He begins an earnest search for a winning system. He attends seminars given by day-trading gurus. Finally, he consults a "trading coach" who specializes in pumping up the psyches of flagging stock jockeys.

A successful day trader has to be able to stay calm while absorbing painful losses. 'It's easy to get suckered into this game,' says Ari Kiev, a psychiatrist and trading coach who wrote Trading to Win.

When Toghraie is not giving personal assistance to traders, she is speaking at seminars around the world on the topic of investment psychology. "Traders' coaches", she says, must be distinguished from "trading coaches", who give advice and guidance about particular trading systems.