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My perspective could be different than many here so if there are those that disagree with me, I am fine with it. But, here are my 2 cents in the manner: Educators should not be evaluated whether they make money or not, rather they should be evaluated based upon the foundation that lay for a beginner trader.
Like all business, some are a pure and out right no knowledge based sites equipped with nothing but a creative copywriting while some have real and substantial knowledge that put the seed of “hey, I have to press the BUY and Sell button based on something outside my emotions”. I have been doing this for a long time and I still purchase, read and enrich my knowledge with a variety of ideas.
As a broker I often like to hear that one has at least take the time and effort to learn because this could be a long term client oppose to those that lack education and their journey is short lived…. unfortunately.
Educators do have the right to charge as much as they want because its their product, but its your job as a trader or a beginner trader to decide what you want to learn and how your value what you are about to receive.
Despite all the criticism here, everyone at some point spent $$ on education whether through a book, software or a mentor.
It’s the job of a trader to collect the “pieces” learned and make them work for them based upon their nature and taste for risk.
Always get educated, you are up against real pros.
Trading futures and options involves substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for all investors. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. You may lose more than your initial investment. All posts are opinions and do not claim to be facts. Please conduct your own due diligence. Use only Risk capital when trading Futures.
1 800 771 6748 local 561 367 8686 email [email protected]
Thanks, but I respectfully disagree. My hairdresser is involved in a local small business mentoring/education program. All the participants are business owners with positive cash flow; it's part of the requirements for membership. Saying anyone is/could be qualified is like taking diet advice from a morbidly obese person.
Let's not lower the bar, but raise it. Only then will the industry gain any credibility.
I respect your opinion. But, not all educators should get thrown under the bus under the same category as "hair dressers" trying to be traders LOL
Education is not a regulated industry, so I understand there is no barrier to entry. Also, I understand exactly who enters, but all I am saying there are good educators and it takes time and knowledge to appreciate one.
Trading futures and options involves substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for all investors. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. You may lose more than your initial investment. All posts are opinions and do not claim to be facts. Please conduct your own due diligence. Use only Risk capital when trading Futures.
1 800 771 6748 local 561 367 8686 email [email protected]
Why would someone want a steady paycheck when no matter what they made last year they could make literally nothing this year? Not to mention lose capital. This is not exactly hard to understand.
While I do think most vendors are probably a bit full of it, the logic that if you could trade you wouldn't teach for a fee is just really faulty if not outright stupid. To me it's a sign of an amateur living in a hedge fund sized money dream world.
There are also some people that really do like to teach. Brett Steenbarger's 3500+ blog posts in 4 years can't really be explained through profit motive.
Vendor = like a job = some regular income
Trading = well, trading = can make and lose money
Vendor & Trading = some regular income, like a job & can gain or lose money trading.
just a couple of days ago, there was a post from a trader signed up to learn how to trade with ms. miss (?) and followed the email advices accordingly.
however after a few weeks, the poster discovered that though the suggestion was profitable at the time of his/her reporting, the capital that should be put up to trade should be around 150,000 usd.
the reason according to the poster was that some trades suggested by the email included averaging and scaling to something like 6 or so contracts per trade.
anyway, i was trying to locate that post again today but was unable to any more.
Q: Was Bill Belichick a great NFL player?
Q: Is vendor X a great trader?
A: No, Bill was not a great NFL player. Was he a
great NFL coach? You tell me...
A vendor can most definitely be a great coach
but not a great trader.
Why is it so hard to believe a vendor prefers to
coach rather than trade? Why can't they do
both? Two revenue streams, what's the
problem?
So I get a base amount per month from
subscribers and then my daytrade profits are
all gravy. If I lose daytrading then i can still put
food on the table and keep the lights on. Can't I
take bigger trading risks if I know I'm getting $N
amount per month? Uhhh, yes I can take risks I
might not otherwise take if daytrading is my
only income.
What about Bill Parcells? The Lions drafted him in the 7th round and then cut him in training camp. He immediately went into coaching. Is he a failure? He couldn't play in the NFL (be a profitable trader) but he was one of the coaching greats.
Don Shula wasn't a great player. Could he coach at the highest levels? You tell me...
