They sell the dream not the reality of trading. There are many free or inexpensive way to learn the basics. the problem with testamonials is that if you take sample of 100 students and all did the same trading course 50 of these students will fail, 25 will have little success and still struggle. 20 students will find it difficult to make consistent profit over the time 5 will have great result for the first few months and they post these encouraging testamonials. So if only 5% make money in the short time, why would potential students without any experience pay 5 thousand pound for a 5 % chance to make a little money and probably not make enough to cover the course fee?
You will learn more if you put the money in a trading account and pick one of the free strategies from this forum, sought information about money management and traders' psychology and you get better return on your investment.
I have been in this business for over 10 years and trade full time now. I can say that trading all about self-discovery and what works for you. these "CANNED' expensive course is the wrong way to go Period.
I think there are only three factors that are important in successful trading. All simple to state yet hard to achieve in practice:
- your own psychology and mastering it and achieving consistent trading discipline
- money management, so that you don't overtrade, but aim to get rich slowly
- effective use of stop losses to preserve capital
Now you might ask, where are the trading strategies, and set ups.
Consider this. Suppose your trading strategy was just tossing a coin. On average you would be right 50% of the time and wrong 50% of the time.
If you entered a trade, in either direction, based on this random method, and come what may, closed the position when you had a 2% loss - no ifs or buts or excuses, or procrasination; and if you run your winning trades forever or until they pulled back 2% by means of a trailing stop loss. You would win!
In any trading scenario there can only be 4 possible outcomes:
- Big losses
- Big profits
- Small profits
- Small losses
The stop loss method described above would avoid big losses. So the outcome would be big profit, small profit, or small loss. My arguement is that the small outcomes up or down, will approximately cancel out over time. You would not suffer major losses, but occasionally you would make some good gains. If you had the discipline to follow this system.
Now this is predicated on just entering the trade on the toss of a coin. Suppose you add the simplest of filters to this system and decided to enter into the trade in the direction of a simple moving average. When the share is rising, ie not chopping around, and has recently moved above its 5 day MA go long and similarly on the short side.
But people want to make things complex and add indicators, fibonacci retracement, Gann levels and angles etc. Maybe they work or maybe the don't. But complex trading strategies distract from the key things to get right and provide the person with excuses why he lost money. They also allow people like Secker and Winters to flog their expensive wares to the those who might be naive, gullible and greedy.
But if you can avoid losing big, then over time you should be making a good and consistent profit.
So my philosophy is.
Keep it simple. But work really hard on self psychology, money management and capital preservation.
