I agree with you that for most potential traders, the best thing to do is experience a live demonstration of trading that which the potential trader is interested in trading. For other potential traders other paths are available. Experiencing the TradersExpo comes to mind. So does WOM. The best way to learn the markets is to teach others what you have learned. It is well understood that when a person teaches others, he learns much more thoroughly the subject he is teaching. I probably won't get to deciding which profile you asked me to choose from, since it is too late. If you go back to one of your first 10 or 12 posts, you will see you were contributing to a thread that was a wrpaup thread of the prior 5 years work on ET. The post of mine you responded to was largely about your OP first topic, the "student". I'm not a trainer, but I do support the learning of others and my maps have been well known for about half a century plus. The drills people do as they follow the map are well known as well. For me, as a supporter of learning the markets, I prefer to use the more succinct demonstration which is experienced by looking at the real time performance of successful learners of the approach. The key to supporting learning is the "transference" that occurs. What has happened for many many people over the past half century has been, as you state, a dream come true. Not becuse of me particularly; it was simply that these people "did the work" and learned to take the market's offer continual during RTH's. The map was there, they walked the walk and then turned around and helped others to do the same. It is all on the record on ET and various archives around the world in many languages. It turns out that, collectively, they represent more hits on ET than any other group. Completed closed threads continue to have high hit rates, especially those who were tuned to trading the markets as they unfolded.
Thanks Jack for your participation and perfect talking demonstration of the problem under discussion.
A couple of the posts cite "Trading in the Zone" by Mark Douglas as one of the best investments for learning how to trade successfully. Unfortunately, books don't help. If they did, would there be so many people around with intractable problems when there have been thousands of books addressing these same problems? Take something as simple as losing weight. There are thousands of books addressing this subject, perhaps millions and yet obesity is at epidemic levels. If you do any research on the subject at all, you will find that that there are two core activities critical to losing weight: diet and exercise. It turns out that studies have been done comparing people whose primary activity is sitting and eating with those who eat a healthy diet and exercise regularly. The studies reached the astonishing conclusion that those who sit and eat tend to gain weight and be obese, while those who eat a healthy diet and exercise regularly lose weight. If books worked, don't you think some of these lard-butts would read one or two of these books and thereafter diet and exercise regularly and solve their obesity problem? Seminars fall in the same category. You can go all to the seminars you want on weight loss, and the answers are the same, diet and exercise. If seminars worked for losing weight, don't you think there would be a lot less fat people? So what does work: fear. If you want someone to lose weight, a good fright works wonder. Something like a heart attack that they survive. Or a demonstration from a doctor that shows while they chronologically may be in their 30's or 40's, biologically they are in their 60's or 70's due to obesity related health issues. It's the moment when they get religious about exercise and what they eat, at least for awhile.... Traders experience the same thing when they wipe their account out. When they've hung on to one loser too many and suffered the mother of all losses. That's when the trader has a personal come to Jesus moment and gets religious about risk control and cutting losers early, at least for awhile... So now someone has had a big fright. They've reached the depths of despair and have given up all pretense of ego. They have taken the initial step, joined a gym, bought a pair of running shoes, created a trading plan, or whatever, how do you sustain the change and overcome relapses? More fear. It turns out humans are gregarious animals and a deep-seated fear of group disapproval. So you require periodic public accounting. For the lard-butts, you have public weekly weighs-in with a group of people who are all trying to lose weight. The fear of public humiliation motivates the lard-butt to lever that fat ass out of the arm chair and haul-butt down to the gym three or four times a week. It works in other areas too. Paul Graham noted something similar with start-ups. In in his start-up incubator, they have weekly dinners scheduled for all founders. The purpose is to motivate the founders to keep making progress. It's simply too embarrassing to show up at the dinner and admit to making no progress over the past week. As noted, studies have reached the astonishing conclusion that people who sit and eat gain weight while those who diet and exercise lose weight. However, the studies didn't ask the right question. The question isn't what to do, but how to do it. How did they get people to actually diet and exercise? It turns out they locked them in cages so they could eat only what they were given and used cattle prods to force them out of bed before dawn each day for 10K runs. Coaching works. That's why athletes have coaches. People are lazy, stubborn mules and they need to be brow beaten every now and again. So what might help with improving a trader? How about calling trades live. Nothing like public humiliation to put the fear of god into someone and keep the ego in check. Get a coach or a sponsor or something. They don't need to be a great trader, they just need to keep a trader accountable. Like why the reporting of daily PnL suddenly stopped or why the trader hasn't made any progress.
Same here. Things have finally clicked, but I must review concepts at the beginning of EACH trading day. I had a bit of a mentor too and it shortened the learning curve IMMENSELY.
