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Jack Schwager, commodity trader and confessed system skeptic, has been a familiar name in commodity trading for a number of years. His 1984 book, A Complete Guide to the Futures Market, laid out most tested techniques along with other methodologies.

His latest book, The Market Wizards: Interviews with Top Traders (Simon & Schuster, New York) might be considered a companion to his technical tools book. Wizards brings home some of the more important, and often, overlooked elements of successful trading—not magical systems, but the beliefs that have made the most successful traders what they are today. Appropriately, trading psychologist Van K. Tharp interviewed Schwager while he was in the process of writing Wizards. What follows is a distillation of their six-hour discussion and follow-up questions.— Ed.

You've completed The Market Wizards . You've spent a lot of time talking with different top traders and you've had a chance to think about their responses. At this point, what do you think it takes to be a top trader?

The following are not in any particular order, just the order that I think of them. To begin, confidence in your ability to consistently win as a trader over the long run is absolutely essential. Admittedly, this is a bit of a Catch 22 proposition: in order to be a winning trader, you need to have confidence; but in order to have confidence, you need to be a winning trader. That aspect, however, does not diminish the importance of confidence. The one absolute common denominator among all the traders I interviewed was a confidence in their continued ability to win over the long run. Everything else stemmed from this confidence.

Another critical factor is discipline. While this may sound like a cliche, it is probably the single most mentioned word that cropped up when the top traders tried to explain what made them so successful. The top traders tend to be very independent. With few exceptions, they restrict their trading decisions to their own opinions (or systems). The importance of not being swayed by the crowd was a frequently mentioned point. While this may not be very surprising, many of the traders I interviewed also stressed the importance of not being influenced even by other superior traders. This has to do with the importance of sticking with our own approach, because that is the only thing you can have confidence in. As one trader said, "if my only reason for being in a trade is because Bruce recommended it, I am not going to have the confidence to stay with that position if it starts going against me."