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Al Brooks Trading Course (www.brookstradingcourse.com)


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Al Brooks Trading Course (www.brookstradingcourse.com)

  #141 (permalink)
emini2000
Atlanta GA USA
 
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sam028 View Post
But if the "90% are snake oil vendors" message can spread and warn the naives then let it be!

Agreed. Except it's more like 99.9999999999%.

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  #142 (permalink)
 
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 SoftSoap 
Canada
 
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sam028 View Post
I agree with @Rory but giving him the same 2 stars like other notorious snake oil vendors is not fair.

This is probably a pressure move from the website that does the reviews.

Don't have the facts? That's okay, just write something that puts the educator in the same category as the snake oil salesmen. The ball is now on the educator to prove them wrong, and if they don't bother then it taints their reputation.

Petty yes, but hey everyone has different ways of getting what they want.


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  #143 (permalink)
 dstrader 
Chicago, USA
 
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Rory View Post
I have considered the utility provided argument in the past however on balance, I see his reviews as fruit of a poisoned tree. I read continued dishonesty and scheming in his actions and some snippets reported to me by a couple of vendors reinforce this personal bias.

Regardless, like Trump I'm sure he cares nothing for criticism, any mention of his name just feeds him so I'll leave it rest.

My personal opinion is as I said, that any decent vendor should step on him immediately.

I stand by what I said, the rooms that we participated and his reviews were absolutely accurate. Not sure if all are accurate.

I do see some things on his actions that I don't totally approve and that's why I said I don't want to defend him, but as an investigative site it seems that you need to put yourself in some 'over the line' situations (e.g. being a fake member with the purpose of evaluating a room, etc.). I also don't like that he is supporting a couple of rooms that doesn't seem any better than the ones he so much criticize. And this makes you start to wonder if there is some quid pro-quo (or a tentative) going on.

Said that, I would assume that any vendor would try to 'kill' the messenger instead of trying to prove that his room is honest and I've seen some very hateful messages against him from vendors. The couple of vendors that contacted you may be doing that. Remember, these are soulless people. I don't want anything to do with them ever in my life. I remember one of the rooms that we were a member for a while, a teacher with a dying mother that couldn't work anymore gave her last $3500 to pay for one of these courses. I've seen enough! And nothing is done, if someone like Emmett is needed to bring some light to this, so be it!

Either way, when I see a site in his reviews I assume they are maybe not 100% but somewhat accurate based on my group's experience, and I would recommend extreme caution to anyone planning in joining them.

As for me trading rooms, trading newsletters, etc. are a thing of the past.

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  #144 (permalink)
Pedro40
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
 
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sam028 View Post
I agree with @Rory but giving him the same 2 stars like other notorious snake oil vendors is not fair.

I think 2 stars rating is just about right. First, most systems are zero stars (OK one star) Second, there are no 4-5 stars systems, (I would call any room like that, that beat the market 3 years in a row), so it is about 2-3. Out of boredom once I looked up some of his better rated rooms, and guess what? They got the better rating when they were performing OK, but accidentally at the time of my looking they were all in a downturn, not making any money. Maybe it was just my timing, or I am right and no room beats the market 3 years in a row...

Actually, there is really no point for Emmett to review these rooms. They are automatically scams, (thus no review necessary) and he should write only about those rooms that have some minuscule value, and those are less than 1%.

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  #145 (permalink)
 
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 SoftSoap 
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Trading rooms are being brought up a lot, so I'm about to start a rant on them.

I see no logical reason for a highly successful trader to start a trading room, just none. Not even money. Here are the 2 biggest bullshit reasons I hear that 'highly successful traders' start a live trading room:
  1. "I want to help traders"
    • You want to help traders by having them rely on you and copy your every move? You are probably going to do more harm to them than good. Every trader should trade differently based on THEIR style and having people copy YOU does nothing to improve THEIR edge
    • Yes people will walk away thinking they have learned something, but they have just seen YOU do something, most will never be able to replicate things on their own
    • Anybody that genuinely thinks they are helping traders by opening up a trading room either doesn't see the big picture, or chooses to ignore it
    • You can 'teach' your ways in a trading room, but if people are watching and paying attention to you, then they aren't doing that with the market. You are better off telling them to take a course or read a book, or just trade...

  2. "It's an easy way for me to make a couple of extra bucks and costs me nothing"
    • So you're a successful trader and you kill the markets, great, you must be making a decent chunk of change trading.
    • Running a trading room LIVE takes your attention away from your CORE BUSINESS, which as a successful trader should be trading.
    • If you take 1 loss in a day simply because you want to prove you are right to your audience, how many people must register for you to make up the loss?
    • Imagine taking a 0.5% loss on a 500K account because you didn't want to look like a fool in front of your audience after calling a trade. That's $2,500 that you lost that you otherwise wouldn't have. How many people need to sign up for you to make up for that one loss? Think if you do 2-3 of those a week, the losses start to rack up pretty fucking fast
    • If you think you can multi-task then you are ignorant, because the truth is that humans are really bad at multi-tasking, no matter how good we think we are. I watched one of Al's webinars and he talked about turning his cellphone off because he wants no distractions, but yet he will be distracted by a trading room? Come on.

