Some excellent advice coming into the thread that I will comment on and summarise over the weekend. And thanks again Jack for fishing, er I mean talking more about your past. I could only find two calls of yours, so to speak. Your minus 24% last place in a trading competition and more recently what you called your most important turning point in your trading career (in the bull market we are experiencing). Can you remember how that turned out Jack? Yes you even carefully annotated the future move. Perhaps the monitor was upside down? Fear stopped Jack immediately coming back and proving what he can do. It still does. It might always do so unless he gets help. The good news is, if he can stop talking and begin to listen, he might find the help he needs in this thread.
If you guys can LEARN not to respond to Jack...these threads wouldn't turn into another thread about Jack. That guy has outlasted and endure more criticism than anyone here at ET while those that went after him have mostly disappeared. Further, use the ignore button and others that don't have the ability to ignore him...don't quote him so that those that have him on ignore aren't seeing his messages through someone else. In fact, I wonder about any trader that doesn't have the ability to ignore that guy. Mark
"... seldom discussed: the students aptitude and the teachers ability to demonstrate live trading." If a training service is promoting higher frequency trading, scalping, or 'day trading' I am in complete agreement about a live demonstration in a live market real-time via webinar or live meeting being mandatory. As far as my particular spread trading program is concerned, we are swing trading with holding periods typically measured in days depending upon the spread's volatility characteristics - but nonetheless we still webinar in the evenings, Skype IM, and email during the course of the trading day. Keeping a live audience for 72 hours continuous would be problematic for all parties concerned - but we do what we collectively think is reasonable and the clients seem to be very happy about things. In terms of a student's aptitude, it is a big issue. I cap the number of clients I take and when I take them because I still trade quite a bit. Honestly, I turn down more prospective clients than I accept - if I sense any desperation or anxiety I politely decline. If someone is turning to me as a last resort, that is not a situation I want to be involved with. Some of the more experienced clients can be problematic - it is truly amazing to me how people can sabotage themselves, and how some very destructive habits cannot be overcome and how some individuals will keep repeating mistakes over and over again looking for a different outcome. The biggest factor is that some folks want instant gratification without any work on their part - the 'magic pill' and 'holy grail' crowd. Like an ATM will come to them in the form of a $75 book or a $1500 seminar at the downtown Hilton. Some fresh-faced kid wants a simple entry signal that is right all the time, and stays right all the time through all market cycles and conditions. The feeling is that a good entry signal corrects all ills. And it should also be programmed easily, because everybody knows trading is all about math and computers. God forbid you have to put in any effort or understanding to make your money. Instant gratification - need the dopamine rush. "So let's get the ground rules straight: if a trader is selling a method it should not be his beast method because copying it will affect his liquidity. " Again, on short term HF-style systems you are correct in your assumption. Since my signals are good from one to six hours, getting enough of them off has not been an issue for anyone involved. And I lease a couple seats and can still lay down some wood when the spirit moves me. But in six hours, one could conceivably do 100K Eurodollar spreads or maybe 20K Nat Gas Calendars, so why be a pig about things? "anyone who makes big money trading doesn't touch training traders." Define 'big money' please - VERY relative term. I don't have FU money as I see it, but I have made a very good living at it. Besides, I'm 50 years old with three daughters in H.S., so I need a bit more time and space away from the trading screen and the client business fits that need for me just fine. Biggest reason I do it? I have some clients who are very big producers - well into seven and eight figures a year. They were successful before they hired me, but the relationships are quite rewarding. The kicker - I have a couple clients who trade my system better than I do, and that has been a marvelous development for me. Just my 2 cents. Trading education is a slimy business with a richly deserved reputation. My clients seem to be happy about things, and I am not ripping people off. I can only speak for myself.
LOL yeah ET is filled with people looking for the holy grail. To me the first thing people need to learn is that there will never be such a thing as an entry signal that is 100% accurate unless you can invent and be the sole owner of a time machine. All you really need though is a signal/technique that is right about 33% - 50% of the time and really good money/risk management. The key ingredient being the money/risk management part.
