I disagree... what makes a good math professor. Someone that knows math and someone that knows how to explain it. To be a mentor.. not only do u have to be a good trader u also have to know how to help other traders achieve. Paramount to being a good explainer or hand holder.. u have to know your shit and back it up. Why anyone would listen to someone that does not provide solid credentials.. is beyond me.
You can make a good living. Lets say you made $1mil each last 5 years and can prove it. You like to help people and need a solid income post trading. You decide you dont want to trade because you are burnt out.. You can easily become a mentor and give seminars and crap on the weekends and can probably make an easy $100k a year.
There are many sports analogies here (great coaches who were only mediocre athletes) but as far as I know, there is no genetic component to being a great trader, personally I would be somewhat suspect of taking advice from someone who claims that they know what needs to be done to be a great trader but for some odd reason cannot follow the own advice and actually perform. At the very least, if the person who is offering to mentor you is not able to make money following their own advice I think that too needs to be stated up-front rather than simplying hiding behind the claim that they can't show their performance record for legal reasons.
Are they your mentors before? If not, who was/were your mentor(s)? Do you know who were the mentors, and their names, of these three mentors, as it seems you know very well about them? Thanks. Just curious!
Precisely, I could not agree more. It's all about tools and that's about the only thing a vendor can be expected to provide. The trader has yet to gain experience in trading and in using the tools and we all know that some are just not cut out for this no matter how good tools they use. It's even better for them to develop their own tools so that they trust them more, but if someone can do this job for you there is nothing wrong with that. Obviously, the point is to find someone you can trust and we know that most cannot be trusted. I had to develop my own tools ultimately, but if I had someone to help me out with that I would not mind that at all. I gained a lot from the experience of one of my friends, but that was only much later on and his help was not so critical then. I believe however that a hypothetical track record is a bare minimum or a free reasonably long trial (2-4 weeks) if the tool is in the form of indicators and not a complete system. Many out there are selling crude ideas and not workable implementations. I believe that ideas should be freely available to everyone, but as someone who had to put in a good deal of time to arrive at my current tools, I will never part with the best of them without being paid for them handsomely. (Now, I am not selling anything, so please no PMs...) Obviously an audited track record is unlikely to hurt any vendor's reputation if it is good, so I don't mind if a vendor provides one, but I do not insist on that. The vendor's job is to provide tools and evidence that they work. Your job is to figure out if the vendor is a con artist before you pay him for his stuff. This is where ET comes in as a very handy tool.
To anyone here on this thread, how did you develop your own system if you have no mentor or vendor that provided you with one to begin with? Did you just learn from mistakes?
I learnt a lot from Vad on Siliconinvestor, back in the days when SI was the main forum for traders... Vad's material on SI saved my ass and I have prospered since... I have a couple of Tony's books, which have proved very valuable (http://www.elitetrader.com/bo/index.cfm?action=view&B_ID=5&CatID=1)... Vad, Tony and Brandon are all respected oldtimers, who I have come across in various contexts over the years...
Exactly. Teaching someone how to develop a trading system is distinct from teaching somebody how to trade, particularly if the "teacher" is teaching his own system. There are a number of good sources for learning how to create a system. But before I go to the time and trouble and usually expense of learning somebody else's system, I want to know that the creator has been consistently profitable with it.