I had a mentor for the first three years of my trading (when I first found him) until when he retired. He was a very good educator (was strictly a futures trader), that drove home a very simple point, over and over and over again... "What does the market do MOST of the time"? That was the single biggest lesson his students came away with. He retired just before the Powell era, and what he taught then is just as relevant today. Back then, he was truly a scalper, because that is how you made money in markets that had no range. (Remember those days folks?) With the volatility of the past 3+ years, that question holds true, but instead of on an intraday scale as he was able to teach back then, it's a longer-term one. These days, what does the market do MOST of the time? Welp, most of the time it goes UP, but the pullbacks are longer and harder. But MOST of the time, they will go UP. Thus the reason for me switching to swing. I learned to switch to swing because of that one salient question he had..."What do markets do MOST of the time?" It has taught me to look for intraday patterns which I often see happen MOST of the time (Like today, made 100 ticks on YM, wheee), and if they are not there, I look for the larger patterns over a longer timeframe. MOST of the time, it works. Could I have figured it out on my own without a mentor? Maybe. But that one line he reiterated over and over made the costs all worth it. Plus the insane indicator package he created I can use if I choose to, but I am beyond indicators at this point.
For Those Successful ET Members: Did You Have A Mentor? No!! Never ever never ever trade according to others. Always trade according to your own. For all those "mentors" can teach/show you, you can learn them by either going into a library, reading on the internet and/or visiting ET here, zero dollars required!! For all those that those books, internet sites or ETer's here can't teach you, you can't learn it from a mentor either. Because everybody is different and everybody trades differently, what worked or works for your mentor might not work for you. What you need to do is to work out what works for you and what works best for you by using a demo account and then by trading small on a live account before you trade with full capacity. But then again, do I consider myself "successful"?
Yes the good 'ole' days before HFT. Not to put your mentor down but what he was asking could be easily observed by just looking at a chart though.
I had mentored close to 10 interns/new hires at the last fund I worked at. About 2 of them ended up doing OK, after about a year or so. Most of them fail, because they think they know everything just because they got a PhD, and usually come crawling back when they lose $, but by then we've already decided to let them go.
I have started my learning from youtube but after it I hired a mentor for me and he was excellent and now I am quite good in forex with the help of my mentor.
I think mentors should be able to help mentee to reach consistency, or it will be useless. In most cases, a poker mentor can help a losing player to become a winning player. One of my friend barely win on micro table. After he had a few lessons from a mentor, paying several hundred/ hour,he became a winning player at 1/2 NL table. In contrast, how many traders can reach consistency after being trained by a mentor? It is rare. If a mentee can't reach consistency, all the improvements his mentor offer is useless. So in order for a mentor to help his mentee to reach consistency, he will need to sell his holy grail. And mentee should pay big fee in return.