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You looked at his youtube page and didn't see any of the roughly 70+ live trading videos?
He is not an educator, he is a trader. His videos are better than "educators" because he is actually trading, its all live trading. Picture it more of looking over the shoulder of a skilled trader while he is actively engaged in live trading.
I always get a good laugh when people on BMT (futures.io) say Lak's trading isn't real.
His trading videos and guidance (not education, just random trading stuff he would say in TIDDI chat while trading) have made a huge impact in my life.
Believe what you want, I use the lessons learned from him every single day in my trading and could not care less if others don't want to put in the effort to learn from one of the greatest public-facing trading resources in the entire world.
You guys simply don't understand how lucky we are to have live trading videos from someone that can actually trade at a high level.
Normally I don't waste my time to debunk stuff like this, but you're so insistent that I decided to.
I'll say the one caveat upfront: the video is missing some detail because it's been sped up. But if the guy wants any air of legitimacy, he wouldn't post videos that look like a 14 year old did them anyway, so, that's on him.
Here's the video:
Go to the 30 second mark, exactly. Pause the video. Use the '.' to advance 1 frame at a time, and use ',' to go back 1 frame at a time. Advance until you see what I'm about to show you, which is at the very end of the '0:31' time.
Here are the 3 consecutive frames. ES is at 74.75 x 75 where 453 are offered, where 1 contract last traded at 74.75:
Next frame, he buys at the market, 25 lots. 75 is still offered, now 457, and 2 more trade at 74.75:
Next frame, his average price has updated, his quantity has updated, but 75 never traded. In fact, 5 have traded again at 74.75. And, at 75, 460 are offered:
Most fake traders will at least wait until the last price traded at the offer before lifting, because then they can make an argument that their fill just wasn't shown (due to a heavy stream of orders of course). But in this case, he insults your intelligence by just buying at the market when it doesn't even trade at the offer.
Just go through the video if it amuses you (another good one is during the 0:39 mark). Note how he hits bids but the bid never trades. And not once did I see his actual size print. Once or twice if it gets missed because of the sped up video, ok, but every time... not a coincidence. In short, if you think this is real, show me an example of where his size actually prints. You ought to see it most every time, but I don't see it once.
Look, I'm glad this person helped you. If your trading improved, that's fantastic. But to say there's anything actionable in those videos is stretching it, and to say that those videos are not sim trading is a flat out lie. I have no vendetta against anyone, but if you're going to pretend that you're trading live, when you're playing a video game (aka sim), well, the truth deserves to be shown.
The mindset of people who watch these videos is, "if I could just have ONE day like that, wow"... and they rarely think seriously about the process and complete teardown and rebuild of one's mental structure it takes to actually trade successfully, much less with 200 ES lots, where each tick is a decent monthly house payment.
There is one good YT channel, with a trader who has made $1M in a day (and $100-500K on multiple other occasions), and it is totally legitimate, 100% real, and I'd bet my reputation on it. I'm not going to promote it, because, what's the point? But the above video from "Lakai" ... not real. Prove me wrong, if you think I'm wrong. As I said, I don't care about this stuff, but it's just shameful to try to fool people, and I get tired of seeing well meaning people get fooled.
People do it all the time. Well, not *all* the time, but it's not a stretch. But, that video, as shown above, well, $1.3 million sim bucks is worth about as much as 1.3 million Schrute bucks, if you catch that reference.
I'll throw out there that there are traders who actually trade, on this site, and who make money. They're right here. But people are drawn to fake 300 lot sim traders like moths to a flame... forget just being consistent.. no, they are thinking about a $1M day...
Last comment here: the ONLY WAY to verify someone's trading success is to look at their tax return. NOT a brokerage statement. The tax return tells all. If I want to fake success on a brokerage statement, I can hedge with multiple accounts and do any number of simple shenanigans that most new traders won't even think of. Videos are a step below that, on the legitimacy scale. They prove nothing, and someone else's trading video shouldn't be the determinant of your success anyway!
Josh has put in quite some effort to prove the exact same point:
If it doesn't print on the order book...
there simply was no trade !
Lakais trades are not on the order book... so they were never put on in the real world.
And thats just the plain end of the story about him and his alleged trading.
As for his simulated trading "method" there was just no discernible let alone consistently applied strategy visible anyway.
What there was tho were a lot of examples where seemingly arbitrarily he'd change direction without any price action or other cues from the market evident at all, and then just average in against a trade going against him till after a drawdown of several points he'd get out with far fewer points profit if the trade did eventually go back in his direction again.