RN comments on the "deficiencies I encountered". He found them after he began his quest. When I look at the list, it looks like a list of items from a person looking for a way to make money off markets. My view is that anyone from fifth grade on up can learn how markets operate and use that knowledge to develop expert trading skills. Haing a map and a set of drills to do along the path on the map is the CPM way to learn how the market operates and how to hone the skills of expert trading. In 1999, Jack Schwager published one of his many books: "Getting Started in Technical Analysis". If you leafed this book, what would be your first conclusion after about a minute? Notice that in chapter 17 there is a list 82 items long. Of course, Schwager thought it through before publishing. It would probably be just like RN's list. How do both of these people get to be in the same camp? How to they reconcile staying in that camp? I feel that is about SOP for the trading community. But I do not feel it HAS to be the standard for anyone who wishes to choose otherwise. This is just the way it is for these people and for those who wind up in the same camp. For RN, he chooses to make me the extreme of his experience in several ways. That's cool. It is his ongoing choice. To get the best answers a person has to have the best questions. In iterative refinement, each question generates a drill to get the solution. As time passes the problem shifts and grows more and more focused. Anyone can see each drill to deal with the items on the list. How can anyone deal with a problem topic? They can handle the whole thing in one gulp or thay can handle its parts and then put the pieves together. Usually if you try to knock off soething in one dulp, you will find you left out something critical. You get to address these critical things once you find them subsequently. what consclusions can a mentor draw about people he has mentored? A few that will come along for anyone mentoring, are: 1. Most people follow the same path to learn. 2. People who focus on making money take longer to learn and get over this misorientation very slowly. (2 or 3 sessions) 3. Most people do not do drills. 4. Most people do learn to do drills after they get over not doing drills. 5. Most learning occurs when you sleep. When you wake up and beging to work again, that is when you go from unconscious to conscios awareness of what you have learned in doing drills. 6. Most important concept recognized by learning intermediate traders is staying on the correct side of the market. Beginners do not get this understanding ingrained in thier makeup. 7. In learning skills there is a point where finding pieces becomes less important than putting pieces to gether. It is a piont in the mind's accumulated inference that "differentiation" becomes the subject. questions can be asked to "fill in" spots in the differentiation that are blank and need to be added to give "continuity" 8. One of the great experiences of mentoring is the time when the learner goes through not reacting to "anticipating". This only occurs when the mind has a lot of continuity in its differentiation. What is the key ingredient? I chatted with Covell to demonstrate this. It is the difference between trend following and monitoring and analysis of trends. In the webb and before when only emails sufficed, this played out everyday by the SOP of initiating the emails "ahead" of market action. Since the webb, things changed to a much more sceptical nature on the part of "outsiders" compared to "insiders". ET has little or no "antiicpatory" orientation. You can chalk this up to the camp of having a price orientation where an up down orientation persists. 9. The switch from up/down to right/left ocurrs well before the switch from entry/exit (the taking a breather stage of skills) to hold/reversal trading. In mentoring the best point to make is that all good entries are the same as good exits (they are at the same time for ends of profit segments). 10. the supreme mentoring esperinces are when a learning trader cannot only anticipate, he can make the judgement toshift fractals with respect to extraction of the market's offer. 11. Scaning panels to trade is one of the last advances an intermediate makes before becoming an expert. On ggod platforms annotation carrying from one panel to another. Few platform as yet have global variables so monitoring is still in the dark ages, technically speaking. By this time the learning trader has 10 to 12 leading indicator of price. Price is always a trailing indicator of price. 12. finally, there is what is called "facility" at each level of drilling. Ther ARE four stages of micro learning. The last is unconscious competence. It might be pgrases as knowing where to look at what time. I described this ongoing character of trading in my office with others. There was a rule that I ask no questions. What replaced it was others volunteeering what was nest on the pertinent panel. By being able to scan displays in an orderly manner, a person can always anticipate trades and carve turns. (See Sweeps Chart). So what went wrong with Schwager? When in the above can a learning trader rewrite Schwager? RN shows that a list cannot be prepped by a learner. He shows that he has a specific orientation for getting informed. He defines getting his moneyâs worth on his terms. 10,000 hours is well behind now for RN. Copy a picture by doing it up-side-down. When you turn it over you will find it is better that you could have drawn the subject in any other way. Why let YOU hold your mind back? Settle down and make up list of what you NEED to learn. Orient to learning and the profits take care of themselves.
Good point wrb, however I am not criticizing Jack because there simply is nothing to criticize. Unlike deadbroke who makes a call and doesn't hide behind oratory, Jack fulfills his role here as a fantasist, always dreaming about trading and compelled to write volumes about trading but not sticking his neck out for fear of repeating his self exposures. He is like the doctor who has learned a decent bedside manner and even gets into the operating theater only to be found out as a charlatan when the real action begins. It is for that reason that I value his demonstration of how far one can get from the action and still think they are in the thick of it. Trading has a great deal to do with psychology for it is guessing correctly the other players cards. The lesson to be learned is a vital one - seeing is believing. Jack never puts his cards on the table because he plays with a weak hand, and to cover up his inability to trade he squirms every which way but play. Always start with the demonstration and then ask searching questions. Never start arse about face or you can spend years chasing rainbows like Arthur says he has done. A free lunch can be very expensive in the end.
"All you really need though is a signal/technique that is right about 33% - 50% of the time and really good money/risk management. The key ingredient being the money/risk management part." Bingo. Everybody pays lip service/homage to it but the practical application of it is really lacking. If you've ever seen a really good floor trader in action, his ability to make something out of an absolutely crap position dumped into his lap by the floor broker standing next to him is an amazing sight to see. Some traders are so adept at managing a position that they can conceivably make money, literally, on balance over the course of a trading day with "coin flip" determined positions. This is not readily taught, and can be more art than science. When I started scalping bond futures on the floor in 1992, most everybody used the 'two tics then out at market' puke rule - and when you back test the bond futures for intraday trading range average rates and volatility subsets, you come to find out how brilliant that simple position management rule was. Another lost art is how to correctly gauge market order flow sentiment and show positions in the market - in other words, when to work a bid or offer versus hitting a bid or lifting an offer.
