Hi,
Did anyone watch the Greg Secker “Learn to Trade Webinar” - live or replay?
Prompted by another member who asked a question about how Greg Secker could have obtained FCA approval since he was a scammer (or words to that effect), I intended to watch his live webinar 2 days ago, but had flu so slept through it.
It was available as replay for 24 hours, and I got a polite reminder if I wanted to watch it. I did so next day and it was 2 hrs 30 minutes long.
I attended Greg Secker’s “Knowledge to Action (KTA)” London based course about a decade ago, and I wanted to know two things:
1 If any of his advice had changed, and
2 Were there any differences of approach that countered what I have spent the best part of the last six months documenting, mostly from the NNFX method.
I am happy to report that his sales patter is more subtle today than it was.
I am happy to see that he has developed a bespoke application called Smart Charts, and that he is now selling an integrated service - much like his decade old KTA course in which you attend the formal training for 3 days, you get exclusive use to a one on one mentor and get a formal meeting with said mentor for around 12 weeks, and that you lease some software at a price that does not seem out of line with other offerings that at first site seems to be capable of exercising up to five separate strategies for trending or choppy markets, from scalping to long term swing trading, and any other eventuality.
I am unhappy that the “special offer only to webinar live attendees”, though equating to a 60% discount from list price, was still about 50% more than a decade ago, but the stated intention was to “lower the barriers to entry of Forex market participants”, and was only available for the first 31 to sign up as quick as possible during and for up to an hour after the live webinar.
I asked myself the question:
If I had heard this stuff ten years ago, would I have signed up?
The answer is “Yes, I would”. But that is because at the time I did attend, the fees equated to about 3% of my intended “bank”, and I considered that to be good value for money (not knowing what I know now, with the bank required being a long way less than I had prepared that it needed to be a decade ago).
With hindsight, why would I be willing to pay such a large amount of money, and on this forum I often preach not to spend any money on private training until you have made your plans based on free advice on Babypips or other social media sources such as YouTube videos"
Because what Greg Secker told his audience was that he was not interested in people who thought they could put $100 in a trading account and be trading $100K in two years’ time. He was interested in someone who recognised that to be serious about trading, they would need to think about assigning a “bank” of sufficient value to make the impacts of their trading decisions important enough to not be flippant about trading in the biggest market in the world, and not to have a “gambling” mentality and expectation.
He then went on to show multiple examples where his software indicated entry and exit points, that it was capable of analyzing 28 currency pairs (and gold and silver) in a few minutes every day, and ended with the statement “the Smart Charts does 90% of the work more accurately than the trader could have done in one hundredth of the time, and the trader does the other 10% of analysis, decision, entry and trade management to exit”
He asked who would be willing to provide screen shots of their successes and failures that he could use in his next marketing campaign as evidence that his product did as it said on the tin.
Not once did Greg explain what sort of returns an average trader may expect to make. He just referred to the Smart Charts ability to identify trade entries and exits via it’s “proprietary coding”, which in effect means “a black box” that was going to cost you £69 per month for as long as you wanted to be a successful Learn To Trade trader. I hate black boxes whether they are the thing they attach to a young driver’s car, or a Expert Advisor whose code has been compiled so it can’t be analyzed and challenged.
The question that remained in my mind 24 hours after watching the replay was this:
I think I would still have coughed up the money for the course back 10 years ago, but I also think, after six months, that I would just as likely given up the leasing of the software as I did 10 years ago (at that time it was a third party charting package with far less sophistication than how he described Smart Charts).
And here is the reason why.
It has taken me 10 years to accept that a serious amount of work is required on the planning, demo trading and backtesting parts of an overall plan BEFORE you should be trading with real money. Certainly more than I had been prepared to do for the previous 8 years. I had never been able to demonstrate a positive edge to my trading, and looking back over my own notes, strategies and plans they had not been able to demonstrate sufficient detail from which I could progress to profitability with assurance.
So would it be an easy option to suspend building my own algorithms for my own trading plans for trending and choppy markets that have been work in progress since August 2019? The direct cost would only be £69 x 24 for the next 2 years (£1,656). I have already spent the equivalent of far more than £1,656 of my own time allocated to Forex trading, especially this last few months as I have been out of contract, and massively available to follow such pursuits without needing to worry about income (based on other streams of income that allow me to satisfy my Forex curiosity). It is hardly a large amount of money. But then again, I would have nothing to show for the £1,656 invested whether or not following the Smart Charts would make me a successful trader. And that is the crux of the matter. Greg did not even attempt to say whether Smart Charts or the training of the new assignee, or both would ASSURE success. My gut feeling is that the Smart Charts is another snake oil product that, if used without success can always be challenged as “well I have lots of past trainees who can attest to a life changing experience to the positive, so you must not have understood the training like the successful guys”, and maybe never have to use all of the “screenshot” information to back up the claims - just cherry pick the examples from those price action charts that conform exactly to how the algorithm was supposed to work and just ignore those that showed when the Smart Charts showed a buy signal, and the pair tanked. I saw those events on at least two charts that Greg was hand-annotating live in the presentation, and his pen just skipped straight over those buy signals that were losers.
So now to point number 2.
Were there any differences of approach that countered what I have spent the best part of the last six months documenting, mostly from the NNFX method.
I had a notepad to hand to write down anything that was at odds with my 94 page trading plan. I wrote not a single word of any variance to my plan. That means a few things to me. First that I had not forgotten anything of use since my KTA attendance over a decade ago. Second, that it was in a 100% agreement with the teachings of the NNFX method. Third, that of the nearly 23,000 posts I have read on Babypips since August 2019, I have found nothing that would make me wish to alter my course of “my matrix”. My matrix is my real and clear view of the world, the trader part of it being:
I have been a trader since I first took a marble to school at six years old and sold it in the playground and bought three more marbles (granted, each of less value than the one sold) and realized that you can get a lot with a little work. Earlier this week I was reminded of this simple fact of life by buying and leasing an NFT for a 20% gain, then buying and selling another for a 48% gain in two days. This rekindled my passion for trading.
All the bits in between, particularly since attending Greg Secker’s course in London, to taking a formal week long course at a cost of £2K on the subject of Agile project management 3 years ago, has resulted in an accumulated knowledge about investment, risk management, trading, time allocation and the concept of “MVP or minimum value product” has contributed to my Forex knowledge. I still can’t say I have been able to demonstrate and edge trading Forex pairs, but the same accumulated knowledge has lead to profits in a broader sense. It may be that I never trade “Forex pairs” and that I find my future in trading cryptos or NFTs. But all the training related to Forex has been a significant contributor to my overall knowledge regardless of whether I paid Fiat cash or just traded in my own time allocation that I value in two ways.
It’s £100 per hour if I am doing something that I thoroughly do NOT enjoy doing, and it’s (depends - £20 to nothing per hour if I am doing anything that I enjoy or thoroughly enjoy doing) zero otherwise. I learned that from Tim Ferris - author of The Four Hour Work Week.
