<i>"Would that make you $350 a day other than wasted 3 hours?"</i> The opposite of every losing trade is not always a winning trade. In other words, midday consolidation periods often channel & chop sideways. It's common for both long and short positions to be stopped out for loss midday while price action goes nowhere and/or tightens down into consolidations which break late afternoon. Taking a net-loss system = approach and doing the exact opposite seldom if ever results in net profit. The opposite of net-loss in trading is not equal to net-profit. One of the many human-logic thoughts in trading which is not true in reality
No, as I've pointed out here a number of times there was simply no point in doing it. I followed Vad's results very closely when he did that, and it was nothing but trouble for him. He did not get one extra client by doing it. People who never would have been buyers might have said they now "respected" him, but more often the bashers continued to bash, as in "How do we know that's your only account, or that you didnt pay them off to just lie for you". People who had planned to buy before the audit did, those who had not planned to buy before it simply did not. Pretty simple. I did provide fully disclosed results to those individuals to whom I managed money for between 2002 and 2005, and of course those people also have the their own records generating by the trading I did for them. I closed that business though about 2 years ago because I was simply getting too sick to continue. At this point I manage one account for a close friend and then my own account. That is the limit of my involvment, along with my posts here and occassionally on seekingalpha, moneyblogs, tradingmarkets etc in the trading world.
I really laughed when I saw his reply, it just proved the saying that there is a sucker born every minute, or at least dreamers.
<i>"or at least dreamers..."</i> I took that as a sincerely logical question. Because trading is a zero-sum game in the end, it's logical to think that every single transaction is perfectly offset by another. Linear black & white, cut and dried. In reality you cannot fade a constant loser and realize a constant winner because of that. On the surface people will think that obviously someone's loss is another's win. Not true. Many losses are just barely taken out on the stop... whereupon price action reverses course and takes out another trade in the complete opposite direction. Neither side profited at all in the two-way chopped stops. Who profited from both losses? Perhaps a third party capable of buying the bid and selling the ask, which retail traders cannot consistently do. Fact is, fading losses almost always results in net losses going the opposite way. Counter-intuitive, but reality. Anyone who doubts that will find out the truth for themselves in realtime if/when they ever fade a net-loss trading system.
This is sort of a funny story (painful at the time) related to that. "Old hands" will remember Cheetah. My original plan included following Cheetah along the yellow brick road, buy when cheetah said buy, sell when cheetah said sell. All was going well except that I was getting my ass kicked and losing money hand over fist. So, I had a moment of inspired brilliance that only a guy who flunked spelling in the 4th grade can come up with, I said well, when Cheetah says buy Im shorting, when he says short, im buying. I'll be rich! Well...not so much...my losses actually accelerating and that was the only point where I nearly gave up on trading all together. Was very frustrated that it was not as "easy" as it was supposed to be.
This is the last point I'll make on this issue, it's something I will mention in my make batrillions selling stuff online ET extravaganza though: Watch what your BUYERS do, not what your lookie loos say. I'll give you a real example of this. Everyone, me including, hates those damn pop under ads that come up and totally block a site if you don't either give your info or close it. A lot of people will just leave a site that has one, and some people are very vocal about how much they hate them. Again, I don't know of any END USER who enjoys them. Well as a result of this a lot of business owners run off half cocked and they remove the things without ever knowing how BUYERS really behave. From a business stand point this is stupid, becuase I can tell you for a fact that if you create two identicle sites and drive identicle traffic to them - the only difference being the pop under- your going to have twice as much bitching from the pop under site but about 30% more sales from it as well. A lot of guys just give away 30% of their sales because "everyone says thats what they want". Well, that might be what they say- but people are very complex and in my opinion its important to give a lot of consideration to WHAT THEY DO! This almost gets back to the trading journal point, coz it applies to an online business too.
The real secret is how many customers - even customers of the honest gurus - actually outperform buy & hold. If the guru's products are worthwhile, then the customers should be beating the S&P over say 5 years+. I have yet to see a single guru who has supplied proof of this. Brandonf says he didn't post account statements or audit because it had no impact on his bottom line. Fair enough - from the point of the businessman, that is a reasonable position. But a guru is not evaluated on how much money he makes for himself - Wade Cook made 10s of millions, after all - he is evaluated on how much he helps his *customers* make. And this is the problem. Whereas a hedge fund or mutual fund has an audited record, where there performance can be judged, gurus do not. Even the few who trade profitably and prove it, do not post the results of their customers. The inescapable conclusion is that their customers do not make any decent money from the guru's advice. They may be successfully persuaded to part with their cash - good salesmen, after all, can even persuade people to buy $800 Kirby vacuum cleaners or invest in Ponzi schemes - but parting people from their cash is entirely different to benefiting them. Someone like Vadym Graifer may not be able to prove his advice helps his customers. He may not improve his bottom line by proving he can trade. But at least he can prove he is *credible* and *honest* by posting his results. It shows he is able to do what he says, and thus by implication he is trying to do right by his customers. By refusing to post results, vendors and ex-vendors like Brandon are failing to show they are trying to do right by their customers. Instead, they are giving the impression all they care about is fattening their wallets at their customers' expense. Most people evaluate an advisor or product based on *how well it does for the customer*, not the person selling it. The reason there is scepticism about gurus is that there's a perception it is not only useless for the customer, but actually harmful to their financial wellbeing. If you add up the fees they pay the guru, and the total lack of evidence that the guru customers make any money trading, then I think the evidence is pretty damning. Buying guru products - even from the few that are ethical and profitable traders - does not make you money, and in fact will cost you money. You would do much better either putting the money into the bank, using it to pay down your debt, or - if you are determined to succeed in trading - using it to buy some books by *successful traders* and learn from them before trying yourself or at a trading firm. That's the real secret that gurus are deperate to keep hidden.
<i>"Buying guru products - even from the few that are ethical and profitable traders - does not make you money, and in fact will cost you money. That's the real secret that gurus are de(s)perate to keep hidden."</i> So in other words, just plopping their money into an account and trading under live fire any old which way that feels right is less costly than "guru products"? Whatever the hell that may aptly describe. Here's a poll I'd like to see. How many of ET's reputed 100,000+ members passed thru since 1999 inception learned to profitably trade solely from the contents of this site. Denizens have trumpeted how it's all right here for free. Sounds good, I'll buy that... where are the blotters in P&L thread showing proof that free info does not cost the highest price of all? I know for an absolute fact that countless people who passed thru here traded real money in real time with concepts of free info here and lost their hairy a** in the process. A few dollars spent elsewhere in many different places may have taught some tape reading skills, some personal discipline skills, etc. * Reality is, all traders who succeed learn some combination of tools that allow them to buy markets heading higher or sell markets going lower, and avoid the myriad landmines in between opportune moments in the market. The toughest part by far is mental = emotional self-management. The technical edge of learning to read charts and respond correctly is damn hard in itself. The number of people posting in P&L thread who learned it all here for free? Zero. The number of people who lost way more $$ dicking around on their own in order to "save" money? Countless. Any way you slice it, the cost for education in our profession is high.
<i>"then the customers should be beating the S&P over say 5 years+. I have yet to see a single guru who has supplied proof of this...</i> P.S... not a good example, buy & hold S&P or any stock market index over the past five years. An earthworm farm would have outperformed that.