You hear the same bs on slashdot. "People ask me to teach them computers for free" You guys don't hang out with the right people if they are pestering you to show them the secrets of your awesome free money trading systems. Reality is most intelligent people think day trading is a waste of time.
When I sit down at a poker table, I am not out to educate anyone else at the table. Trading is no different.
most ppl have no idea what you do some think it's boring - numbers etc some think you're a -wolf of wall street- style wanky sales guy the smart ones are genuinely curious, and the young ones, I guide towards finance degrees. There is no short cut nor secret sauce.
Given how much time and effort it takes to learn the skill and develop an edge, one shouldn't feel obliged to giving away their priority information for free. Treat trading like a business that requires significant investment. A business doesn't give it's products/services or competitive advantage away for free. The best way to create a win-win in this situation is to consider the various options 1. Getting licenced and trading on behalf of others so you can both profit from their capital. 2. If you're charitable, teach them the basics so they can develop their own edge. 3. Setup a prop trading business and get them to work for you under a profit split arrangement. 4. If they have a skill that can contribute to the business, enter into a partnership or joint venture.
Having helped people including family in the past with both time and money, it came to be my turn. A family member threatened to break my jaw because I asked for my money back; an ex-girlfriend who had a tough life so I put her up in a 1bed apartment for 6mths to get her life back on track, she contacted me for no real reason and I said how about helping me, told me to get lost. I worked with someone permanent on $80k/yr who became a friend and I taught her how to go contracting in finance so she at least doubled her income in a few months due to my mentoring, I later asked her to get me on one of her projects and she sent me the phone number of a random agent. Those are a few, in most cases you get the grand total of squat. I had one very serious event due to the stupidity of family, all it took was one act of kindness by someone to help, nothing and in some cases they made it worse. Here's the thing, all those events help push you in to the top tiers of knowledge but you find out one key fact along the way. Money isn't everything, but people put an importance on it because you can hide things with money, you can't hide them with time. You can't help anyone until you help yourself. There are only two ways it works, people either blindly follow your advice or they at best take a tiny part of it and try and introduce it in to their approach. Sometimes in life you have to do 'the right thing', but that is experience, there are no rule books, all you can do is try your best and try not to get taken out in the process, which sometimes means walking away! Human nature is to pass problems to the next person as it's easier than passing them back to the originator, unfortunately I was always at the end of the line so had to absorb them all, the most complex option that nobody does, everyone was shocked when I decided not to do it anymore so I was 'insensitive' 'no morals' ... Don't ever underestimate the ability of people to take you out by trying to help them, arms length seems to be the best way to approach it as usually the reason they are in the mess was either by lying to other people or lying to themselves! Is it worth helping people, yes, but you have to do it as a gift and know you are writing off time/money or both. Always assume you will get nothing in return and no-one will listen or care, sometimes you will be pleasantly surprised, I haven't been yet and doubt I will be but there's always a first for everything! Here's an example, use a trading methodology from a hedge fund where one of them put out a research note in July 2013 detailing GBPUSD going to parity, El-Erian put out the same research note in July 2016, were they invited on to Bloomberg or CNBC as they made the call 3years earlier, or that they were the only ones who made the brexit call, or advised an oil giant board their business processes were flawed and went on to lose $100bn capital, not a chance! Why does that work, if you earn $200k and them $50k, the natural process is to balance in the middle, so they will move up to $125k but if you spend too much time around them you drop down to $125k. For you to not be influenced you need to have them follow you blindly with no questions asked at arms length, and they learn by observation following more experienced people, if those people providing experience generate $millions per year and you increase your knowledge 20% you get a return on investment and the provider generates fees, win win. The problem is that people can't do that so they slowly, or quickly, drag you in to the problem by which time it's too late as you would then have to walk away leaving another mess. So good people complete it to the end and then find out they just absorbed someone else's disaster and lost x amount of time and y amount of money! So what's the trick then, simple, you cannot pretend to have money when you are poor, but you can pretend to be poor when you have money, if you help someone, always do it via an independent third party, if it starts to go wrong you can pause or worst case walk away! Gaining experience costs a lot of time and money so you should be paid for it, but there will always be an exception and you need to decide when just because it's the 'right thing to do'!
I used to wonder why people would donate (via various means) lots of money anonymously. One day, I figured it out.
Unless you have an inside info , what else is out there useful , we all know that trading is about discipline , I don't think that there is magic formula, See , I love playing tennis , and I keep losing to my friend , and I'm a better player , but I get emotional and make lot of mistakes. In trading the same thing, if you can't control your emotions you lose.