Hey Mark, The only issue I have, or ever had, with Jackâ¦, and the only reason Iâll ever mention himâ¦, is when he starts talking about being always in the market / not using stops While back he posted his group was sitting on their hands (ie not always in the market), and using stops â I told him thanks and went on my merrily way Recently though he responded to someone inquiring about stops â and started the âuse no stopsâ crap again That is criminal behavior in my mind (we all know there is no quicker way to a blow up) ============================================ I will absolutely leave him be â right up until he posts stuff we all know is false â or more specifically â if it has the potential to lead the less experienced into an absolutely catastrophic failure Imperfect as I am â I still try to follow the âdo no harm firstâ mantra Regards RN
Sounds fair enough to me. Either do some of your guesssing or simply ask me direct questions about the "cards I am holding". This is SOP for ma and always has been. For anyone to move forward in trading, anyone supporting his progress has to go where he is a help him move forward. Your doing you regular guesssing is just as good a place as any to start. You want to learn the lesson called "Seeing is believing". Post what you are seeing And I will move you forward from there step by step.. Take a big or small steps as you can. Ask searching questions so you can fill in the blanks still present in your viewpoint. Pur up any of our trades and ask what it is that you are still guessing about.
Stops come up as a topic in any learning group. At the IBD Tucson MeetUp group we made it a topic, as well. On that Camtasia the topic dealt with a handout that covered 12 most often used stop systems. For each one there was a reference to the webb home page and the handout included the pertinent webb information and examples. I suggested that my prefences were methods 8 or 9 and I did not use stops personally. The Tucson meetup had many participants and many training methods were represented from around the US. People flew in for the meetings. Skill levels ran the sprectrum as well. Oft times the PhD's were in residence and sometimes they ran the evening's programs. It is the nature of every meeting and sub group meetings between full meetings to deal with the question of stops. RN is correct about people who need to use stops. The quickest way to determine if a person needs to use stops is to check his emotinal orientation. As RN says anyone with this orientatiion needs to use stops. The emotional orientation is flawless for determining what "survival mechanism" is at work for the a person. If the emotions are suggesting fear, anxiety and anger, then the person does not "know that he knows" and his emotions are telling him this. We use these emotions as signals in PEP and its applications PVT, SCT and SSR. They signal to journal as described in the webb site "Behavioral Finance". Our emotion set is comfort, support and confidence. On ET, I illustrated the use of my recommended use of stops. I did a post using another person's illustration. It depected the up coming buy and the daily dealings with stops for that trade. I put in the buy event and the next day's stops for each day of the hold. As the time of the event arrived, price went to the intersection. After that it could be seen what the stops, set up in advance were going to be. As time passed the price moved within the annotations showing how the advance determination of the stops worked. If any person wanted to know how to apply any method of the 12, I certainly would do a run through with it on any application he chose. My view of trading is holistic, so stops are not part of my trading. Stops are the farthest away price consideration in taking segments of profits. My view is that stops only work if someone is willing to take the other side of the stop setting. I don't believe that any trader can envision himself taking that position while still hodong the instrument. One of the outstanding aspects of this thread is the demonstration of lack of understanding of others with respect to what I do in trading. I do know that those very new to trading cannot be expected to carry their own weight and be responsible. Those two lessons are not a requirement for beginning to trade. It is the tradition of one segment of traders to be protectors of people who cannot carry their own weight and those who cannot handle being responsible. One of the great tools this sector of people use is telling people to put me on ignore. Further, some of the strongest of these people do not wish to see me quoted because of the "EFFECTS" of seeing me quoted. I like the "shoot the messenger" character of ET. It allows a lot of traffic on what is wrong with this or that. If anyone is using an approach that is edge oriented or deals with only one variable of the market, then that person MUST use stops since during holding a position he does not know what is goin on in the market. It is a big choice to learn one thing or learn another. I hear from polls, that 4 out of 5 reject my views. That is how it turns out in non stratified non random testing. Most people do reach a point in their belief systems where binary vector non probabilistic trading is no longer a poassibility. It can actually happen the first day they begin to observe trading. It happened for spurt; it happened for RN. So what; that is the way it goes. As Mark says, he is able to see the detractors come and go. I've seen it for 53 years. Roughly speaking, I have it down cold. It is very enjoyable to have it down cold and get the benefits. If a person is capable of perceiving that, then he can run with it. Look at the examples on ET and elsewhere. Asking questions is a cool mode. The era of doing demos was part of the webb many years back. We all did it then. Before that, there were other means. There was the chicken dinner era and brokerage houses. There was the telephone era too. I liked the brownline era as well. What I like about ET is the nature of the various "belief systems". It is so cool to see these cats who "know it all" that have such mediocre belief systems. The adjectives they use are priceless. Thank God none of them answer any questions.