The main risk the teacher takes on is that his trading may become effected by his student. The teacher takes on the Karma of his student. The student cannot keep questions on the essence of the thing until he learns it. Until then, his questions are bound to be off the mark. The teacherâs train of thought may be affected by the students irreverent concerns. The fees paid by the student have to be high enough to keep the student interested. On the other hand, the fee cannot be significant to the teacher because all he has to do is allocate a higher percentage of his equity to a winning trade when he wants more income.
Matt, The bottom line is that you will have to work at what you study. No site will make you a trader alone. You have to understand yourself also. May I suggest another reason why that site I recommmend helped. They studied the psychology of the markets, which was fantastic. Their Technical Analysis of the course was about 40% and the psychology part was 60%. The nice part is after the course is complete; you enter a 3 week homework room where traders have an open voice forum for the students to reharse study. Best of luck PS : Also that other site I warned about, I believe they are going out of business.
>>Seems hard to have much legal recourse if someone you pay to coach, just takes your money and you never hear from him again<< That would be a good lesson, essential to any would be trader. Someon mentioned that a trainee, asking all sorts of silly questions, would, unavoidably so, be influencing the trainer in a detrimental way thus affecting the trainer's own trading. That in my opinion is very true. The problem is that people think one can buy knowledge. They reason 'If only someone told me his successful system I too could make big money.' Think about it, what is in it for a successful trader to muck around with an idiot ? There is a saying with a lot of truth in it which goes as follows : Those who can, trade, Those who cannot, teach. There is no shortcut. One needs to learn bit by bit, burn by burn. Paper trading is totally useless. Better to start off by trading very small trades and no more than one or two trades at anyone time. I remember teaching a friend, giving him my system and telling him to go slowly about things i.e. small trades and no more than one or two trades at anyone time and to trade amounts no more than US $ 500 to US $ 1,000 in anyone trade. Yeh, I KNOW, too small a trade to make any money after paying brokerage and incurring a few losses here and there. But ................................., who was atlking about making money ? This is a time to learn, not make money. It took just four days for him to be in TEN positions (and too large a position in each instance). It took me two weeks to find out what trades he was in and just ytwo minutes to see that only two out of his ten trades were my system selections. The other eight were trades which were against the trend. How does one protect an idiot against him/her self ? So in my opinion the best way to go about learning to trade is as follows : 1. Acquire some books and subscribe to a data service and buy suitable software 2. For the first six months play around with some moving averages and start looking at share charts each day. Eventually you will start seeing things. 3. Once you think you are ready (i.e. have found a system which is profitable) start off by holding only one or trades at the most at anyone time and remember to trade small amounts only. It is like learning to ride a bike. It is impossible to learn by listening only to instructions (even if the 'teacher' is a champion. The only way to learn is 'to get your feet wet' by trial and error and experience your share of falling off the bike many times. freealways