Not really. It may come to a point where anyone touting trade signal service would have to account for signed disclosure documents from every single room participant kept on file. Do you know what that would do to free trials process? It would squelch them greatly. Also, if the signal caller deviates greatly from disclosure document guidelines of operation, could be liable for suit with losses from followers. Perhaps the idea of starting with one and ending with 100s of futures contracts on a forced liquidation for margin call would be considered outside DD letter of direction. Now you have the potential for liability of loss from those who followed the trade and then reflected on it later. It's the potential threat of litigation, fines and lawsuits that could greatly curtail or eliminate the "signal call" players. Time will tell.
Hoffman does not stop himself out he adds instead bringing his average price closer to where price currently is. This is martingalingaling in trading.
I think Rob's been doing it for a long time, and if he says he went a year without a single losing trade....hmmm, let's just say that's true, then he must know sometimes it blows out, and I think he is still trading both personally and for himself. Simply holding out your individual trades doesn't automatically imply fraud or something malicious. Sooner or later I got to start making profits myself if I want to attract anybody to my firm, but my trading is different than determining investor allocations. I don't think I really have a problem with the trading room setup, but I would feel a bit uncomfortable on days when I did nothing, which is a high percentage of the time. If he didn't make money selling live calls, he must still be getting positive responses from the people left. I would shrug that off, but I don't believe it was ever his intent to martingale a $300 thousand loss. Obviously. That he did I wouldn't dismiss his abilities out of hand, but whenever you see these kinds of advertisements and with any sales pitch there is always the element of snake oil. Many people recognize the pitch, and automatically dismiss these approaches, when there could be some times when this would be beneficial, the majority of the time people choose to ignore the salesman. If they do not dismiss him offhand, they'll look for a free trial or some type of discount. Have you found out how he's been trading since this loss? Hammering away at this when he could have traded in the millions isn't really fair, but I don't know how he's done since then. I agree that regulation in these types of environments would be extremely difficult, but it may be necessary and I think sometimes I'll follow their free videos for a while and if I don't see any positive expectancy I'll just ignore it, as a lot of other people do, too.
Nope it wasn't. you're talking out you're ass. Unless you went on a trial or was in the room paid for, you would not have known he was martingaling and targeting 1-2 ticks. None of his videos in 2009-2010 talk about martingaling or tick targets. Could you have surmised he was a snake oil salesmen? Yes, but it would have been just an (accurate though) guess. You're not that smart, you got lucky.
Interesting theories. What you describe is called "style drift" in the hedge fund world. It can be quite the issue at times.
For the record, in the 2 day online event this week, Hoffman will apparently talk about how he is going to set his stops, instead of keeping his so-called mental stops (I guess his stops are 130 ticks away?). Also, he's going detail how he will trade less contracts. I'd be interested to see how his record performs under those conditions going forward. I'll wager he becomes break even pretty quickly.
What about non-American based signal calls? Can they be regulated? I think not. The dumb money eventually will find any and every way to try to make more money "the easy way." So my point is that signal givers will just have to move abroad...And it can be Americans too, they just have to use a foreign front...