Six years ago and knowing nothing about trading futures a friend suggested the DTA to me as a not-too-scammy trading school. I followed the twice a week live market classes, did the course homework and six months later I was live. Having stuck to their way of doing it 100% I tweaked things here and there as it was obvious to me in the generally low movement markets we had at that time, their T1, V1&2, OB etc. trades were not cutting it. What it did give me was something to do (looking for setups) while absorbing the market, kind of a "wax-on wax-off" exercise if you remember the Karate Kid. This got me looking at things in terms of runs,retracements, momentum, support/resistance etc. without thinking. Well I now do very different stuff, I use time and not tick charts, no indicators and work with inter-market correlation etc. A friend who does not speak English is asking me to train him and I can't decide should I put him through the same tasks of completing those chapter exercises (took me quite a while) to get him tuned in or just give him three very good trades where he will make money without the 610 charts, finding setups.. If you were a DTA student, do you believe that you got some edge following the course or in hindsight would take a different path now?
Hey Bugenhagen, it's different, but slightly correlating question that i had as well, this summer : https://www.elitetrader.com/et/threads/worthy-of-my-edge.331271
Yep, as you encountered with your friend there I don't want to waste my energy with someone who is not actually going to trade. I gave him an IQ test and he is in the 120-130 zone so that is ok and he has a background that indicates decent experience dealing with & thriving in risk (real world). It would be great to hear good or bad from someone who did DTA though just for the whole did you think the method helped perspective
I remember a pal who tried Marcello and DTA about the time he got started like over seven years ago. total scam waste of time (like that stupid "funny yellow line"). Marcello who claimed to be a "successful" daytrader with "10 years" experience didn't look over 25 then, and started by making videos of himself of "trader success" fakery at hotel vistas sipping drinks overseeing Rio. There was also a stupid video of him in his mom's home where he supposedly had his simple laptop for trading. There was also another guy on bmt (now futures.io) who tried DTA and thought it was an utter waste of time and scam and even found out details that Marcello and his dta may have been sponsored and created by the "daytradetowin.com" scam marketing site i.e. like a brazilian wing. (https://futures.io/attachments/131890) DTA locally feeds on the brazillian middle class trading aspirants. As was official study reported last year, where more well to do brazillians love their trading gambling just as much as americans. (https://www.tradingschools.org/reviews/day-trading-its-for-suckers-heres-the-proof/). More comments on bmt about the DTA snakeoil here: https://futures.io/trading-reviews-...ww-thedaytradingacademy-com-3.html#post433889 https://futures.io/trading-reviews-...-www-thedaytradingacademy-com.html#post305473
Yes and sort of, the infinity pool photo was a red danger light. The reason they do OK is that though the trades they taught were only very marginally profitable even if executed well, they got people do do some work completing exercises before access to the follow along the instructor classes. In this way it was good, though Marcello and his boys (he met the core group of three developing trading indicator software for another company) are marketers, it is just poor value for most rather than a complete waste of time. If you do what I did and treat the wax on, wax off trades they teach as just dialing in neuroplasticity finding your own better trades, the money was insignificant but I'm sure only the usual few percent made it anyway. I always felt that schools if the were honest should make prospective students do an IQ and psychometric test. If you are in the top few percent and better have a work history showing you work hard and get promoted over others a trader has every chance. The FYL was just a linreg (is by standard yellow) 89. I am not sure why they bothered with that obfuscation.