mighty good chance of making money.
Even better, we can be more selective in looking at what the Money Calendar is telling us. I like to go after trades that cost less than $500 and have at least a 90% probability of being profitable.
Of course, in trading, just like in Pac-Man... sometimes you get eaten. Past performance isn't a guarantee of success, but the pattern does give you an advantage no one else has. If you know the pattern and can see the trade moving against you, you have the chance get out with little to no loss.
That's why pattern trading is so powerful. If you have a specific kind of pattern you like to trade, let me know in the comments section below.
Looking forward into the month of November, there's a beautiful mix of bearish and bullish opportunities thanks to all the volatility out there. The Money Calendar is hard at work right now, "chewing" on the numbers that will show us the right patterns to trade on the best stocks.
You can click right here to learn a little more about how the Money Calendar works and how you can get my best research.
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About the Author
Tom Gentile, options trading specialist for Money Map Press, is widely known as America's No. 1 Pattern Trader thanks to his nearly 30 years of experience spotting lucrative patterns in options trading. Tom has taught over 300,000 traders his option trading secrets in a variety of settings, including seminars and workshops. He's also a bestselling author of eight books and training courses.