Looks like bone is preying on our newbie engineer who is not even a beginner trader, trying to corrupt him with "spread trades" ideas, get him hooked, then hook him into a "client" who will pay him $6000 every six months until his bank account is sucked dry by bone and by his losing trades. This so unfair bone! and I really hope the op will be intelligent enough to see what I am seeing now, not after he is broke.
To the OP, I'm an engineer to and have been down the same path as you. This might sounds a little extreme but I ended up moving from NY to CA to trade the mornings and during the move, I traded full time while looking for work. Places out here are pretty laid back with the hours you can work, people come in as late at 10:30am, which when trading the mornings, is almost a whole trading day. Might not be an option for you but thought I would throw it out there. As far as Bone, I have contacted him about his service about a year and a half ago and have contacted about half a dozen people that have hired him. I didn't end up signing up with him(for personal reasons, not trading) but I have yet to hear anyone say anything bad about him, in fact the most common reply I got was "I wish I had met him sooner."
i have nothing against bone but i'm wary of all guru's and mentors etc so far he's been pretty helpful i'm going to keep an open mind for now
thank you for your input did you go to CA to sign up with a prop firm? how come you couldn't do that in NY? i don't want to take such a drastic jump at the moment, drop everything and begin trading i have a pretty cautious personality, and before i get flamed for it just let me remind everyone of the difference between taking a business man's risk vs gambling. i feel if i dropped everything right now to take trading on full time it would be more like gambling. if i traded successfully for 2-3 years and then quit my job then that would be more of a businessman's risk.
skimmed this thread. glad you've decided to stick with your day job as long as you can. i left my day job (as a techie and other stuff) in the finance world 12 years ago and started trading on my own. i didn't have enough money, but had to try it then because my day job had changed after a merger from a place i loved working for to a place i didn't like at all. i've been successful, but it took years to get where i could almost guarantee that i could make more trading on my own than i could at my old job. what i did, BEFORE leaving was read tons and tons of books. see intraday charts forming in realtime. read lots of comments (websites were reasonably poor in the late 90s for financial information and even the newsgroups weren't that good). did swing trades that were a couple days at most. got lucky on some trades because it was a huge bull market, but got accustomed to taking losses and learning about position size, risk, etc. don't hold a play through earnings with a small account, that sort of thing. i've heard MACD crossovers work for some, i don't use them. i do research every night and then some in the morning, wait for setups i like, make sure i'm not buying a hugely overbought (or selling a hugely oversold) stock, and use a MA, volume, and candlestick price and level 2. that's it. don't go too complicated with things. don't go for a long time frame. DON'T swing for the home run - if you're going to take money out on an everyday basis, you need to get singles and doubles down for confidence building. i'm going to post separately, as i just went and saw where you are now. want to reply to that separately.
That is what they all do: to make you believe they are nice guys and are they are so nice that they are helping you for free! when you are hooked then they will tell you if you want more , their price is.... This is thousand years old marketing technique, nothing new, but it has worked so well for thousands of years so these people continue to use this "trick". another technique is to provide fake testimonies. just look at all these fake guru/mentor services, do they not all using these two old tricks to lure the newbie traders?
User, 1. I don't take newbie traders as clients. 2. I turn down far more prospects than I take as clients. I am not building some sort of online trading academy. 3. I have many, many very satisfied clients who are also ET members. I let prospects contact them and ask questions independent of me. If I were not effective, wouldn't you be hearing about it in this forum ? 4. Why are you ignoring the other member who posted in this thread his personal and direct observations speaking with my clients ? 5. Fact is, you are making a judgement and a blanket value statement about me, when in fact you know absolutely nothing about my own background and the experiences of my clients. IMO, you are not being fair to me.
To the OP: This topic has been covered many times in many different threads on this site. But let me say that you made a good decision by staying in your job. As you discovered you basically have two choices - 1) Quit your job and work at it and try to become successful at trading and potentially risk failure and loss and then possibly have to start again to rebuild your career. 2) Work at it whilst in your job and spend your free time trying to be successful in trading. This choice is very disheartening when you see other people you see and may know trading successfully but let me tell you that if you stick at it and commit to it 100% and NOT give up no matter what happens, you will succeed. I also chose the latter path ten years ago and it has been hard but I also stuck to it. I saw and made friends with lots of people along the way who had given up their jobs and become moderately successful at discretionary trading. It was disheartening to see that they had become successful at something I could not master or be willing to take the plunge for. If you have a family - wife and kids - that demands time like I do then it makes it even more difficult. Your job may also become demanding at times you may have to be prepared to put in long hours to do work projects for long periods - many months - without being able to spend any time on trading research. But there is reward at the end of the long and windy roller coaster! Just wanted to say that I recently have developed five completely mechanical swing systems that each give annual returns of greater than 90%. However to get to this stage you have to invest a LOT time, effort and money. For instance you may need to spend money to buy market data and development tools. As an example, I recently forked out $5K to buy complete stock data (current+historical+delisted) so that I could test my systems. Wish you luck!