Was Steve Jobs a great coder? Could he lead
(or coach) great coders? You tell me...
Honestly, I don't understand why this is an issue
at all.
In closing, what's the point of pretending there aren't 2 very different skill sets for trading and coaching?
I'm glad you posted here, @johnnymustard, because I had not seen the thread before (not surprising, I guess, since I was a member for only 11 days and the post before yours was nearly 11 years ago).
I cannot comment on your specific sporting analogies as I have no familiarity with them (and even had to look up NFL to find out what it is) but I think I may still suggest an answer to the general point of your question: in the sports arena where physical fitness and often age are relevant to people's abilities, we are looking at a very different subject from the trading world, surely?
I understand that top players can earn a lot more than top coaches, in sport, just as top traders can earn a lot more than trading teachers/vendors, but there I think the analogy more or less ends? In football or tennis or baseball or whatever, people generally move to teaching when they are a little older and do not quite still have the physical abilities to remain a top player for ever?
For me, with some very rare exceptions, I think it is because of the huge income discrepancy: someone with reliable, robust, proven trading skills and abilities has no need of tuition income.
For me, the problem is that in the case of the sports people you mentioned, they got into teaching only after their success at doing was publicly acknowledged and verified.
The problem with many of the examples from the world of trading is that the people selling what amount to "teaching services", sometimes for enormous sums of money, have no verifiable evidence at all of any success.
I think it's a terribly significant and huge difference.
You are probably much more at the "expert end" of the scale than I am. I am a complete beginner, looking at the whole thing from a very different perspective from you. And I am having great difficulty telling the real experts apart from the charlatans. And I know that as you are honest, you will agree that there are many charlatans.
For people like me, there is a real problem there.
I accept that, to some extent, of course. But I want to learn from people who I know were/are good at the activity they are claiming to be able to teach me. This is surely a reasonable wish?
With sports, it is easy to tell. The successes were public.
With trading, not so much. And there are the added problems that the alleged successes tend to be not too difficult to fake, even when there does appear to be something to be seen from them.
I will end with a couple of examples which I hope will illustrate where I agree with you and where I disagree.
First - a successful eye surgeon, a professor of ophthalmology, say, might want to teach medical students and young doctors how to operate on people's retinas if they have vein/artery damage from high blood pressure or from diabetes? He can make more money as a surgeon treating his own patients, for sure, but he enjoys teaching and he wants to "pay it forward" and he earns something from it anyway, and it goes along perhaps with elements of image/status/respect as well? So there is no problem seeing that he has two different skill sets, one for operating on people and one for teaching his juniors? He will attract patients anyway, even if his teaching is not quite the best, if his patients' eyesight does not deteriorate and they are happy with their surgical outcomes? I agree with your point, where it applies to this example. (I am guessing that you will agree with what I said, and of course I chose retinal surgery as an example because we are both aware of the background of Dr. Al Brooks, whose trading teaching I am, myself, finding extremely valuable).
Secondly - an internet marketer who is good at identifying a "desperate buyers' niche," probably something to do with "how to make money", can quickly and very easily produce and market a product which purports to teach people how to make money by trading. But where is the verifiable, incontrovertible, irrefutable evidence that it works and is based on something real and objective and valuable? It is rather a different scenario, I think? In another forum, there are dozens of threads started by people offering a "We pass your prop-firm evaluation for you" service. I think you will probably agree with me that all these services raise the obvious question of "Why would you need to do that for $200 when if you can do it so reliably you could be raising a 7-figure amount in funding and living off its profits rather than scrabbling around in forums for low-price customers? So there are problems of credibility there, no?
On the sports analogy front, the one thing I would add is that I don't think managing/coaching a sports team (training, psychology, strategy, preparation etc) is really education and can't be compared to trading coaches.
I was thinking about your surgeon analogy (and most education professions), and obviously the 'constraint' for a surgeon is time. You only have time to do so many surgeries, and you can't create 'more time'. Hence why you may want to teach. If your a successful trader though, your constraint isn't time, in most cases it's capital*, and you can create more capital, and with more capital comes more profits (in theory at least).
* Obviously there are situations where trading isn't scalable, but I doubt that's an obstacle for many here
