The reason the internet gets a hard time for trading advice is this:
The vast majority of private retail traders who make money are using systems they have developed (maybe from freely publicly available systems). This will include some form of testing/learning, whether it's backtesting, paper testing, or learning from months/years of trading. In any case, they will have paid a lot of attention to why trades win and why trades lose, risk/reward and performance characteristics of their system. They will almost all have learnt through experience why you can't just throw indicators together, why you can't just reverse a losing system. They will probably have an intuitive feel for performance characteristics when developing or refining sytems. And of course their discipline is good, and has probably been enhanced by the hours of effort and methodical approach they have taken.
So, along comes a new trader who wants to make money. He's straight on the web. He may not even have read a single book yet. I mean, that's effort right? 90% of important newbie questions on here are answered in just one decent trading book. He wants to know whether system x costing 250 quid will make him money or not. FFS, do you realise how stupid that sounds? Even system X's website doesn't claim it makes money in the small print at the bottom.
So let's say he dumps system x, or didn't go for it. The next step, post on here for a good free system. Get recommended to read a couple of 900 page threads. Get to page 40, decide you probably know how to trade that method. Try trading it. Either have success for a week, and decide that this trading lark is easy, or fail with it, for a variety of reasons, and go back to the web. Read a few more pages. Repeat for a few months.
By now, he reckons he's quite experienced. He can throw indicators together like an expert. He can search the web and books looking for more complex indicators. Maybe with a Japanese name, or something. Or he may have become a purist, and decided that price action and volume is all there is. So he trades that.
In any case, a small number of you will have made money for six months. You've only been lucky. Sorry.
In all cases, you haven't made a stab at what I described in the first paragraph, so the internet has slowed you down considerably, and in fact, you may carry on for years searching for the holy grail of making free money for little effort.
I believe all of that is a fact. If you disagree with it, please post why.
Since we now have to post our credentials on this list, I've spent the last eight months full time developing and backtesting, with almost no trading. So I have no recent record to speak of. As for before that, well, how do you think I know the newbie story so well?