I can understand why a successful trader would start a course or a book. It's some work upfront, very little maintenance, there's the potential to help traders (provided you do it right), and it brings you some money on the side. All without having an impact on your edge on the markets. But even that is questionable whether or not it's worth the time of a highly successful trader. There's a reason why you don't see the guys who are pulling in millions from the market every year creating a course, it's just not worth their time.

If you are a mediocre trader, and let's face it, most of us are (and I mean that in the nicest way possible, but most of us aren't bringing in the millions). I would go further and put myself in the 'bad' trader category, I'm not even mediocre yet. Then starting a trading room might make sense at first, but you'll see how quickly your edge will start to fall off that if you ACTUALLY trade, you will stop the room sooner or later.

And as for the consumer, why would you want to pay to watch a mediocre trader call out trades? Please spend your money on something better than watching someone else trade. Go take a course on fundamentals, start a journal, use that money for a combine, save the money and spend it on a psychology professional who can watch you trade and help you improve. Please stop chasing these trade rooms that you think are helping you but in the long-term do more harm than good.

So please someone enlighten me on a logical reason from a business standpoint or moral standpoint that a highly successful trader would start a trading room?

Actually, writing this down I can think of one reason, and that is the 'look at me I'm a good trader' factor. And let's be honest, if you have to pick between more $ in your bank account or the 'look at me' factor, a person with the right mentality to succeed in such a competitive field will not pick the 'look at me' factor.

Rant over.

PS- If you run a trade room and I'm offending you I'm sorry, but I feel like nobody ever brings this up.

Reading this after posting, it seems like I might've been raging while writing it
Believe me, I really wasn't

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  #146 (permalink)
 dstrader 
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@SoftSoap

I think I agree 100% with what you said with exception of the ‘f..’ word on your fourth bullet point (second item). The use of vulgarity always weakens someone’s point imho, and your points are too good for that.

And I think I’m going to write to the people that have a room or plan to have one in the future since this seem to be a hot topic that now spans 15 pages in this thread:

If you are someone thinking in opening a room for ‘helping traders’ we can save you a lot of time and effort: you can come right here on Fio and share your set up and knowledge. You can even record videos and upload it right here to show people how you found success. I guarantee you, you will have a lot less problems than setting up a site, payment options, etc and spend hours entertaining newbies that are going to ask you what is a Market Order, while you are trying to make hundreds of thousands of dollars with your own trading.

On the overall trading room subject; I think we live in a time where it’s very hard to hide. With social media, forums, review sites, etc. you are dreaming if you think you are going to be the next successful room hiding that you are actually a Breakeven or failed trader that suddenly found these great indicators and set ups. I believe that those days are over. The contribution of Fio and other sites to spot these sites now compared with when I started is amazing. I can find out your age, address, previous professions, the size of your home and how much you paid for it, previous marriages, criminal records and even the places you lived. No, I’m not an FBI expert, I’m just a person that owns an iPhone that can press the home button and ask Siri. (or Cortana and Google on your desktop for that matter).

I think if you believe you found something useful that will REALLY help other people and can be proven to be of substantial value, you are going to have to define yourself as an educator ONLY, not a trader. There is nothing wrong with that. I do think there is some value on Price Action, and I personally use Volume Profile that I learned from Jim Dalton books.

These rooms will quickly disappear. The model now with social media and the internet, will be sites like Tastytrade that really provide a lot of value, but they are free. They know they will not survive if they don’t have a community of followers that like their products and advice, and that benefits both them and their customers. We will also see brokerages like Stage 5 helping their clients to be successful and in the same way creating an honest and useful community. Information is out there, too quick, too fast and too extensive for you to survive without integrity anymore.


So, my point is, don’t even try. Don’t waste your time. You will not get anywhere (just maybe in jail or with a huge SEC or CFTC penalty).


Now back to the retail traders out there starting now: things are getting better, not worse. You will have a lot of information, and most of it will be of value and free. The folks providing the information have interest on you being successful, because they are not making money directly on you, but on you being successful and a customer of their services. That doesn’t mean that it will be easy as this is a very competitive profession, but you will not have to do what folks like me and my friends had to do and spend a lot of money and years without any light in the end of the tunnel. You will not have a heart attack, fights with your wife or even a divorce, a psychological breakdown, an empty IRA account and many other bad things I’ve seen people in this business go through.
You will just have to navigate the learning curve as most people did before they could become a successful trader (develop their own edge, emotional control, risk management, etc.). This will take time, but it will be useful time that will guide you to your final goal and not a bunch of dead ended detours. It will be challenging and fun as any new endeavor; not painful, depressing and miserable.


