JEM is correct in his comments ...How can one say an approach to trading has validity if there are not simple cases of success....Simple cases of success for trading are simple weekly postings of completed trades...Traders should be represented by the seller of the products as well as by the buyers of the products... What is the game afterall...The seller wants to make money by selling content that is made available in books...cds..internet.. hotel seminar rooms...if a cd costs a $1.00 and you can place information on it which will sell the disk for $29.00...then what is the game here... If you rent a hotel seminar room...and you attract 20 people that pay $1000 each...the room costs you $2000...then what is the game here...your really selling the room for $18,000 more than it costs you... The real question is very simple...the seller is clearly in the book selling...cd selling..hotel room selling game...the seller is possibly in the real trading game...we don´t know unless the seller posts a verifiable list of actual consistent trading day by day...not hypothetical possibilities...
I read the stock trader and the How to take money... You can learn 2 major issues: 1) Money/Risk management - I wish I implemented that as described 2) Support Resistance indication rather then the other. The first one is to avoid the most critical issue in trading - lose your capital. Take this from Tony with two hands. The second - even Tony Oz changed his method of entering the trade from the stock trader to the How to take money So read these books, I read any trade book I can. But do not think this will make you a trader. It's only you, with the right money management and the ability to 'be right and sit tight ' - enter trade only with a good setup. Good luck, tol
It sounds logical that if you want to learn to be more profitable you should learn from someone who is profitable. But, I believe that is so say that the learner believes he will trade exactly like the teacher. This transfer of styles hardly, if ever, occurs completely. I agree that Tony Oz is a marketer of educational materials in trading. Thats his bag. Since we don't know his daily p/l we cannot say he is a profitable trader to date. And I am not defending his reputation when I say that to learn from someone and benefit your trading, it may matter less than you think if they are currently profitable or not. For a number of reasons I will list. First, no student becomes a clone trader of their teacher. So even if attempted to trade exactly as Tony does (which is literally impossible because of the structure of the markets, e.g. you can't be in his same trades and not BE him), because of a number of differences (retention level, personality styles, etc), the correlation between your trading and Tony's trading would not be exact. So the P/L would not be exact. Slim margins are often the difference between profitability and losing, obviously. Second, what Tony or any other mentor communicates as what they think are the components of success may vary radically from what their actual components are. Having the talent to perform a skill is a completely different ability than the thought process required to break down the elements of developing that talent and further, teaching it to others. (For further reading see THE DISCIPLINED TRADER, Mark Douglass). If you need some evidence for this, query talented high school athletes, and ask them to teach you their skill. Part of it is that they can't teach the hours and hours they spent over their lives doing it, the other part is they may not recall all of those experiences in order to teach them, if they could. So at best teaching your talent is a summary, the gate to the real work in learning that lies ahead. So, the key then is not whether or not any mentor, guru, or trading teacher is always profitable, although that may help ease your own internal fears (the fears you have of not being able to do what needs to be done in your own trading), the key IS that maybe by hearing elements enough times that you incorporate trading principles into your style, and from that you develp a successful way of interacting with the markets: e.g. profitable and happy trading. Trading principles, or general truths about markets are the most important things you can learn. You hear them again and again, but they don't have value until they are incorporated into a habit of trading. Some people call this tertiary knowledge. Sometimes it takes the right teacher to get things to click because they present things in a way that make sense to you, sometimes traders do this on their own. However, if you are waiting for P/L numbers from anyone in order to learn from them, then learning will take quite a long time. But it would be kinda nice if we saw them from the marketers of information. What else can we do? There are really no mysterys to this business, the good traders by habit act out good trading principles. Model those as best you can and trust your judgement to develop your style that works.