You nailed it. You have to apply yourself to studying the set up, the trade and money management and to validate for yourself that what you are seeing is able to be duplicated inside of your own trading environment. It is not an easy task but the rewards are great.
Your point? I sell a few copies a year but don't advertise it nor do I promote it here or anywhere. The sales I get are from referrals of people already using it successfully. You're just pissed you've never written anything that has that much value or that you will never be nominated for a Pulitzer or Peabody for the trash you write. I can always tell when you are getting pissed, your typing gets really bad.
Nothing wrong with selling stuff. Just be upfront about it--- My book will be out in the fall 2012--- judge me after you read it. Although I certainly completely doubt your claims and system-- you deserve props for consistency and longevity in the face of adversity.
Which is one reason why figuring out how to identify "false positive" trade signals can be a goldmine. Keeping yourself out of bad trades is just as good as making a good trade, especially when the bad trade looks so much like a good one before you enter. This month alone, by identifying a scenario in which I get a signal that is more likely to be wrong (all systems give wrong signals, after all), I was able to avoid 7 losing trades that would have cost me over 50 ES points. And that particular variant of the trade set-up I use were always the biggest losing trades, because the set-up typically signaled a transition to a market where my initial stop on a trade was more likely to get hit, because of the wider swings. Now, I track that variable as part of the set-up and if it reaches a certain threshold, I ignore the trade signal or take the opposite side of the signal. Look, these discussions are always difficult because "those who know, aren't saying". If I laid out in detail how I go about trading, I think even a hardcore skeptic would be interested because each detail of the method is so logical that the overall approach just "makes sense". But I'm not going to lay it out in detail because it is not something I want everyone doing. So, there's always an impasse where one side says the other is full of shit and the only way the other side could show it isn't full of shit is by divulging more than seems prudent. One thing I can say for sure is that I don't have any product for sale, manuals, courses, software or anything else. I'm just a guy who figured out 1 thing about markets (I mean that literally, because I only trade 1 set-up, long and short, and ignore everything else that happens) and now I'm trying to monetize that knowledge as quickly as possible.
No reason to be "upfront" since I don't promote it and don't offer it on these boards. If it weren't for you and others like you it wouldn't be an issue here. You wouldn't have to doubt the validity of what I claim if you simply tested it.
And just to make my point, you mentioned seminars, I just corrected your misinformation again, because it ISN'T the truth.
I've thought about writing a book, I know quite a few things that equal money right away. But why would I do that ? If everybody does what I do, then the opportunity will be gone. I make more money trading than I could ever make writing books. I know people who write books myself, none of them were succesful as a trader. I guess pretty much for the above reasons. Maybe if I ever retire, I'll write a book, but not as long as I'm using my knowledge myself. I know somebody who sold his knowledge in bookform. People paid good money, but after a few firms bought his knowledge, it just didn't work anymore. Oh, also, I know people who sell not only books but whole courses and seminars. People like Charles Vaccaro and Oliver Velez. I know these scam artists peronally (well, I know Vaccaro, I have never met Velez but I know a few others who can tell you a sh*tload of bad stuff about him; or just simply search this board). They charge thousands of dollars for courses, while they can't even trade themselves ...
I stated previously that there is definitely more money trading than doing seminars, teaching or writing books combined . . . if you know how to trade. The book I wrote was used as a text book in the classes I used to teach. Most people don't like the book because of that reason. They have to "work" at learning from it. It isn't full of fluff, interviews and opinions like most trading books. I never have to worry about everybody trading how I trade, this thread is a perfect example of the cross section of traders out there. Even if someone has a great system there will always be a segment of the population that will refuse to validate it, ignore it or summarily dismiss it out of ignorance. On top of that, what makes this work is structural so the more that trade it the better it works.
Hehe, you've got SCAMMER written all over you I don't really care though, if people are stupid enough to pay for books or take courses, then that's their own fault. I know they do though. Those classes at Vaccaro's and Velez's scam companies always are full. At least they were, I think they overdid their scam the last time, LOL, after they took everybody's money this board was full of angry victims. There's something 'magical' about all this techical blah blah. People believe it, or they WANT to believe it. Smart scammers like Velez and Vaccaro literally make millions just selling useless crap for big money. Even if it goes against all logic, they don't care. It's almost like those people WANT to be scammed. And that's why I don't really care. If they were smart, they'd join a bank, prop firm or a hedgefund and learn there. The losers buy books and take courses
BTW, if you want to expand your scam, take a good look at how Velez and Vaccaro do it. They not only sell 3 day courses for like $5000, they also get their victims to open trading accounts. They markup trading fees and get their victims to churn shares. Of course, they also require deposits. Then, after a while you can just take all their deposits and let the company go bankrupt, like they did, but that might be 'overdoing' it slightly, like they did last time