Not Mike, but my experience has been that you always get this sliding scale of "it's the only thing that works" vs. "it doesn't work at all" with any trading approach. The fact of the matter is, what works for you depends a lot on your trading philosophy.

For me, there was a lot of stuff in Brook's books that provided valueable pieces of the puzzle. There are some things he claims that I don't believe, e.g. an EMA acting as dynamic support/resistance or the explanations he has dreamed up for some of the patterns in the market. But there is also a lot of good stuff in there that definitely helped me read the market bar by bar. The tl;dr of his method is "look for little clues and make a judgement call on what the market is most likely doing".

Hi guys,

I’ve asked Terry to read this statement on my behalf in today's webinar.

As most of you know, we work extremely hard to provide the highest quality content to our members. I am constantly approached by vendors and I turn down 90% of them, because I don’t believe the content of the webinar would be beneficial to our members. That also could mean the reputation of the vendor is not good, and we don’t want to be associated with them in any way.

It is extremely difficult to find high quality educators and experienced traders in this industry who have a true desire to help people, that value honesty and integrity above profit, and are willing and able to take extremely valuable time out of their schedule to lecture to our members. On top of that, as a trader myself, I must often allow a webinar on a topic or a style of trading that I don’t personally believe in, but that I believe the community as a whole would still benefit from (for example, scalping). It is difficult to balance these things, but we do our best.

In the past, a few mistakes have been made where a vendor was permitted to do a webinar, and then after-the-fact I realized it was a mistake, or they violated our no self-promotion rule. I’m not perfect, and don’t pretend to be. I just do the best I can, always doing what I feel is best for our community. In one example, the webinar was removed from the site because the vendor had such a bad reputation. In other examples, the presenter was simply never invited back .

Unfortunately, most of the so called educators or “mentors” out there focus on making false promises and posting fancy Excel spreadsheets showing how “easy” it is to make money – often charging ridiculous amounts of money to learn their “secret”. Even more unfortunate, there are enough new traders or “new blood” for these dishonest vendors to survive on this type of deception, preying on these rookie traders that simply don’t know any better. The number of “trading rooms” that provide so called “signals” is proof of this problem, leading uneducated rookie traders down the wrong path and causing a sort of never ending loop where traders spend all their time and resources on finding a new trading room, instead of focusing within and working through their problems that are holding back their performance. It is human nature to reach outward for a solution you are struggling to solve yourself -- but to be a good trader, you have to compete against the best traders in the world that figured out a long time ago there is no shortcut, and most of the answers come from within, with due time and gained experience (usually at quite a price).

On FIO, our priority is to be a unique community where we help traders while providing a friendly, constructive and positive feedback environment. I place a great deal of emphasis on encouraging traders to create their own trading journal on the site, because I believe the process of journaling their trades will open their eyes to the true problems they are facing, and allow them to tackle them one by one over time. I have written about this extensively over the years, and I believe that anyone out there right now that is struggling as a trader should take note of what I am saying – start a public journal today, start holding yourself accountable and stop looking to others to solve your problems. If it sounds like a lot of work, it is. Like I said, there are no shortcuts in trading.

I spend a lot of time moderating the forum so that the very tiny percentage of troubled users that stoop to childish behavior don’t ruin the environment for everyone else. Many of you have witnessed how quickly negativity can spread, and if you visit other trading websites you’ll most likely see this type of behavior running rampant. I started the forum 7 years ago because I strongly disliked the options available to me as a trader, because I wanted to spend time in a community surrounded by my peers but couldn’t that so much of the content on the sites was just childish behavior. The signal-to-noise ratio was terrible, and I thought I could do better. Thus, our community was born and I am extremely proud of what we’ve accomplished together.

Why am I stating all of this? Recently there has been a lively discussion about Al Brooks on the forum, and I wanted to address some of it here.

Some members believe they can only learn something from a trader that makes money. At face value that seems to make a lot of sense. But, I would beg to differ. I believe I am in a unique position as the forum administrator, because I get to see the patterns of tens of thousands of users. Over the past 7 years of running the site, I’ve read hundreds of thousands of posts, and statistics would suggest that many of them were not written by profitable traders . Yet, I am a far better trader today than I was before I started the forum, because I’ve learned what the common mistakes and common patterns are from traders that both lose money as well as make money. I firmly believe there is great value in learning from failure, just as there is in learning from success. I personally believe that traders that say there is no value in learning anything from someone that doesn’t have a proven track record of success, are really just using it as an excuse so they don’t have to take responsibility for their own trading. It is far easier to blame others for your failures, for example blaming someone that taught you a bad or unprofitable method – instead of taking responsibility for your own actions.

In a similar light, some members want proof of success by way of trading statements. Some of them have said you wouldn’t hire a plumber or a roofer that had no proven track record at their job, or you wouldn’t hire a doctor with no valid license, so why would you hire a mentor that has no proven track record in trading? Again, at face value that sounds logical. But life is rarely that black and white, and trading is certainly no exception. Ultimately, that is a decision you will have to make on your own, and like most things in trading, it is going to be based on your own beliefs which is going to provide a bias with your decision. My opinion is as I’ve already stated, that quite frankly you should stop chasing vendors to provide some sort of blanket “solution” such as making you a profitable trader. You will not find success in some shortcut such as trying to copy someone else’s methodology. Instead, you need to look at each vendor, indicator, trading room, webinar, etc, as a resource to help you address a specific problem you’ve already identified in your own trading. For example, if you are a scalper you can still find value in listening to a webinar from a swing trader, if you keep an open mind and add some key component to your own trading, instead of trying to just replicate someone else’s behavior.

Here are some questions for Al, so that he can make a comment or a statement. I hope that you consider everything I’ve said above when listening to Al’s answers.

1. Do you tell your students that you are a successful trader, and that you trade for a living, making money from your trading?
2. Do you offer any proof?
3. Anything you would like to add?

Thanks,
Mike

Here is the big difference. Al Crooks, I mean Brooks has made specific claims of trading profitably over the years.

So I encourage a Poll with a simple question, "Should Al Brooks have to show proof of his claims as a profitable trader before being allowed to do another webinar here?"

Why do I get the impression that @TraderSusan is a fake account?

Bla bla necessary posts to hit 10, nearly all one liners, nothing about trading and straight to this topic with a huge post.

edit: Ok just went black as I posted so someone else thinks the same? Two are not connected