yeah, another posting today along those lines.... I also wondered if the labor of the last three months -- which was meant to both rekindle my personal trading passion while giving back on two fronts: Trader Education and a Charitable Cause -- was truly worth the interim sacrifices of personal time, focus, and trading profit. http://donmillerjournal.blogspot.com/2009/10/tuesday-notes-welcome-back.html
I see in Don's last post he says he picked the swing highs and lows within a a tick 8 times. He must be so proud of himself he probably gave himself a medal.
Who actually believes this? 8x? Sure. In marketing world this could mean so many things. It could be the swing high on a 5 second chart or could mean he was averaging in and out so much that ONE of the averaging in/out trades hit the bottom or top. Don't fall for it.
From Sunday's post, he compares his efforts and persecution to Jesus. Somehow Don making a half a million for spending a couple months with some traders, and being nailed to a cross don't equate. When others criticize, you're probably on the right track. Some in this world will always try to tear others down, and nothing you can do will ever change that. To this day, many continue to ignore the lesson of all lessons of 2,000 years ago.
That's what I thought too. Anyway, I have a theory about last year and why Don decided to teach the Jellies: I think after a few months into this year Don realized that last year's result was a huge outlier for him. I could be wrong, but if it wasn't, we sure would hear about his previous years' performances. But we don't.(I am not saying he wasn't profitable, just he didn't have such a huge return in such a capital) So what do you do if you are Don, already selling DVDs with methods and you have an excellent and very marketable year? Well, you market it, for sure. You keep the money safely in the bank, you scale down quite a bit (he was entertaining the idea of trading with just 60K at one point, but didn't) and you get the rest from teaching, what you are already doing anyway. There is no real downside to teaching, because his method is very hard to copy and scaling in and out is not really giving away an edge. So from his POV he made the right decission. That the student might not get their money's worth out of the education, well, that is their problem.... P.S.: By the way, Don encourages honest discussions: "A good team will often encourage open, healthy debate. " 10/25
Had respect for Don Miller before he tried to monetize his trading success by going into trader education and throwing out a little bone to a charity for marketing purposes. His blog was great at first but it seems like it was used to set up his trader education sales gig. Teach people how to trade for a BIG FEE. Do it for free if he really wanted to give back!
He's a hustler, and while I don't necessarily think he provides the best (or any) value for the money he charges, I am not mad at him for taking advantage of NOOBs. However I will point-out that he's a fraud, sure, but in this captialistic society, this is what people do. Con and rip-off noobs who don't know any better. That's the way it is, has been, and probably will always be.
I decided to check my theory and here is what I have found. Don wrote in the blog that he made it up to 700K (the starting of 2008) from 200K in a few years. Assuming that "a few years" means 4 years, that is 38% annual returns, compounded. So the 216% for 2008 is definitely an outlier. Even if he did 80% annually and took half of the profits each year, 2008 still would be an outlier. Now this year's performance was dropping as he entered the spring-summer period: (these are net profits) Jan: 98K Feb: 74K Mar: 174K Apr: 43K May: 30K June: ~15K (read from the quarterly chart) July: ~20K (refered to as slightly better than June) Interesting to note that as the returns got smaller, Don stopped posting the stats, and I had to use vogue references to the performance. Also, as the Jelly effort got underway, all reference disappeared, thus no indication of how he did in the last 3 months. About the trading style, he mentioned that he had 9 "brain cramps" in the last 60 months, meaning sizable losses. The 2 that he gave dates for were huge trend days, so about twice a year his style makes a huge loss, when I guess averaging against the trend doesn't work... So I guess this explains it. Back in January he wrote that he didn't have plans for teaching but as the returns diminished, the extra money from teaching sure looked better and better. Returns from teaching the Jellies: (not counting the webinars and DVD sales) Aug: 150K (20 x 7.5K) Sept: 150K P.S.: I am not against teaching trading, but the value of the knowledge learnt and the price of the course need to be in harmony.
hey don miller , super duper all star douchebag.............how about joining the forum under your real name to answer your critics???????????????