Seminars, books, and other training materials can provide a good foundation to start from and I would suggest that anyone interested in trading learn at least the basic principals and theories before even attempting to do so. I doubt any of them are going to hand you a full fledged trading plan though. They are there to give you the tools and knowledge to build your OWN trading plan. Some teachers/schools/seminars may even go as far as providing on going support (for a cost of course) to help you develop your own custom tailored trading plan. I do know of one Trading Education company that provides lifetime retakes of their classes and lifetime live trading rooms. Will this work for everyone? Doubtful. It will always depend on the students own drive and initiative. They do help in the creating of a trading plan and provide some accountability which as Roark so eloquently pointed out, is often a key ingredient to get people moving in the right direction. Bottom line is what works for one person may not work for the next person...."your results may vary".
Your whole post is a beautiful development of how people are incentivized and how they can be supported in this process. Elsewhere in this thread a person commented that he did not know of any trading schools. Too bad. As I continue to just talk instead of doing demos to train potential traders, I can attest to the immense value of live trading among learners and their mentors. There are so many great factors that come into play. Most learners cannot go through an entire trading session. When I am trading with those learning, I only spend an amount of time that is reasonable in terms of attention span. The OP pointed out the relationship of trading time with his students and without his students. For some reason he has an income difference. I do not notice that kind of shift. Mostly, those in the group are taking the same trades as I do. The time when a great deal of learning goes on is when responsibilities are shared instead of all persons doing the whole job. What can compress the amount of learning time before live real money trading commences is how using the mutual time spent as a time for doing a specific drill in a succession of drills. This setting doesn't change the trading profit segments or timing of trades; all it does is make the drill "bold print" for those sessions. Our current set up is a larger table for about 8 people with laptops. We can cable any set of laptops (4 max) to a large wallscreen (52" screen was donated, for example). To the right of the screen is a 3/4 inch sheet of plywood painted light swimming pool blue. At the top is a 3X4 flow sheet of cycle 1. below it are cycle 2 and cycles 3. 3/4 tape separates the three flow sheets. 72 point type was used and pasted on the board. Four colors of chart tape connect the 24 modes (Alphabet ID's) on the top chart. People have lasers they use to point to the market display or the flow board. Logging is done as well as the conversation and the laptop trading. One funny experience was finding out that IB as a trading platform was deficient. As Roark explained, a person trading really takes heat when his trades are not on a par with others. Moving money from one platform to another is good for a group to understand and witness. We have two to three levels of traders. They are paired as helper and learner. We went from scratch to where they are today. PVT first as a weekly planning experience. Several quarters made this an integrated team effort. the "sunday" meeting was standard and all the IAS's and DAS's were shared as was the Universe which was kept current. The office appeared as a natural result of curiousity about SCT trading. It about 20' by 20' and built out to supply power and cable to all laptops. The printer runs a lot. Getting the office "scuritized" took a lot of effort. the skylights had to be shaded as well. The incentives of the group are not like weight loss. EVERYONE is supporting their chosen local problem solving operation. As the OP pointed out the people he trained are making millions by doing what he taught them. This group started on whatever individual level of "investing" they were doing and converted to "position trading" PVT. They showed up by word of mouth; so the group is a stellar one. SCT is what caused the office to appear. SCT is a replay of PVT for commodities. Trading the ES begins when a person can go from inter day to intraday. The incentive was having learned PVT using common Universe. By learning the timing of the markets while doing normal family activities, people gradually recognize what else is going on in the world. We do pool extraction and do NOT do edge type trading. The core of skills and knowledge is how and why the markets work as they do. YOU GUESSSED IT, THE DEMO IS THE MARKET AND NOT THE GUY WHO SUPPORTS LEARNING. The oldest trader in this group asked to come to my office since he knew 3 others were trading with me there, at that time. We traded the first part of the day which is before business hours in Tucson. We watched and told the other PVT traders what was going on. It is an experience ot sit in with a few commodities traders. Everyone knows what the OP's account looks like as he trades intraday. The market moves many points in short order as the day begins. Trades of many points only last 2 or 3 bars per profit segment. It is something to watch a screen recording the succession of partial fills on each reversal and the P&L's are spinnning like a one armed bandits all the while. Realized profits are not very static during frequent am trades. In that setting I used screens rotated 90 degrees to make it possible for those there to see my annotating and marks for coming turns. I use both multicharts with indicators and TN with all the snippet oriented customized automated annotation. There is a thrwad on all these modifications elsewhere in ET (it is less than 200 pages long at this point). Today, most in the group who are assigned others to help, agree that they are able to do much better as a consequence. For me it is a requirement of those learning to help others ASAP. Everyone agrees that a person can wait as long as he wants to begin to do drills. when that beginning is made is the time when a potential trader goes from observer to acite learner. Drills support learning best. Second best is being in a group trading setting everyday. third best is having Q and A sessions where the mentor does the A's for the Q's learners come up with. As mentioned in this thread, books don't count for much and neither does "training". So this post is just âtalkâ to spurt. For those of us in Tucson and elsewhere this means not having the âproblemsâ the OP has. Obviously all of this can be automated simply since it is based on a very hardedge binary vector system. Using binary vectors throughout leaves no noise and no anomalies. This is a real break a fast track learning experience.
