I've tried to post the following review on fxknight.com at the "review site" forexpeacearmy.com (www.forexpeacearmy.com) but it was not published for whatever reason. That's why I post it here. Judge yourself. When I relate to "this site" I am referring to forexpeacearmy.com as I wrote my review initially for that site. As this is a very long post, I've divided it into 2 parts. PART I: ***************** It has now been some time, since I've attended the pro room of fxknight.com. However, since then I've always felt this anger inside me when I think about these self-proclaimed experts in this market who fool aspiring traders by providing their services. I have to admit, that I did attend only fxknight.com and no other educational service, but I am pretty sure that in this business about 99% of educators sell mostly crap to their clients. So, my review would probably be similar for many other educators. Unfortunately for Andrei Knight (or Andrei Pehar or what his real name is) I've attended his service... A. My background: Traded stocks and options since the 90-ies, but without a concept (only gut feeling). Started taking trading seriously for over a year now, i.e. doing it full-time. It's been quite a journey. Did all mistakes one can make at the beginning, including believing that an educational service would teach me how to trade. That's why I joined the pro room of fxknight.com for a few months. When I saw that these guys have no (or very little) clue themselves I've started to continue the journey on my own. I've educted myself from many many books and trial and error, sitting endless hours in front of the screen and analyzing methods. Unfortunately, there is not one "bible" out there. The "truth" about trading is scattered over many books (the better ones only... more than 90% is also crap in this field)... you have to put the pieces of the puzzle together by yourself. That's how "it works". However, I am now an above average profitable trader. B. Main criticism regarding fxknight.com: 1. Lack of disclosure of performance metrics He advertises that he backtested and forward-tested his methodology. But, if you ask him for concrete performance metrics of his system, he is beating around the bush! The only figure I've heard from him several times is that his trades "work about 75% of the time", i.e. that's his win rate. But why is he focusing so much on the win rate? What about profit factor, avg. win, avg. loss, % draw down, etc.? And on what instrument(s) did he test his method? During which period(s) did he test his method? You don't get any answer from him on these important metrics. He prefers to stay intangible. Why is that so? This communication strategy of him can backfire. One can assume that he focuses on the win rate as it is easy to fool uneducated students with such figure. A 52% win rate does not sound good, of course, but every professional trader knows that the win rate alone is meaningless. It can be very misleading as many very profitable systems or methods have way worse win rates than 75%. The fact that he focuses only on the win rate gives an educated trader the feeling that his service is only fooling people. But to make matters worse, in one of the sessions, his co-coach "YR" revealed by chance that you can not expect to make more than 1% return per month trading fxknight.com's methodology (without giving more info on risk per trade, etc. to get the 1% p.m.). This figure is for sure realistic for most folks getting into trading and trading any method. If you put this into perspective together with the 75% win rate you get an idea of the other performance metrics... However, getting so few basic information regarding a method's performance should make anyone suspicious of the service. 2. Hindsight methodology His complete methodology is only useful to describe what has happened so far. In hindsight he can explain very well the price action. That's where people get fooled. However, his methodology is almost useless when it comes to tradable ideas. He used so many support and resistance and fibonacci lines on his charts that later on you could always make sense out of the price action as some of the many lines always fit to price action. Also, several times he claimed that he forecasted this or that development in price in previous sessions, but if you had listened carefully, you knew, that he did not do that the way he presented it later. That left also a bad feeling about his methodology or his way to present things. A further thing that makes any educated trader suspicious is the fact that his methodology relies heavily on indicators. He looks also at price action and emphasizes that price action is more important than the indicators (so much in his defense), but still, the use of ADX, stochastics and MACD shows that he is not a great trader. Such indicators are lagging by nature, they just describe what has happened so far. They have no predictive value at all! Most of the good traders do not use indicators to trade at all (I said "most", not all!). They rely mostly on price action alone. 3. Unreliability He was late very often in the few months I've attended his service. Often by 15-30 minutes, sometimes sessions were cancelled altogether! As you can see on this site from older reviews, this problem has been there before as well. 4. Overemphasizing of positive thinking mumbo jumbo His positive thinking/visualization sessions can be outright dangerous for some weaker personalities. I believe also in positive thinking and visualization, but only to a certain degree. You have to still have a good sense of reality. Some weaker folks out there could really get into problems if they believe too much in this stuff and rely on it. Just to give a stupid example of what he wants to make his student believe... In one of his sessions he gave an example of the power of visualization by telling that one of his employees or co-workers on the site was visualizing to get a free parking lot on a saturday afternoon at a busy mall, something that he never got... he visualized it and.... bingo! He got one! ... this is just one funny example that comes to my mind, but you understand my point...