Letting his losers run with increasing size while cutting his winners to satisfy his ego and show a high winning percentage in other words...
Which as any trader whos been around the block once or twice knows is completely irrelevant to net profitable trading.
(And yes you can be profitable by risking way more points than you pocket if your winning percentage is high enough as Al Brookes etc are fond of doing, but a: its one heck of a stressful way of trading, b: not very scalable on intraday time frames, and c: the odds of blowing up are just way higher than doing it the other way round, ie run your winners, cut your losses and make good money with a winning percentage of around or below 50%.)
Boring stuff where patience and discipline are more important values than feeding your ego by micromanaging positions and enduring high drawdowns for the sake of much smaller profits just to give yourself the erroneous feeling that you've cracked the secret to how markets work.
I have no idea if he is a net profitable trader or not, if he makes his income from trading or selling courses based on concepts that imo he complicated way beyond what in essence is sthg really simple, markets that can only go up, down or sideways, with our edge being a slight trend bias thrown into a lot of random movement driven by the sum of the activities of all market participants at any given moment in time...
But re my point about Al Brooks generating positive probability thru much larger stop losses than take profits coupled with a high winning percentage...
A video of his I saw was this where Al is also trading a simulated account like Lakai...
Btw why I have no idea as for a marketer there could be no better advertisement than real life performance. Why waste time on sim when you could be making real money instead ? And if you're putting your trading skills out in public you're creating risk for yourself no matter if you're trading 10 or a1000 lots in the ES or whatever, so not wanting to show what you're worth as an excuse for trading a sim account is really just disingenious for anyone who has a basic understanding of what compounding does for you.
at around 10 min in he doesn't even get his one point profit, but exits at breakeven because apparently he was able look into the future and see that that specific trade was going to be such a great specimen that he was going to take it on his real account instead...
At around 20 min into the video where the market is showing signs of going against him he enlarges his preplanned stop loss to 4 points...
etc etc
While I don't know how if Al makes money from real trading or not I'm not saying what he's showing on a simuated account can't be done profitably, it can.
But imo such an approach is based not on skill reading the market but on gaming the numbers.
Nothing wrong with that per se, just very stressfull to no real advantage other than feeding a need to be right over what should be a desire to make money.
Sorry just saw I couldnt add any videos for some reason, its on youtube,under Al Brooks, "#03 Ten Emini scalps on 15-second chart".
I read your post with surprise, since Brooks generally uses and illustrates trades on a 5-minute chart, not a 15-second one and does not generally advocate risking 3 to make 1.
But sure enough, if you Google "al brooks #03 Ten Emini scalps on 15-second chart" you'll find it. It is described as a bonus video for his trading course. Brooks says in this video that he is making a point about extreme scalping, and that the 1-point target is taken just to keep things simple. He also explicitly says it's sim.
I'm not putting the YouTube link here because a detour into Brooks would send this thread off-topic, which is about whether there are any good traders on YouTube. If someone thinks Brooks is, or isn't, a good trader, that's fine, but there is a review thread for his trading course, which is also better for Brooks in general, here:
Is there a discount for the new Brooks Trading Course for Big Mike members ? $249 is full price . . . for 25 hrs of material = $10/hr . . . brookstradingcourse.com
Sample modules . . .
There are other threads where Brooks' materials are discussed, and we should try to keep this thread closer to its original topic where possible, to prevent fragmenting the forum more than it needs to be. If someone wants to put Brooks forward as a good trader, or as not a good trader, that's fine, but we should realize that the subject of Brooks' trading has been and probably will be extensively worked over again and again, and that there are better places to address the issues.
I am speaking from a Brooks-neutral position, by the way. There are many opinions pro and con, which is why I suggest using an actual Brooks thread for them.
Thanks.
Bob.
When one door closes, another opens.
-- Cervantes, Don Quixote
Hi Bob yup thats perfectly fine by me, hadn't realised there was so much interest in Al, matter of fact his 15 sec video was simply the first that sprang to mind when trying to come up with a point of reference to the other chap and the similarity I saw in negative reward/risk ratios and the extremely high winning percentages needed to get that to work.
That apart I have absolutely no interest in endorsing or criticizing any one who sells stuff on the web, I mean I dunno about say 99% of them out there, but after all there are people like Linda Raschke who could trade and still also marketed stuff so who am I to say.
