timsk said:
I've had 1-2-1's with both of them and blown 70% of my account trading a very fast moving stock that I shouldn't have been trading. I'd love to blame Mr. C' and / or Naz for what happened, alas, the responsibility is mine and mine alone.
Tim, you make an extremely important (probably unintentional) point here.
Let me state up front I have not had trainings with either Alan or Richard so cannot comment directly. There has been a lot of slagging off of the various coaches on these boards for the wrong reasons.
Let me explain.
It is vital in any endeavour: Trading, running a business, training an athlete - whatever, that you are crystal clear what
type of expertise your are buying in.
Training can be of the one-off or drip-feed variety.
One-offs are seminars, specific trainings as one or multi-day events either as 1-2-1 or groups.
Drip-feed is books, boards such as t2w, chatting with other traders etc.
In a one-off training you get the goods - and it's up to you what you do with them - if anything at all. This is your situation you refer to above Tim. You got the goods. They were delivered (the training). You did or did not use all you were given or not correctly. All quite valid.
Mentoring is where someone with a greater knowledge of your subject area [trading] guides you and holds your hand through the activity they are mentoring you in and help you avoid making mistakes. They normally will do this until you have sufficient mastery (in their opinion and yours) to handle things on your own. A mentor has to have significantly greater knowledge and experience in the target area than you do - otherwise there's no point. But the critical point is that they are there - guiding you - pretty much on a regular if not constant basis.
Coaching has the same aspect as Mentoring in terms of 'hand-holding' and supervision, but differs in that your Coach does not necessarily need to know more than you do about the subject matter or even be better than you - they just need to be experts in helping you bring out the best in you. For instance, Tiger Wood's coach is not a better golf player than Tiger. He may well play golf himself, but there's no need even for that. He just needs to know enough about the subject matter and most importantly how to help Tiger perform at his best.
I think this is where many of the confusions arise regarding the usefulness of trading coaches - there are very few of them. Naz and Mr. Charts are trainers. They may well provide on-going support, but I strongly doubt they can hand-hold all their people all the time - they are after all, traders - first and foremost.
I think with these distinctions borne in mind and with clear expectations of what can be achieved from each of these types of expertise buy ins, no trader should really have anything to complain about.