I expect to be done writing in this thread, but this is an important topic for most beginners or struggling traders out there and I hoped to finish writing here (at least on my part) on a positive note!

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  #147 (permalink)
 
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 ratfink 
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All the analysis and input in this thread has been well worth reading. Unfortunately it won't affect much because human nature doesn't change - folks will still want free lunches and you can't learn somebody else's lessons for them.

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  #148 (permalink)
 
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 Tymbeline 
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sam028 View Post
So Al Brooks books are hard to read, his methodology is hard to follow


I think there are several Al Brooks enthusiasts here (I count myself as one of them) who can't argue with that.

Indeed, I suspect that's part of the reason for some of the negative publicity: people want something that's "quick and easy to follow".

Whenever posting positively/supportively about Al Brooks and mentioning that I wouldn't be making a living at all, without having benefitted from his work, I've always mentioned that the books are hard to read and badly edited.



sam028 View Post
giving him the same 2 stars like other notorious snake oil vendors is not fair.


Clearly.



Stray Dog View Post
The silence from Al Brooks tells us that he doesn't eat what he cooks


In this thread, some people have either tacitly assumed this to be so, or openly stated it, as you have yourself.

It isn't actually an objective statement at all: it's simply an interpretation, or a belief. It's opinion, not fact.

The silence from Al Brooks apparently tells some people that.

As Sam says, however, it doesn't really matter, since it apparently doesn't bother Al himself (or at least, he's decided - rightly, in my opinion - not to respond to it): the people who believe that presumably aren't potential Al Brooks customers anyway.

(Again, I'm not commenting on the trading room, having never seen it. I broadly agree with all the negative comments offered above, about "trading rooms" in general.)

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  #149 (permalink)
 JohnS 
Bamberg, Germany
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tturner86 View Post
@Big Mike can explain more on how webinars are selected.

But here is my take. There are two types of webinars educational and promotional. Educational webinars are just that, education. The vendors are selected based on their reputation and popularity with FIO members. This is one reason we see scalping webinars even though Mike disagrees with the topic. If a vendor advertises during a webinar they are usually not brought back. If the community doesn't like the webinar then they are not brought back.

The second is promotional and those are only allowed to site sponsors. To become a site sponsor is an ordeal. Mike does his due diligence and vets the sponsors well. Again he can speak more to how that is done. But just let me say this, Mike is very picky on who is allowed to sponsor the site. He could have done like other sites and just taken the money from anyone, but he hasn't.

So I am going to leave it with this, if you have issues with the presenters of Webinars please post in the webinar thread or PM Mike.

Now on to Al, I studied all of his books and the course. I took that mixed it with Market and Volume profile via FuturesTrader71, added in some custom RSI and VWAP stuff and create my own trading style. Al provided a base understanding of how the market works. It is a bit myopic, but it was a start. Having talked to him personally I think he is a great guy. I agree and hope his story is true. But ultimately I don't care, it will have no bearing on me, my trading, and my future.

I think people look for turnkey trading. I am not saying anyone posting here is, but that just in general it seems that people want it handed to them. After studying Al's stuff I took 1 major setup and manually back tested it. Looking at 5 min charts all the way back to 2008. Bar for bar, day for day. What looked like a Major Trend Reversal, where it worked and were it failed. Marking thousands of instances. I did this for other setups. I created my trading plan 2 sided, what to do if a setup works and what to do if the setup fails. The failing side gave me ideas on what kind of risk management was needed, but it also gave me ideas on where I might be able to reverse if I was wrong.

And earlier @trendisyourfriend I wasn't talking about trading what you believe. I was talking about trading a system that you believe it. There is a difference, if you have done the testing and have found an edge you will have more confidence in trading than if you trade a system that someone 'told' you had an edge. As others said about broker statements seeing is believing. Well actually testing a strategy and seeing it work is worth more than a broker statement from someone else.

There is no right way to trade, but there are plenty of wrong ways. To me the number one wrong way is to trade halfcocked and by the seat of your pants.

I second this whole heartedly. You have to build your own system and prove it to yourself.

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  #150 (permalink)
pinetree
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Interesting discussion. I don't think all of these guys who are questioning are trying to avoid responsibility for their trading, or looking for handouts. Surely some are, but many just want some assurance that their teacher is steering them onto the right path. I bet all of them have been conned before. I've read guys post about spending months or years studying vendors like Jaguar Ed or WrbTrader or some other "trader" who professed to have near straight-line equity curves, and then it all turns out to be a sham. All that work for nothing. So yeah, I sympathize with them, they are still interested in trading, but don't want a repeat of those terrible experiences.

The bottom line is that yes you do have to make your method your own, and no one else can do that for you. But if you are concerned with credibility I would say stay away from all online educators and all seminar speakers. Instead get to know people in the industry... CTA's, prop traders, market makers, hedge fund traders, portfolio managers, and so on. Let them point you in the right direction. These expos and ecosystems... it's all marketing. Instead treat this like a profession, get to know the industry and the people in it.

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