PART II: ****************** C. Further negative aspects which add to the bad flavor 1. Strong focus on FX As the name of his service suggests, fxknight.com focuses very much on FX. Well, this is not a problem in itself. The problem with FX is, that it is currently very popular among retail traders, but it is not what most professional traders trade. The latter trade mainly stocks or index and other futures and not spot FX. So, every company that focuses on FX is suspicious of being more interested in marketing their service to make the quick buck first as compared to be genuinely interested in providing excellent education first (in addition to good marketing and making a good profit, of course). However, I have to mention that he analyses sometimes also other instruments than FX, such as the Dow Jones Index, Gold, etc. But as I said, his focus is FX, the brokers he works with are FX retail brokers and the platform he works with is the crappy retail platform MetaTrader. This limits his students right from the start as they don't get to see what else is available in the market and at much greater value! 2. Giving the impression to be professional traders themselves He says that he is a fund manager. Well I am too... I manage my own funds and those of some friends and family members... lol Why isn't he publishing his funds name so that everyone can check out the performance of his fund from a neutral source? Well, I am sure, that he will come up with a good explanation why he cannot do this... Another one: His co-coach YR was initially portrayed as a professional trader, but then you find out later that he still has a normal everyday job and does not live from trading alone... which is okay, but then don't make the impression that he is a professional trader already living all the student's dream, i.e. being a full-time trader able to make a living by trading only. 3. Providing false or unverified information Repeatedly he made fun of people using the Bollinger Bands for their trading. He stated that John Bollinger (AK: "I have met him") invented the Bollinger Bands for options trading only (as volatility is important for options pricing) and not for technical analysis in general. A technical indicator, he said, should not be diverted from its intended use. Well, unfortunately for him, Mr. Bollinger must have been drunk when he talked to Andrei. At least, in his own book "Bollinger on Bollinger Bands" he describes extensively how Bollinger Bands can be used on any financial instrument as a technical indicator... he is not talking about options at all! (It was only when he was working in the options area in the 80-ies when he started to think about volatility and its implications. But then he applied it to technical analysis in general.) Before making such statement one should at least take his time to read the ONE main book available on the subject. Such behaviour just leaves a bad overall feeling about the competencies of a person who claims to be an expert. D. Positive aspects The psychology sessions with Dr. Marty were helpful. These were once a week (2 sessions in one day, but with the same content). But you get this information (and more) in the books of Brett Steenbarger and Mark Douglas as well. E. Conclusion Don't get fooled by the positive reviews on this site. They are not from professional traders but from students who used the service for a few months only. Many of them still trade on demo. And of those who trade live, I doubt that most of them are consistently profitable at all. Furthermore, at least one of them is on the payroll of fxknight.com. So much about the weight you should give to these positive reviews. Andrei Knight/Pehar asked his students also several times in a few weeks to post their positive reviews on such sites as this one (which is legitimate). He is an excellent marketer and presenter, but I seriously doubt that he is a good trader. I am not saying that a newbie trader will learn nothing in his pro room, but one should reduce his or her expectations a lot and don't expect that he will make you a great trader because he himself is not one. Of course, I have no proof for this, but the facts above leave a very bad feeling behind. Now, what should a newbie trader do now? Try another educator? ... No... as I've stated in my initial remarks, I am sure that there are only very very few helpful educators out there - if any! Unfortunately, there is overall not much helpful information out there for aspiring traders. Trading is very much a do-it-yourself profession. That's the way it works, unfortunately. Nobody, who is a great trader starts an education service to teach others for $200 bucks (or whatever amount) per months... ... such trader trades... period!
Are you sure he's not focused on binary options? A win rate of 75% is acceptable if the average payout is 72%. Because the risk/reward ratio is fairly fixed, there's a lot of emphasis on win rate when dealing with binary options. I would like to know if his method would work in that arena. How would i find out what his method is?
