Welcome to NexusFi: the best trading community on the planet, with over 150,000 members Sign Up Now for Free
Genuine reviews from real traders, not fake reviews from stealth vendors
Quality education from leading professional traders
We are a friendly, helpful, and positive community
We do not tolerate rude behavior, trolling, or vendors advertising in posts
We are here to help, just let us know what you need
You'll need to register in order to view the content of the threads and start contributing to our community. It's free for basic access, or support us by becoming an Elite Member -- see if you qualify for a discount below.
-- Big Mike, Site Administrator
(If you already have an account, login at the top of the page)
When you're seeking to succeed with your art, it's helpful to see how those before you have done it. And so the conference [trading forum] was invented. The ones where recently successful internet entrepreneurs tell their stories are particularly popular right now, but you can certainly find designers, novelists and others that are generous enough to talk about how they succeeded.
Some speakers at these events are brimming with false modesty. "I'm incredibly successful and happy, it happened really fast and I have no idea what I'm doing." The appeal here is the same that works for the lottery. Someone has to win, it might as well be you, it's easy, buy a ticket.
Some speakers, on the other hand, bring false hubris to the table. "This is incredibly difficult, I worked harder than you can imagine, and only a perfect storm of effort and connections that were created directly by me led to this moment."
The truth, of course, is a combination of both. "I worked really hard, back against the wall, thinking I was going to fail, almost did, and I got lucky." And that's like hearing that there's a lottery and the tickets are very expensive.
That pretty much sums up learning trading. If it works out, awesome, but you have to spend a lot (time, money, effort) to see if your number gets called (one of the few that can avoid the pitfalls).
In reality its nearly impossible to tell the false hubris from the false modest traders but logic says its the false hubris in majority. The 'ol track record test is illogical also.. why post a track record unless you want people to believe you can trade.. in which case what is your incentive? Cool - if its to sell market education, but then why need to educate with that track record blah blah blah (check out this post )
There is a lot of good ideas on investing in Big Mike and Elite Trader, Trade2Win etc - however from talking to people I have come to know in the last year that actually grind a living out of day trading, none of them ever bother advising in online trading forums, or know of other day traders that do. This doesn't mean they don't exist, but ponder what percentage of what you read is actually making your path to success more complex with misleading information?!
If I was to give myself advice - every minute spent reading online trading forums could be spent reading markets (DOM or Charts), reviewing tape and mastering the skill of trading instead.
The saying 'I wouldn't join a club that would accept me as a member' comes to mind with online trading forums. Just to add another paradox to my response here.
US trading hours routine has me up late on the weekends here in Oz with nothing to do.. which is why I guess I am revisiting the online trading forums. We should come up with a standard procedure for rating trading advice
Or at least for every hour spent on a forum, it should be matched with time on developing skill. "Research" aka procrastination, only helps so much after a while. Just need to get out and do it.
[I]f I fail more that you do, I win. Because built into that lesson is this notion that you get to keep playing. If you get to keep playing, that means you get to keep failing, and sooner or later, you are going to succeed. The people who lose are the ones who don't fail at all and get stuck, or the ones who fail so big that they don't get to play again.
I don't know that trading has too many that "don't fail at all and get stuck". Maybe you could be breakeven forever, or go through episodes where you never blow up but never really produce sufficient income?
There are plenty who "fail so big that they don't get to play again."
Neither hubris nor false modesty is particularly common on trading forums.
The most common attitude is uncritical and simplistic credulousness arising from the combination of limitations of understanding, financial desperation, and the need to believe that there is an easy way out.
This characterizes the vast majority of participants - who furnish the audience for those who use such forums to express their egotism or to exploit their audience for financial gain.
Of course, as Emperor of the Universe, MY hubris knows no bounds!
"If we don't loosen up some money, this sucker is going down." -GW Bush, 2008
“Lack of proof that something is true does not prove that it is not true - when you want to believe.” -Humpty Dumpty, 2014
“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” Prof. Albert Bartlett