As I promised Don Bright earlier and on another thread, here is a short review of my experiences with the chat rooms/services I have used in the last year. I started trading almost exactly one year ago and didn't know a single soul that traded and I wanted to have some sort of guidance. After researching a bunch of rooms I decided that the Underground Trader was right for this newbie. The bottom line on Jae's room is that it saved me a ton of money. He spends a great deal of time encouraging (in a pretty blunt way) the traders NOT to trade. "Newbies donât trade the open. Don't trade the last hour. Don't trade the dead zone. Don't trade this low volume crap. Don't trade this chop. Don't trade, don't trade, don't trade." We used to jokeâ¦jeeez, when can we trade? Well, as it turns out, not trading saved my bacon â that and only trading tiny shares (which he also encourages). I was able to spend less than 10 grand before my equity curve began to climb (and that was without IB â it would have been something like 3K if I had known about them). So, Underground sounds great right? Sure, for a newbie that needs to learn about discipline and stops. Perhaps other traders were able to really profit from his trading methods, but I just never really was able to. His methods saved me a bunch but were unable to make me a much. He doesn't claim to be a "call service" and expects the trader to "manage" their own trades. Problem is, since he rarely does calls where he manages the exit (by giving a hard number), you can't just look at the listed calls and determine whether it is possible for you to actually make that money. It is a nebulous world and I think he really wants it that way. I understand that with the short time frame and often overlapping calls he can't manage them all for the room live, but he really should pick 5 or 6 every day and manage them in front of the room so members can both learn methods and gain confidence in the teacher. After signing off the UT room, I soloed for a few months with (very) slow and steady results. In my first year I have been very conservative (still haven't traded more than a 500 share position and my average would not yet reach 200). I trade full time. Because of my UT experiences, I have been trading a very short time frame, and had a desire to learn some swing trading techniques. In my original search for a room I had been impressed with the attitude of the guys at RealityTrader.com so I signed up while back for their T/A swing room. I'm still impressed with their attitude â it is a very educational room and unlike UT, the calls are managed in the open where you can actually tell if they are making money or not. They do a bang up job of posting nicely done up charts to support their trades. There are two guys in the room and I've been making money on one guy and losing on the other (been playing all calls without exception). Overall the learning experience has been great but the overall call P/L will have to improve or I will soon question the current effectiveness of one of the guys methods. The thing that bothers me most about this new effort (swing trading) is that the risk of holding overnight (almost all calls are held multi-day) seems to me to be very high compared with the return. Maybe I'm just paranoid, but I hate sitting in a stock making .25 per day on it. So far techniques I've developed myself have been more consistently profitable and with less risk IMO. I'll stick with it for a bit longer and see what happens. While deciding on a swing trade room, I also spent one month in the T/A swing room at Mtrader. The room was much less educational than RealityTrader but just as at RT, the calls were managed accurately and honestly. I left for two reasons â I want to learn and I want to profit. I was doing neither. If you looked at Allen's posted results, they began to dwindle a few months ago. They used to be posted very quickly to the web site, but as the success dwindled, so did the updates to the point that they are now approaching 2 months un-posted results (saw some of this time while there and it wasn't really pretty). Nice guy, honest guy, not that great of a teacher and not trading the current market very well. So that brings me to a really wild and crazy stunt I pulled out of curiosity a few weeks ago. Some will remember RocktheLurker pointing out AlphaTrading.com and there was a bit of thread discussion regarding their posted records. Their posted results were impressive enough and their fees so ridiculously low (comparably) that I decide to try a month. I was critical as hell and I honestly absolutely fully expected to find BS in their postings and be out the 30some bucks I spent for the month. Well, I'll be damned if they haven't rocked the last month. I have found very few anomalies (and those relatively minor) in their results (they seem to have taken a couple entries post/pre market which make it look on a chart as though they lied about entry, but I was there and saw the trigger price available). They don't overextend you (max 5 positions) It's not a chat room. It can be managed completely EOD. They don't educate you. They don't communicate with you and don't explain themselves to you. They have however done what the other sites have yet to doâ¦make me money. (PS: Yes, I haven't been there long. Yes, I'm still skeptical as hell. Yes, I'll be there next month. If y'all wish, I'll keep you updated on my results with them). So for me, the bottom line is that through my programming experience, I have developed my own system that I trade small shares. I want this system to survive a year or more before I build up shares too far. This system has consistently made me money (two negative weeks in 9 months) on a small basket (12) of Naz stocks. Outside that I have used rooms and services to learn and have been very pleased with those experiences at UT and RT. I have not yet however been in a chat where the calls made me money after all was said and done. See there Don â I donât hate commercial entities. I just don't like the ones that don't know when to give the ads a rest. BTW, I've enjoyed quite a number of your promotion free posts. JB
Good notes, I am printing them out for closer review. And that stuff about "not trading the opens" not "trading the close" - gee, If anyone listened to that nonsense we would never have a chance to make any money. Clearly 50% of all of our traders profits are made the first and last half hours (pairs in the "no trade zone" - when things get out of line). Thanks!!
>And that stuff about "not trading the opens" not >"trading the close" - gee, If anyone listened to >that nonsense we would never have a chance >to make any money I agree with both you and Jea on this issue (and Jea wouldn't disagree with you either). He was specifically telling the *newbies* not to trade at these times because things happen fast and furious. He wanted us to watch and hang on to our money until we had more experience and execution skills. With his methods, most of the money is also made in the first and last hour. JB
Turok what is the address for the alphatrading room? I got some jewelry hocker on the address that you posted alphatrading.com. I would like to check it out.
I would endorse Turok's views of the integrity of RealityTrader. I had a trial membership there when they were just a day-trading service. I was impressed by their clear and un-hedged calls on entries and exits. They also had an emphasis on education and training rather than pure play-calling. I cannot comment on their overall success in calling trades, as I was not there long enough to form an opinion. However, I am grateful to them for giving me the opportunity to decide that day-trading was not the game I wanted to play. One thing that irks me about several on-line chatrooms that I have seen is their seeming inability to get the time-flags on their comments to match up with the times of the bars on their charts. There is often a several minute difference. This makes it very difficult to retroactively review claimed calls. Doesn't seem like a huge technological nut to crack to me, but I am not a computer expert.
I've been a member of trading markets for the last two years and generally found the content interesting. I am not a member of the very expensive live service called "TraderWire" The real value of Trading Markets is their lessons and courses. Several courses are available and are written by experienced traders and/or money managers. In particular I've found the courses by Borsollini, Boucher, Marder & Haggerty worth the subscription. Regarding real-time "calls" I like Borsollini's S&P support and resistance numbers (posted pre-open) and ditto for David Floyd. There is also a very good new QQQ segment written by Don Miller. Over the last year the site as degenerated a bit into a promo for additional pay services. I don't subscribe to any of those. I should mention that I probably won't renew my subscription when it's up next fall unless they get back to basics again. www.tradingmarkets.com
Are the guys that are offering chatrooms real traders???? I am not sure of that... As Ed Seykota put it in market wizzards : good traders trade and good letter writers write letters.
>Are the guys that are offering chatrooms >real traders???? I am not sure of that... Some of them may not be active traders. Some of them certainly are as I have come to know a few of them personally over the last year. JB
Anyway it depends on the analyst. I worked as a TA and advised numerous prpo traders and sometimes even if my advices were good they were loosing moeny. So the point is : "are you a good trader or not. " What a chart room may bring you is just educational stuff, nothing more. But education especially in the first months is key. good luck