A couple of weeks ago I attended a presentation on a Friday morning at the Marriott next to the airport and got a free continental breakfast, a free thumb drive that is now ready for saving whatever files I like, and a free Amazon fire 7 mini tablet with Alexa, which I sold on e-bay for $34.00. The other six people at the presentation all signed up for the $200 three-day course scheduled for early December, so OTA got their money back for the free food and technology, though I don’t know how much they paid to rent the hotel room for three hours. I got a call from an OTA coach or whatnot the day before Thanksgiving, and I returned his call today. The guy was cool and didn’t try to twist my arm. As far as I’m concerned, the only thing OTA might have to offer me is how they come up with their supply and demand zones, or EXT zones, or Mastermind grid levels, or whatever the heck they are calling them these days, but I suspect that in the final analysis, they are nothing more than horizontal support and resistance levels (or areas of consolidation). OTA also scores these zones in accordance with their strength. But again, I’m willing to bet that this amounts to little more than counting the number of times price has been rejected at those levels. If rejected three times, give the zone a strength score of three. If rejected five times, give the zone a strength score of five. I find it interesting that OTA is able to get people to shell out hundreds and even thousands of dollars so easily, because when I connect with folks who claim to be interested in online trading, when it comes down to backing up their professed interest with a modicum of actual concerted effort, they always fail to evidence the kind of genuine seriousness I think it takes to learn to trade successfully (kind of like the woman who tuned down the opportunity to speak with someone who has been day trading for 18 years).
I attended a Online Trading Academy free presentation with two friends several years ago. Ironically, the best content seemed to given in their free introduction presentation. After the free introduction, attendees are offered various courses for large fees, with a discount offered for enrolling in “Comprehensive Packages”. However, the content of these courses does not seem to be anything beyond what one could read in a book on trading. One can easily spend $60,000 on OTA courses and still not have an edge in trading, in my opinion. One of my friends strongly considered spending the $60,000 until I and my other friend talked him out of it. Buyer beware.
Yeah, that was the thing. Everything they said in the presentation was legit (except I disagree with the hard-and-fast 3:1 reward-to-risk ratio many swear by, because if you're someone like me, whose daily success rate tends to vacillate between 75% to 100%, a 1:1 reward-to-risk ratio is quite sufficient). But when I got home and checked out the testimonials online, it became clear that OTA doesn't have a clue as to how to take the solid information they share in their initial presentation, and apply it so that traders actually make good money buying and selling financial assets online. After all the years they've been in business, it would appear that "putting lipstick on a pig" is still the only thing they've learned how to do well.