While I agree that a number of the cited "reasons" for these "gurus" to make videos make little sense, some - e.g., #2 - have a bit more subtlety to them than the black-and-white "haha, so ridiculous" interpretation. Scaling up is not all that trivial - the number of contracts you trade is a direct result of your risk model, so you can't simply go from trading one lot to a hundred. Meanwhile, the effort necessary to make a video while you trade isn't all that much - and assuming you can talk a good line of patter and attract paying customers, the money that comes in has little to no risk/downside. Not to excuse any of them - I strongly believe that 999/1000 of these "gurus" are just smooth-talking fakers - but blithely dismissing everything for bad reasons will make you miss the bits of good advice that are out there.

Also, from a guy who has spent a number of years creating Open Source software and running publications for the benefit of a community (e.g. Linux Gazette): #4 is quite a bit more important than you make it out to be, especially for successful people who feel that they owe something to the communities that helped them become successful. Much of my trading skill and ability came from being helped by successful traders who were happy to share their knowledge - strangers giving away something tremendously valuable to a guy they didn't know from Adam, simply because I asked them to help. I don't know about you, but I strongly believe that this imposes an obligation on me - and the greater the success, the greater the obligation - and I'm certainly not the only one who feels that way.

Last: the primary purpose and the direct goal of a trader is to make money - so for someone demonstrating how to trade, saying "you could restore someone's circulation and save their life with this technique" would make no sense - in the same way that it would make no sense for a doctor to talk about how much money you could make while demonstrating medical techniques. And there are plenty of medical education videos on YT - a former GF of mine who teaches nursing uses them quite extensively, and as a former medic, I found their quality to be excellent. (In fact, one of them specifically demonstrated removing a rather large brain tumor - she used it to underscore the principle of "saving the penumbra".)

Traders need to start thinking why other professions like brain surgeons don't record youtube videos explaining how to remove tumors. Imagine a doc saying: "You can make 25K in an afternoon, if I can do it, you can do it..."

Ok -- but I didn't see any of this in the videos there. I've established that it's sim trading, you have claimed they're real. Let's just leave that aside. If it helps the viewer, it helps them.

Please share, if you don't mind, some of the knowledge you found. I didn't find any of Lak's videos to have anything actionable (and I did watch several of them back when he put them out, years ago), but maybe I missed some. If it's helpful, sim or not, it's a good thing. If the knowledge has come simply from observation of those videos, maybe if you can distill some of that into something that folks can take away to improve their trading, that would be helpful. If it's from conversations you've had with him, please share those, if you don't mind. You mentioned "look left, etc." -- please elaborate on that, if you will. It's reasonable but a bit generic, so any fleshing out you can do would probably be helpful to readers.

I have been a long time lurker on here but this lak bashing has motivated me to make a post...

Curious for a first post but I think most of us already know enough about you err I mean lak to decide from ourselves.

Let's move on from this shall we.

This topic is funny, theres so many youtubers nowadays and after watching them most people still cant trade, bc even if gurus trade for real its hard to be checking their results and implementing it yourself as part of the learning curve...

Some of recent channels grew so much in 2020+ bc market only when up... and they traded only "long"... we will see if they survive some volatility as uncertainty grows...

Actually first thing I saw when i typed on youtube years ago for futures trading came up with Lak and huge P/L swings when he was trading on TOS and all of his videos were quite entertaining..., he also tends to be on twitter, maybe good for some ideas I donno, but to get more of real mentorship series/proper risk managment for futures accounts without big surprises of blowup... I would seriously consider Vinny Emini - Algorithmic Trading thats what helped me to learn a lot of things and fill many gaps in my trading that i been missing as i transitioned from trading stocks to futures. Thats just my view on subject.

The dude must be a psycho

It's curious that out of all medical specialities neurosurgery is considered as something super complicated. It is, but no more than any other specialised field, medical or not. There are three things that make trading so hard: unpredictability, high frequency of bad outcomes (losses) and as the result the demand for high level of discipline. For private traders another issue is lack of accountability. If you have the money you can keep blowing small accounts forever and keep explaining how great a trader you are to everyone who is clueless and is prepared to listen. Doctors and lawyers I think are traditional offenders in this regard. Getting a bad outcome in engineering or medicine, on the other hand, immediately puts you on the spot.

I am not sure if I mentioned him before, but my current favorite is Trader Tom. It's not a plug. His videos are entertaining, and you get the subscription to his signals for free. The dude must be a psycho, apparently he trades sizes that call for 700 British Pounds a pip. Most of his trading videos are about psychology.