If indeed all you write is TRUE, then all I can say is WOW. If Joe was and is part of all what you say, then shame on him. Good luck to you. P.S. Someone might want to forward this link to tradingeducators.com.....
Guys, are we discussing biographies in this forum or trading ideas and concepts? I really don't care, if Joe Ross has 10 or 40 years of experience. I read the books and they helped me a lot in my trading. Having read dozen of books about "magic indicators" and "100% reliable trading systems" I was glad to finally read books, that brought me back to the basics. Bottom line: Whatever Joe Ross did or did not: His concepts improved my trading and made me a better (i.e. more profitable) trader. And that's what counts (at least for me). Markus
I have to agree with Markus. I've read JR's book 'Trading by The Book' , and really like it. (i didn't fork out 150$, my friend did ). We all trade in different ways, one strategy may work for one, but does not work for others. Many thanks to Dottom for the very intersting infos, this reinforce my belief that you can take some guys' ideas and see if they fit your trading personality, but should not consider them as gurus, and listen blindly to them, they are just as human as we are (only richer? ) Always take it with a grain of salt ! (I think that was the saying?) Cheers!!
When you ask a question on EliteTrader you have no idea how much you may learn. Thanks to everyone who responded to this thread especially Dottom. Good Trading to all. ~EC
Yup. Like I said many times you can learn anything from anybody, purported guru or not. I'll quote myself: In fact, sometimes even looking at a flawed idea or an idea with no real trading advantage to it can itself give me an idea. That's why as a trader you are always reading, learning, asking questions, making hypothesis, and testing your methods. My posts dealt specifically with the Ross marketing material and the specific claims, denials, and quoted statements he has made over the years. I was also responding to QBD's post regarding the wisdom, experience, honesty, and forthrighteousness of Joe Ross. Listen, If I bought a book for $150 and learned an idea or two from it, then I really could care less if the guy lied to me in the marketing material. But what if you paid $5000 to go to a seminar to learn about trading from someone who claims that he has been trading for 40+ years and (in early 90's) was regularly day trading 25-lots of the full S&P contract? Do you know how much a 25-lot of the full S&P contract is??? This was before the CME split the contract in half. That would be the equivalent of trading 250 emini contracts today!! (And you haven't adjusted for inflation yet.) Do you know how much *one tick* of 250 emini contracts is? For those of you who don't trade futures, that's 125,000 shares of SPY *per trade*. This, my friends, is why there was such a huge public debate over past 10 years on "who is Joe Ross" on all the popular trading forums and newsletters at the time. Here is a guy who was charging you about the average slippage on *just one day trade* to attend his seminar (not to mention using this reputation to sell advisory newsletter and solicit managed funds). Like I said there were *many* other issues on this topic that I didn't even bother digging through my archives. Like Joe's quote that he never had a losing year as a trader. Woah! Here's a guy day trading equivalent of 250 emini contracts, never had a losing year trading, and I can come listen to him teach me how he trades? This is truly a master trader. Where do I sign up? Maybe now you see where I'm coming from. If it was just about a book, I wouldn't have bothered to take that stroll down memory lane. To quote from Gary Smith: I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that Bruce was correct in his assessment of Joe Ross. And what a shame. Joe Ross has written some good trading books. Maybe we should just leave it at that. But as Babcock stated in his investigation of Ross, "If Ross is making up his experience, he could do real damage to a careless, trusting student."......It's really too bad vendors have to resort to gimmicks to give them name recognition. Ross wrote some good books, he didn't need to fabricate his trading experiences to enhance his name.
dottom, your posts nail the issue hard. if there're still some that cannot or refuse to get it by now, that's their own stupid fault. either that or they have some stake in Ross's reputation. simple as that.
Is Ross for real? I donât know, and I donât care. I have all of his books, and learned much from them. Am I a defender? No. But it must be pointed out that the âeditorsâ of both so called newsletters are vendors of systems and or methods themselves. Anyone who read the publications in the past no doubt remembers the tone â backbiting, petty, mudslinging.
Regardless of the tone of the discussion, facts are facts. Facts can be proven or refuted. There were many people who commented on the issue who had nothing to "sell". Like Gary Smith, a well-respected all-around "good guy" in the industry. Joe Dinapoli was and still is a very popular author/educator. He had nothing to gain from publically refuting Joe Ross, and lots to lose if Ross could prove Dinapoli wrong. There are many others (registered futures broker, former students, etc.) We actually get a lot of that same type of tone here on ET. Everybody has an opinion. Everybody loves to speculate and attempt logical deductions from limited data. But despite all of that vitriol that we see on message boards, there is no more powerful argument than the truth.
