Thank you. Are you familiar with Van Tharp? I am friends with his son, who use to post here Robert, but was driven away by the bozos. Van has my respect because he admits, despite being a successful trading author and psychologist, that he can not trade. A very unique admission is the sea of lies. surf
Crank--- A genuine crazy person who believes and preaches non scientific material, often hidden in the words of science or pseudoscience. Charlatan-- A person who knows what he preaches isn't true but continues to preach it for monetary or ego gain.
With vendors it is the monetary gain and they are easy to spot because they have an online "storefront" where they advertise their goods. But ego gain is very common problem in trading social media...... Trading probably attracts lots of arrogant people.... too proud to ever admit they are struggling so they adopt online alter ego identities. The shame of years of fruitless study is not something they wish to reveal, even in anonymous environment. Even in real life they are not always easy to spot because some people can be quietly arrogant..... or conceal their arrogance behind faux benevolence.... so are not readily obvious to most observers.
Social disciplines often are considered "non-scientific". Such is the case with many techniques of psychology as an example. That makes especially hard to distinguish helpful services from fantasies or even scams in these areas. Guess trading is somewhat like that too, since purely scientific (or better say, mathematical) approach is not very applicable as life shows (the brightest speculators in the world are usually not pure quants at very least).
This is why keeping a personal journal, while sounding cliche and so "old school", is so important to avoid repeating mistakes.
Disagree-- Jim Simons is pretty close to pure quant and arguably the winningnest speculator who ever lived.
IMHO, the stories about the defeats of others will not help any future losers nor the future winners... Que Sera, Sera... Those, who has a will to continue, after reading your research probably will say "F@ck you all !", and will be right Those, who will get scared after reading it, probably is scared already, and research will be just another justification to drop it while its not to late......and they will be right too.