@Al_Bundy what is his "method" is it price action based? or looking at patterns? or market profile? I read the articles on his blog, and they are very generic....no charts of his previous trades etc...
There are several posts with charts where the rationale behind entries and exits is explained. He's a discretionary trader who combines classical charts patterns with price action (not the usual simplistic stuff aka here's a pin bar, buy buy buy ) and elements of trend following.
In my opinion, the simple stuff I think works almost just as well. Perhaps the win rate won't be as high as someone who considers more data and has refined their trade entry criteria, but it still will be good enough. Of course the way to make the simple stuff work though is to know when, where and how to enter, where to place your stop, and when to exit. I can tell you as a newbie how easy it is to be trading in the right direction and still lose money, and how you can also have more wins than losses and still lose money. Furthermore, as a newbie, its easy to see how you know that what you are doing is wrong, and yet, its incredibly difficult to do the right thing. So in essence, the mentor will sometimes just help you put your head on straight, and although that might seem simple, lots of experts say that trading isn't all that difficult in terms of complexity, just difficult in terms of execution.
I am influenced by your words. We cannot get any help if we don't know what we need. The best mentor would always be yourself. But it doesn't mean we cannot get help and useful advice from others. For me, it's the best to listen to many others and then select out what is really useful for us.
I think this is a good initial strategy when you have no idea what you want to do. Its hard to know that something doesn't work when you don't really know what does. But evaluating what is useful, especially when only getting bits and pieces is sometimes more confusing. Look at it like this. I would never buy an initial breakout... these things fail all the time. But then just the other day I read NoDoji say that her mentors showed her how in an uptrending market, buying new highs works, even though I think the general public is sometimes warned to not buy new highs. I'm of course taking all of this out of context, and a breakout trade isn't exactly the same as buying a new high, since an up trending market isn't really in a range and hence a breakout, but it is at least a break of something, be it the break of a range high, or the break of a previous high. Anyway, my point is that trying to pick something useful from so many suggestions, when all the useful bits are just bits, not backed up by the help of a mentor showing you how to use them is kind of like just figuring out what kind of indicator you want to use. The choice might not matter so much as on their own, they are all pretty much useless. Now granted, most people who end up being successful have had to make it work without probably much outside help, but of all the traders that I've read about here who have shared their stories and appear to be highly proficient now, every single one of them has said how they used to lose for years, and lose tens of thousands of dollars.
Yep u r right that it's difficult to figure out what is really useful. However, personally, I would prefer to follow an experienced and profitable trader that I know, rather than listening to some so-called mentors who I have never met with
Ha.. couldn't agree more! And that is where the difficulty starts. The best traders are very quiet and have no need to help anyone. Yes they sometimes visit forums, but its mostly out of boredom, or perhaps to converse with other high level traders, but you hardly know who they are and have very little access to them. Unless you live in NY or Chicago perhaps, where there should be lots in person and you might bump into one (how would you never know who they are mind you unless you hang around outside of the CME building... LOL), or maybe even Florida, since lots of successful traders seem to love the nice weather and easy life, meeting one in person is highly rare. So you're back to the original problem. Those that make themselves visible you gotta be careful about. Those who advertise and have a website you have to be even more careful about. Any type of business that is set up as a mentorship you have to wonder if they make more money from helping others rather than trading themselves, which really shouldn't be as any mentoring income should be peanuts compared to trading income. I'm not complaining about it.... just saying how it is.