Paying for a mentor vs. Elite Trader Forum

Hello everyone,

So I have been attempting to find a mentor here on cyberspace, getting a complete stranger from a faraway land who I will probably never meet to mentor me in my full time trading career (since I have been unprofitable for the past two years ).

I have been debating within myself whether there is any additional value of paying for a mentor.

So here is my question to the Elite Trader Community:

"What can a personal mentor (receiving compensation) offer, that the various members on the Elite Trader forum cannot?"

-or to rephrase the question-

" If I simply post here on ET, will I be receiving the same guidance or advice that a paid mentor will be providing? "

Thanks to everyone who replies and answers the poll.

IWDI

 

When the student is ready...the teacher will appear.
The 'teacher' will/can be various sources and things.
(in my opinion, one cannot simply buy a mentor -- then expect success.)

Successful trading is kind of a long road of enlightenment. (not to sound too hippy or philosophical or anything -- just saying)
Trading is a Battlefield, a war zone...i know that may sound cliche, but it is. You will be tested. across all facets of life. And how you react to those situations , will ultimately determine your fate.

There are always wars to be fought.
Those who wish to become leaders choose the ordeal of war prove themselves worthy of the privilege.

 

That is easy to answer:

Given you choose wisely, and given you even ever find a mentor that can teach you to profitably trade at rates you can afford to pay, the advantage is that you are taught a straight forward, probabilistic process. A good mentor will be profitable him/herself. Do not believe what some idiots claim on this site, which is that some mentors are great teachers but are bad at implementing their own teachings. That is crap. I have never met or heard of a great teacher who cannot trade him/herself well. I would, for example, never ever consider taking advice from Victor Niederhoffer, someone who blew through all his clients' investments several times. In fact I take the opposing approach to his thought process and believe he will never succeed with the way he approaches markets. And I am pretty sure anyone who learned under VN and makes money will have adjusted his/her own process which most likely significantly differs from what VN preaches.

In summary, you will read a lot on this site in terms of "advice", and of course you could end up with a bad mentor. But if you take the time to choose wisely then I believe a mentor is of much more worth than stuff you read here.

P.S.: And yes, as the previous poster mentioned, you CANNOT buy success. You may not be cut out for trading. Maybe you do not have the right mental make up or can't put into practice what you learn. That is entirely up to you.

 

A paid mentor will be giving you direct and serious answers to your questions. The downside is that if the mentor is a fraud or simply not as knowledgeable as he thinks he is, you can be misled down a wrong path or two for a long and costly time.

Posting here is a real crap shoot. This place is full of trolls and former class clowns who live to ridicule newbies, or provide frivolous answers, or just seek to derail a thread because they're bored. Then there are the well-meaning members who know little or no more than you and their sincere responses provide no real insights. Every now and then someone truly knowledgeable and experienced responds to a newbie post with some genuinely useful input but that seems to happen less and less frequently these days.

The great news is the search page. Chances are almost any question you have has been asked before in some form or another and there are plenty of useful answers in earlier, especially some of the earliest threads before this place became a troll magnet.

So embrace the search pages, get creative with your queries and good luck with your search for enlightment.

 

My advice is to save yourself a lot of money and time and only deal with mentors who can provide you with actual evidence that they can trade profitably. Most will not be able to provide this and some will even go on the offensive if asked for statements - i know this from experience.

You will get all sorts of ridicule from vendors and others supporting them claiming you shouldn't ask for statements for a variety of reasons. These reasons might include 'they don't prove anything', 'there are no guarantees', various sport analogies where they try and say a coach doesn't win medals etc etc.

This is a strange industry in that otherwise intelligent professional people will abandon any common sense the have. For example I have heard of doctors who sign up to some clowns mentoring when it is clearly a scam.

GL

 

I do not know why but I have heard so many stories about well-respected and actually well-off medical doctors who fell for some of the cheapest and most trivial scams. I consider them, some of whom I have known personally, to be of above intelligence and intellect. Yet, somehow it seems to be this particular profession that wants to dabble in financial markets and gamble away a portion of their wealth via questionable advisors or money managers or mentors. I have not found the reason for this phenomenon yet.

 

Yes it is a strange phenomenon. My theory is that they have spent such a long time studying their own field that they can be very naive in other endeavours. Of course this is a generalisation. They also seem to take instruction well from a supposed expert in the finance field. Then of course they often have large savings and disposable income.

 

When I first started down this path, I spent a lot of time reading posts, trying to figure out who the real deal is and all that jazz. I've built a list of member who I would trust, but even then, I'm not exactly sure how they would specifically help me since each of them just offer snippets.

Part of the problem also is that a trading method has to match the individual personality, and if you don't even know yet what kind of trader you want to be (or what kind of trader you can be given your own set of fears, etc.), then how would you even know where to start to look for a mentor?

The mentor you seek, who is confident and profitable, simply doesn't need to train anyone how to trade. If I told you that I make 2-3k per day, would I care to collect $100 from you for just an hour on the phone? What would I get out of it? That hour would be more precious to me and my personal time would be more valuable than your $100.

Now there are members here who make this amount of money, and when they do share, they are genuinely doing it to give back, and in some ways, altruism is something you do for yourself anyway. But the problem is that they are only giving you little snippets of what it takes to be profitable day after day. Also, there is so much lost when you are just exchanging emails or forum posts. What you would really like is to be able to talk, one on one, and even better, to be able to discuss things live, during the trading session. This once again puts extra strain on the trader who is trying to make his 2-3k per day, but without this type of personalized hands-on approach, whatever help you get from a mentor after the trading session is over is very limited in my opinion. It would be like a surgeon learning how to do open heart surgery without his teacher being right there beside him making sure he doesn't cut the wrong blood vessels.

So in my opinion, its almost impossible to find what you seek. Perhaps if it was a family member, this would negate the issues I outline, but I just do not see any way that a highly successful trader would take on a mentorship role and help you enough, day in and day out, to teach you how to trade.

I've read so many posts on ET, and just about everything is contradictory, even if both traders each make money. Some may be experts in trading breakouts, others stay clear of them since so many breakouts fail. The difference of course is all in the details, so you have to find someone to spell out these minute details for you, and stick around with you long enough for these subtleties to get ingrained into you. Its simply too much work for a stranger online, and if someone offers to do this for you for a fee, I would run because I am sure they make more from their teaching than they do from their trading.

I have read here on ET where some members have been in chat sessions or skype sessions that they found extremely helpful, and some have been able to talk one on one, but I think many of these people are gone now, and even then, it probably wasn't hands on enough to qualify as mentorship.

 

while this is generally true there are exceptions. Most great mentors do not derive benefits from charging money from their mentorees. I think the best place to find a trading mentor is for someone working in the financial arena to provide extra work in exchange for being taught.
Else I find it very hard to imagine to find a truly gifted mentor to learn trading.

 

Maybe they have heard of Michael Burry and his success with the markets while doing his residency as well as what he did with Scion and they want to be like him lol