Hi Good1, No, he is not focused on binary options or options at all. He teaches a discretionary trading method for directional trading only (trend following and reversals), mainly for spot fx. You can get some information about his method from his website. He has also a free webinar on his site. The direct link to the webinar is this (takes some time to load!): http://www.fx-knight.com/video/core/intro1/ If the direct link does not work, click on the link "free sample session" on this site: http://www.fx-knight.com/pro.html There you can get an idea of his method. Regards, k
I took a quick look but could not really put it together. Looks like he's got several indicators going. Oh well. Probably isn't anything i haven't already considered, or won't find out with a little more digging.
Hey Karoshiman, Ive just started in the fxknight pro group, I thought you gave an interesting and fair review of this. Too early for me to say though as there are so many glowing reviews about it to your poor one, and I have no experience to comment on who's right or wrong. However your points seem valid enough and you mentioned that you are now trading profitably. What advice then would you give to a newbie on becoming a better trader? You've read many books, which one would you say hands down has helped you the most? What other resources can you point me too to become better educated? I went through Steve Nisons Profiting in Forex course and thought it was a great tutorial on price action, but what do I know. A little insight on how to move forward in my journey as smooth as possible and which pitfalls to dodge would be greatly appreciated. Cheers
Hi Dabra, Thanks. There are many good reviews on forexpeacearmy.com but also some not so positive ones. You have to judge for yourself at the end. I am not an educator. Thus, I do not have an elaborated teaching plan for new traders available. So, I can just try to give you some hints based on my journey. You should read as much as you can from my point of view. It takes a long time until you get where you want to be and you have to answer many basic questions which are relevant to become a good trader. For instance: - A very important question you have to answer is, what your theory is on how the markets work (and I'm talking markets and not price behavior). Start with a hypothesis that makes sense to you and go from there. - Are you from your personality-type a discretionary trader or is mechanical trading more suited for you? - What are your restrictions, in terms of money, hours available per day, days per week, etc.? - What is the right time-frame for your personality-type? Do you want to sit in front of the computer all the time or not (you don't have to, depending on your trading style)? A good place to start is Jack Schwager's first Market Wizard book. You will not find a trading system there, but what you will find is excellent traders with different personality-types. Those traders which appeal the most to you give you a hint into the right direction, as you have probably similar personality characteristics as they have. The most important criterion by which you should travel your journey (i.e. choose books, threads on forums etc.) is that you choose what makes sense TO YOU. I think this is key for a successful trader... to think independently. Later on, when you have already a direction, you can post concrete questions on quality forums on trading. But you have to find the right forums where good traders are... not necessarily where the most traders are ;-) Hope this helps for a start. Regards, k
Hi K Thanks for the reply, In answer to your questions you may in turn help me answer mine. - Are you from your personality-type a discretionary trader or is mechanical trading more suited for you? Well mechanical trading does sound good but I feel I need to do some sort of apprenticeship in discretionary trading first, the time spent trying to make mechanical trading work could be spent learning to trade in my opinion. I dont know It just seems like an easy way out to go straight to mechanical trading without having earned any stripes yet. Let me know if Im wrong. - What are your restrictions, in terms of money, hours available per day, days per week, etc.? Money- it depends how confident I am of being profitable. If starting out id only like to risk 5-10k, but if I can see something works I could go up to 100k. Hours available-this is probably my biggest issue at the moment. I have a wife and 2 kids and work shift work all sorts of hours, but the beauty of it is that I can trade from work at different stages of an 8hr shift. The downside I guess is that id be trading on the different sessions throughout the week. I could trade everyday at work also. I dont want to trade at home because its family time. - What is the right time-frame for your personality-type? Do you want to sit in front of the computer all the time or not (you don't have to, depending on your trading style)? As I write this Im thinking Im a bit of a mixed bag, I like the idea of setting a trade on the higher timeframes and being done for the day but when looking at charts I also have the impatience and like to see them move on the shorter time frames and to get in on the action. I really like your questions and feel once I can get this sorted then I can spend more time on the all the other aspects of trading. Its just that Im feeling a bit lost, as you can see Im a bit all over the place and need some guidance on how I should go about things In reference to my answers. Hope you or anyone else can advise on the best rout moving forward.