How does one know if Jack is smoking dope or for real? Simple - ask the acid question, is it all talk or all proof? Other things to look out for is how hard does the swindler works to get your attention by teasing but never demonstrating. A trader couldn't give a rats ass because success means you are not his problem, but the charlatan can't give up because cracking you is his problem. Of course none of this might apply to Jack. He might be unique. I wonder why he spends so much time fishing on ET instead of demonstrating? Now what does Jack call evidence - page hits! ROTFLMAO Anyway, enough on Jack. I will let him talk and talk and talk as it's Christmas and all he can do is dig himself deeper. Enjoy his tactics.
The acid question is: Is it all talk or all proof? This is the problem you have with respect to posters on ET. A lot of people have this problem and behavioral science and behavioral finance explains the root of the problem. For me talk is kindred to documentation in all forms. People do not ordinarily accept documentation as anything more than talk. I am finishing a five book suite (in parallel more or less). It is a culling process primarily since what I have written would fill many more than 5 books. The books will not have proofs other than contiguous trading records, etc. As we see, the question has changed from the OP and now we are focused specifically on a problem you continue to have as phrased this time as an acid test. So as you see, for about 50 years there has been a great payoff for me, personally. If I had just chosen to make money and give it away, I only could have done as much as one person. The fact is that I am highly leaveraged to several degrees of freedom. People who use the approach find that the greatest stepping stone to their expertise is occurs when they teach others. This thread is all about what you call "students" and "trainers" and what I call learners and those who support their learning. From my view the greatest single knowledge and skill shift occurs when a learner becomes a supporter of learning by helping others. You found out the personal consequences of trying to become trained and trying to train others. Certainly, you are not going to do any more training. Attached is a brief period of a person's life. He was using the approach in ES. Very tangible proof of the existance of an office, my participation there, and its ever continuing nature since about 1957 is available all over the globe via successful practicioners in many different markets. As the saying goes:"The sun never sets" on this trading approach. Historically, there have been polls where people contribute their views on this apppraoch. They ae poor and none were stratified random samples. 4 out of 5 people usually reject my viewpoint and approach. They haver sufficient measures and judgemental criteria to reject the approach out of hand. If you can get to the level of making a decision we can a;; see if you fit into this group. How did the proof go for those that agree and use the approach? They did the work to learn the approach and they extract the market's offer according to theirlife style. They do comply with the terms of the agreement to learn: to pass it forward and the contribute time and/or profits to help solve local problems. The acid test is a test that applies to the learner and the acid test works out quite well for learners who are being supported by those who are passing it forward. ET has over five years of records of this success actually happening in ET.
The attachment didn't stick. Lucky for the OP. Few if any, want to see, yet once again, how some people are deeply hung up on proof.
Trader starts a thread about gurus/ shills â biggest, most nonsensical shill of all shows up and gets defensive â Love itâ¦. X, I gave this some more thought â what follows is a compilation of the deficiencies I encountered after attending two formal (paid) classes, and subscribing to three trading services -Ignored direct questions, or answered in an ambiguous/ non answer way -Did not provide an appreciation of the amount of uncertainty -Not enough one on one - or figuring out how I learned/ my competency level -No mention of protective stops â or minimal emphasis on risk protection -Tried to explain a move â like he knew why -Lot of after the fact trading (off an existing chart) -Using delayed data to trade from -Too much emphasis on using indicators - Too much ego â meaning when I didnât get it the first time/ or questioned it â was talked down to like I was an idiot (Hershey comes to mind hereâ¦. And by the way should Hershey read this and want to make a comment about me being an idiot â go for it â Iâm impervious to the bullshit at this point) -High pressure to buy more, buy the next level as more secrets will be revealed -No insight on how to read price - from any of them -No.., or BS type setups (think stochs at overbought/ over sold⦠or MACD crossing type stuff) -No insight to how this business/ wallstreet really works Probably more but I canât recall it/ them at the moment⦠RN