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I learned through reading all the books that I could find and studying the charts. I spent hours and hours in backtesting and again hours and hours in forward testing and reviewing.
I am glad that I never lost money to a "vendor" / scammer and my advise when you are new: do not spend money on tools or indicators. You don't need them and they are most probably not worth their money or pure scams.
The best/most recent was run by a guy named Mark Dannenberg, who I started-out using options trades with, but they expanded into a futures scalping program. But maybe 4 years since I 'graduated' ... too long to be current now? TradingView platform carries an indicator that he developed ... 'NCTA Cycle Finder' (I liked his old indicators better; guess its a habit now).
Anyway, your best bet is to do as I did; look on Youtube for promising teachers, then see if free trials or look-before-buy is offered. If so, check it out.
Also, look at the mentors associated with ThinkorSwim and/or TastyTrade ... lots of old Chicago pit traders still teach.
"You have to kiss a lot of toads before you find a prince."
On one hand I cannot really vote in the poll without selecting more than one.
On the other, the very little I have learned so far is hardly relevant to anyone else here anyway.
I learned from two friends who now trade for a living, having learned only a couple of years ago themselves. They told me and showed me what to read, mostly older books, mostly price action.
Mostly I have avoided online information apart from one helpful free course when I knew literally nothing.
It is already very clear to me, quite quickly, that this forum is way more helpful, reliable, interesting and relevant to me - as well as better run - than any other one I saw.
No, unfortunately. As I said, I've become self-directed to the extent that I've dropped-out of the guru-hunting business. However, I find that these days I know exactly what I want out of a trading method, so I do all lot of online R&D to generate new ideas and insights. My top 2 sources? 1) NexusFi threads, and 2) sampling various Youtube videos (definitely kissing some toads here ;-) And, although I only do CME-based currency futures trading, I pick-up useful bits from the 'hardcore' FX world too, so search occasional forums postings there (hedging rocks!).
Otherwise, I wish you the best of luck with your search ... we've all been there at one point in our journey.
for me it was creating tools that created other tools that created more insights into developing more tools that extracted micro structure of price movement. Oh and forgot to add that none of these tools are in the public domain. Far from it.
Some of that "mostly price action" stuff is available online, but lost in a sea of other stuff, and hard to identify (especially when you're relatively new to it and possibly not too experienced at separating the wheat from the chaff).
One of the (many) advantages of "older books" that have stood the test of time and are still being recommended by people who now trade for a living is that they can enable you to bypass some of the time perhaps mostly wasted on the "online information" stage. I would carry on doing whatever you're doing, I think: sounds to me like you're either very well advised, good at taking advice, or both.
Thank you. I am so inexperienced at separating the wheat from the chaff that I had to look up "chaff" to find out what it is (not part of a chaffinch, as I initially imagined).
Once you have - from books and/or trusted friends known to be making a living- the names of the people whose "mostly price action stuff" you want to look at, it becomes a little easier and less unreliable to look at online stuff, I am hoping.
It seems to me that there is quite some overlap of material and of techniques between what was/is taught by Al Brooks (but I cannot understand him much!), Lance Beggs, Bob Volman and the late Joe Ross. In many places it looks to me like they are saying nearly or even exactly the same things but with different names for them.
I do not, of course, suggest that any of them are/were copiers of each other's work, but it seems to me likely that their independent studies of the markets and charts led them to some similar conclusions, which they then each described in their own terms.
I am instinctively more inclined (actually really strongly more inclined) to trust them than the thousands of people on Youtube telling me how to use combinations of indicators (mostly to trade forex CFD) and stressing how important it is to subscribe to their channel, and give your email address for "updates" and "information". It is perhaps pretty arrogant of me, at this early stage, but I am inclined to imagine that most of this is "information" I do not need, and that if some of it is not that, I will not really be able to tell it apart from the rest so its value to me will be limited anyway.
And thank you for your kind reply to my post above!
early on i read al brooks and i followed lance beggs from his beginning to the end... both were helpful in understanding trading, but in the end, i took everything off of my charts and just started watching price action using bars/candles. then i added something that i thought would help me be profitable and if it helped, i kept it, if not i removed it.. over time i added other things and if they didn't add to profitability, i removed them. i still do the same thing today, if i see something i think might help
