+1 Moreover we have to be responsible for our own failures. I once took a piece of guru "wisdom" and went off on a tangent (probably more than once but this instance stands out foremost in my mind) and spent a LOT of time and effort trying to hone it into a trading tool. It seemed great right up to the final performance test, then it fell flat time and again, no matter how much I changed the instruments, the time periods, the parameters, etc. I finally had to own the fact that what I was doing was based on a false assumption and start over. But such failures are very educational and I started on a new path that was much more valuable. Trading is very challenging, even I imagine for those who attended business school. But if you can take the hits and keep coming back until you succeed, you'll have the satisfaction of knowing that you went up against some of the greatest competitors in the world and won.
You are completely denying the value of teachers and education and think that everyone should reinvent their own bike??? now you are just as extreme as guru seeking people.
04-05-06 11:47 AM andrasnm, good post. I think the last guru that fit that bill died 1400 years ago. As you can see, even back in 2006 I was a genius
I may be wrong but I don't think he was proposing an either-or situation, and I know from experience that it certainly doesn't have to be such a situation. Yes we can learn great things from others but the lessons that stick with us the most are the things that we figure out for ourselves, even if we had help along the way. I think the point of this thread is that while it's wonderful to have a great trading mentor, for most of us that's never going to be the case and we have to learn to think for ourselves and to avoid the fake gurus who are only in it for themselves.
Great choices in our lives come from the culmination of all of our positives collective experiences. Trading is the same. We learn from many different viewpoints and opiinions and then build our own method from the great aspects of all of our positive collective trading experiences.
Most guru's are fake because their edge doesn't work, also each edge has weakness. It can simply stop working, but gurus don't tell u that even if they have curve-fitted backtested working edge. they say it works time and time again but it doesn't. I bet if you test H&S it's more or less a coinflip now, but still tons of guru's teach H&S.