The following question has been raised many times on this board: If you have found the holy grail, why would you want to sell it? Similarly, if it is so easy to become a successful trader, why are so many people a) working over 60 hours per week at restaurants? b) flipping burgers at McDonald, Burger King, etc.? Could they just learn the TIMES method, and get rich?
If they basically give away their proprietary setup during the free seminar, what do they have left to sell? It doesn't sound like rocket science, ie MACD divergence. Divergences are a little hard to code for backtesting, but I would think anyone could put up a one minute chart and just watch it for a few weeks.
They show what the indicators look like in the seminar, but they don't give you the settings for MACD and stochastic until you sign up (although i think if you subscribe to FutureSource they are built in. Beyond these settings, the training is detailed in how to look for and trade several divergence setups, not just a simple double top. Not worth $5K though.
The indicator settings are provided in the CBOT webinar. http://www.cbot.com/cbot/pub/cont_detail/0,3206,1058+23479,00.html
Are the MACD/stochastics settings in the video? I didn't see them in the slides. Incidentally, I attended the TIMES demo twice remotely, and the emphasis seemed to be on looking at trades in hindsight, most of which were naturally profitable.
The settings are spoken in the video, not shown. MACD: The speaker first gave the macd settings as 3,5,8 but afterward said 8,3,5. The exact setting was not clear to me. After looking over several of their charts and matching the indicator with my own, i have worked out a near-exact setting of 4,12,9. Stochastic: The speaker says to use a 'modified' slow stochastic with a setting of 5,5,2. Since my slow stochastic only allows 2 settings, i have worked out a not-so-near-exact setting of 7,5.
Being that I trade against short term trends using divergence from an indicator (and a couple other things) I checked out their method to see if I could pick up something. What I found out was that they would have the same problem as my system does during trending periods. During the question and answer period I asked what happens during trending periods and he referred me to another method that they have to catch those moves. Hmmmm. Newbies, definitely should not follow this thinking that if you do it "right" you'll make money. You can learn something about the market, indicators, etc. if you're a newbie, but pay $5k for that ? Just watch the market yourself.
They mentioned several different methods: JOT (jump on trend); SEM (sudden exhaustion movement); Cat Ear; Elbow.