From: mr_bond@mdi.ca (mr_bond@mdi.ca) Subject: Joe Ross Defends Himself (Long) View: Complete Thread (10 articles) Original Format Newsgroups: misc.invest.futures Date: 1998/05/28 I don't know anything about Joe Ross or his methods or character. However, I have a friend who recieved the following letter from Joe Ross regarding the Duane Howe incident. Read it and decide for yourselves. If nothing else, it shows that there are two sides to every story. Dave >From Joe Ross: Some people choose to believe the worst that they hear about someone else, and there is little you can do about it. When a person becomes well-known, there always appear detractors who seek notoriety of their own by "putting down" the person of renown. Princess Diana, Mother Theresa and many others have had their critics -- those who chose to find fault with them, often without investigation or from believing trumped up and falsified charges. Sometime in the early 1990's, I received a call from Bruce Babcock. He had previously written a rave review of my first book, "Trading by the Book." and he wanted to review "Trading by the Minute." He also wanted to do a telephone interview with me. During the interview, Bruce asked me to verify my trading by sending him my broker statements. My reaction was, "Hey, my statements are none of your business!" To understand my reaction, you have to realize how I view Bruce Babcock. I see Bruce Babcock as a self-appointed critic of the futures industry. He is not alone, there are others. He is a man who sells all sorts of questionable mechanical trading systems, many taken from the work of others, and he attracts his customers by appearing to be a trading consumer advocate. In fact, he calls his publication "Commodity Traders Consumer Report." This is rather a strange name for a company that makes most of its money by selling its own mechanical trading systems. That the systems he sells are worthless has been publicly shown by John Hill and his company known as "Futures Truth." There, in objective testing, the truth about Bruce Babcock's products came to light. As my conversation with Babcock continued, I requested of him that he judge my book by its content and not by whether or not I sent him my trading statements. My reasons, apart from Babcock's rude request, were numerous. I'm not going to go into them here, because my work stands on its own and needs no endorsement from others. Anyone familiar with my work can plainly see that the concepts I teach could only have come from long years of experience as a trader. Babcock, in his review, lashed out in a personal attack against me. About ninety percent of the review consisted of his attacking my credentials. At the end of his attack, he praised "Trading by the Minute." After his attack, I wrote to him asking him for his broker statements. He never replied, and to my knowledge, although he has been challenged numerous times by others to produce them, he has never done so. Babcock claims that I was introduced to the futures business by Ken Roberts. The problem with his logic is that I was trading before Ken Roberts was even born. My trading goes back even further than when I was trained by my great-uncle. I actually put on my very first trade at the age of 14. So much for Bruce Babcock. Now to Joe DiNapoli. Here is a man about whom I have never spoken an unkind word. For him to claim that he trained me is ludicrous. In fact, according to Babcock, I was trained by Ken Roberts. How can this be? We can't have it both ways! I have to believe that there are at least three Joe Rosses in order to make any sense of the matter. There is the Joe Ross who was trained by Ken Roberts. There is the "destitute" Joe Ross who was trained by Joe Dinapoli, and I claim to be the Joe Ross who has never in his entire life been destitute and was trained by my great uncle Julius Goodman. In the early 1990's I went to visit Joe Dinapoli because I had purchased trading software from him. It was Dinapoli who introduced me to the fact that it was possible to trade from live data. In short, when it came to using computers for trading, he was light years ahead of me. It was also Dinapoli who snickered at my concept of the law of charts, 1-2-3's and Ross Hooks. He preferred to use Fibonacci ratios. Good for him. To my knowledge he still uses them, and teaches Fibonacci concepts in Asia. Dinapoli did recruit me to write ad copy for his Fibonacci training course. I did it in exchange for some free software. It was also Dinapoli who recommended me to Tim Slater as a speaker for one of the old Computrac TAG conferences. I suspect that it bothered Dinapoli to see how well received I was at the conference, because by the time I was ready to leave for home, he had told Tim Slater that he, Dinapoli, had taught me everything I knew and that I had stolen all my material from him. The topic I spoke on at the conference was "Where do you place the Stop?" It had nothing to do with Fibonacci. In all my books, I show the proper way to use Fibonacci ratios, and I lambaste the erroneous use of them set out by proponents of Fibonacci.
Might as well reprint the entire thread. What about the prior 6 years of discussion from Usenet that deja doesn't have archived? Want me to send you my archives? Here is a relatively mild criticism (compared to the rest) but probably the one most can relate to because we all know who Ken Roberts is. From Gary Smith, well respected trader, author, and all-around "good guy" on misc.invest: