Knowledge 2 Action SCAM!

Beginner Questions
1

Knowledge to Action (K2A) – Greg Secker

I had already decided that I was going to attend some formal forex course to help me with my personal Forex Trading Journey when I went along to one of Knowledge to Actions (K2A) 2 hour free seminar in Birmingham at the end of September 2010.

First impressions; was that this was a sales pitch and nothing else; the guys were dressed in poorly tailored suits which didn’t go to meet people’s expectations that we would meet successful traders earning a mint. Of course since realised you can be trading very well and not be earning fortunes, but the first impression in any case was what I or the other 20 or so people expected.

The K2A guy, did a relatively good job explaining the forex market and it was possible to make money from the market. He handled the usual questions on “this can’t be true”, “this is gambling”, if you are a successful trader why are you doing this” quite well. He did boast a little too much he made, but being a designer man myself, I noticed the cheap shirts and clothing they were wearing.

At the end of the seminar in which he gave no real idea as to what strategies one would follow to make money they came out with sell. For £2000 + vat (disc from £3000) you’d get a 2 day Forex Training course, 3 coaching sessions of 30mins each and a Greg Secker DVD set. I had money that I had to use for retraining (any nothing else) so I went for it.

2 Day Forex Seminar

The 2 day seminar at their place in Fulham was interesting. The course was packed with 30 other people and we were all given a manual which contained 3 of Greg Seckers strategies that he teaches on the course. 1 for end of day and 2 intra day.

The Good bits :

  1. The instructor was laid back, fun, interesting and had a few of trading ideas over and above the ones in the manual
  2. The course went from “this is a candle” level to brief mentions of Fibonacci
  3. Relaxed and motivating atmosphere
  4. Step by step guide as to how to implement each strategy
  5. Good overviews of the forex market and how it works

The Could do better bits :

  1. No food given !!! For £1000 /day per person you think they could stretch to a sandwich!
  2. Because it starts from basic principles it can be slow for some people, but then moves very quite quickly during the day two leaving the slower ones behind.
  3. There is nothing in the course that you cannot read in a few £20 books and read for free on the internet
  4. It is overpriced. It is priced at this level, in my view as people must think “if its this much; it must be good”. I have since seen similar courses for a less than half what K2A charge.

The Good bits

  1. Met some other people who seemed serious about trading full time forex

The Could Do Better :

  1. Be prepared – the coaches didn’t really have much of an agenda or seemed organised to handle the event
    This was a no brainer piece of advice for me – don’t waste your money. If you look hard enough around London area you can find the same thing for a lot less.

K2A kept hammering on that brokers won’t teach you how to trade, I found by attending FREE on-line seminars in the evening, that they teach the same stuff, which I paid 2.5k for. K2A are con-artists, they promise the world but deliver nothing. They also fail to mention you require a 10k trading account to make the kind of money they promote in their seminars. Plus during our course they introduced a person who was advertising real wealth programme for £35k, really inappropriate found out from people they then discount to 15k +VAT.

In summary I am more convinced that Greg Secker makes more money from training that he does from trading as do his coaches. Have not seen or heard anything since to make me think otherwise. I am sure these guys trade and maybe some of them trade successfully, they talk a good game, just something in me isn’t 100% convinced of them as I am of what they sell.

On leaving the course, I was not at all confident in placing a trade, attended 4/5 on-line seminars which had some decent presenters, placed my 1st trade after 2wks and by chance hit profit.

I have booked coaching sessions with my coach – I’ll give a final review on these sessions when I have finished them. (Not flexible timing to suit your working life as promised)

2

Can I be harsh but brutally honest? I can’t believe anybody would attend things such as this without prior research. Even some big dogs who really can back up great results don’t cost this kind of money. What did you expect they would be able to give you in a couple of days for that price? You mentioned they introduced what candles were. If that is the level they started at, there is no way after 2 days you were going to get value for money.

3

I know what you’re saying, but they pitch is so well, hundreds of people are attending K2A course only to be disappointed.

I posted this to stop other getting conned, ou there hard earn money.:frowning:

4

One of the problems is K2A are very well protected by forum administrators. People try to warn others, but those warnings are immediately deleted.

Last year the Financial Services Authority in the UK issued a notice critisising K2A. Details where posted on the largest UK trading forum. The post wasnt critical, it was an exact copy of the statement made by the FSA, with a link to the FSA website to autenticate the claim

It took less than 2 minutes before moderators removed that material. Try posting an impartial review of a K2A course on one of the larger trading forums and see how long it lasts :smiley:

5

This is probably the wrong place for a(nother) discussion about K2A, but to introduce the other side of the discussion, I did this course around six months ago and am very happy with it. I was completely new to trading, I found the pace spot on, I did not get left behind on day two (I do not come from a finance/business background at all), I have recently gone full time at trading and am consistently profitable using the strategies taught on the course (plus a couple of things I have since picked up elsewhere). Everyone has different learning styles, while a good deal of the information they present is available elsewhere (of course they have to explain OHLC bars, but that takes only a few minutes on day 1), I found it very helpful to have it all presented together in one place, then to have the strategies overlaid with this, with the opportunity to ask questions in context at the time in a room full of other people learning the same thing. I live in a rural location and trade alone from home and find the ongoing coaching I have received since enormously helpful in refining the way in which I implement the strategies. There have been separate debates on here about the merits of paying for a course versus investing the same money in your own trading account, and the simple answer is that different approaches will suit different people. There is no way that anyone can teach you a way to make 100% guaranteed money from Forex trading, anyone who has done any research will know that. It is, however, possible, for someone to teach you a range of skills and key bits of knowledge, and some strategies that they have backtested, to maximize an individual’s chances of making a success of this. I feel that this is what K2A gave me, and am happy with the investment. Forex can take years to learn, I feel that K2A have got me profitable on a much shorter timescale than that and without starting out with major losses. That makes it worth the course fee to me.

And I don’t think that the sandwich point is really important, if you are looking to become a successful trader, I really don’t think that worrying whether someone gives you a sandwich should really register high on your priority list!

Anyway, sorry to ramble and rant, nothing personal, I have nothing to do with K2A beside having attended the course, but they seem to get bashed a fair bit on the internet, so I thought I would put the other side a little. I will be interested to hear your review of the coaching, once you have completed it.

6

Thanks for that! :slight_smile:

Anyways, sheeples are sheeples because they want to be sheeples. Nobody can keep them away from the slaughterhouse, if they do not want it. I can tell you: They do NOT want it. That’s why they are sheeples.

Nothing about basic stuff to teach, but to really get profitable in the business with the most sharks being around, the worst thing anybody can do is to believe if hundreds of sheeple join a course it must be a good course.

Even if that course was good before, the crowd will for sure make it worse. How can a crowd of sheeple become rich? How would that go?

Is the crowd rich? No, the crowd was, is and will never be rich. The crowd is average and just that. Why? Because the crowd is the food for the sharks. If you ever want become consistently profitable, you must develop your very own style of trading, which sets you apart from the crowd. This takes years of learning and experience. In my eyes your money would be a better investment if you experiment while trading.

Just my 2 pips.

7

good to see scams being exposed.

8

which daft forum is this?

9

I don’t think that there is anything in the original post or subsequently to demonstrate that this is a scam. We all learn in different ways, the course did not suit the original poster, it suits some and not others, like any other learning medium.

10

Beware, sydney786 is just out to hack K2A.

I have been debating taking the K2A course and decided to do some research. While poking around the internet I found this post:

{Insert link here} <-- babypips won’t let me post the link here. The post I’m referring to is on forexpeacearmy.com go to “Education & Forum” and follow the path “Commerce Zone> Has anyone heard of?> Knowledge to Action” …or just type “Knowledge to Action” in the search field.

Review the post on 05-12-2010 by James Gillespie. It is identical to the post made by sidney786 on 10-24-2010. He even left in the bit about completing the training sessions. It seems very suspect that 7 months after posting on one forum no progress has been made with three 30 min coaching sessions! The chronology just doesn’t quite make sense.

The poser, errr umm poster, did manage to have the where with all to remove James’s link to his blog though.

11

Not a scam. You paid for a service, they provided that service (meaning they did actually sit you down for 2 days and talk about forex), and that was the end of the story. Welcome to capitalism, man

12

sure, not a scam.
another question if it worth it. and the poster wanted to imply that it isnt.
the title is a bit strong though.

13

Indeed, I just wish that people would not use such inflammatory (and, frankly, inaccurate) language. There is enough uncertainty in trading, particularly for new traders, and threads like the original incarnation of this one appear intended to put new traders off using K2A or similar companies. I find that a shame, as when it comes to trading itself, we are all content to put our viewpoint, while accepting that others take a different view, and allow new traders in particular to take all of that information and advice, and filter out their own style. A good example is indicators: I barely use indicators, others have whole systems with indicators at their very core. Each approach works, so the two camps simply put their view without criticizing the alternative. The same mature approach to an exchange of views and offering of advice permeates this board across many other aspects of trading.

Yet when it comes to paying for formal tuition, a few people think that it suddenly becomes okay to dismiss it as a waste of money and criticize, either openly or by implication, those people who have already paid money for a course. For me, the style of this often steps over the line between giving good advice, and trying to steer the audience too firmly towards one’s own point of view. I just do not understand why we are collectively happy to acknowledge that there are alternatives to our own style of trading, alternatives that work, yet when it comes to formal tuition it can be simply dismissed as ‘it’s all available for free on the Internet anyway, why are you too lazy to find it all for yourself, preferring to waste money on some charlatan demanding money for old rope when you could put that money in your trading pot’.

I took the K2A course, I am now a profitable trader, I credit that course with getting me there, there is a lot of stuff on the course that you can get elsewhere (inevitably: I walked in there knowing nothing about trading, they had to cover certain basic stuff to enable me to follow the more bespoke sections), but there is also stuff on that course that is not so readily available elsewhere, and that is the stuff that is making me money.

So it is not a scam, we are just all different. Some of us like indicators, some of us like a ‘naked’ chart. Some of us like Price Action, some of us like Fib. Some of us like self-tuition, some of us like structured courses. As long as we are all making money and are happy with our choices, live and let live.

Anyway, sorry, this is a rant, which is not really my thing, but I joined this site to learn and seeing words like ‘scam’ used to describe something that is not just got my goat. I’m ex-law enforcement, what can I tell you?! It has been a long week.

Can I also be clear that this post is not remotely intended to be a criticism of anyone who has posted on this thread during its current resurfacing. I just thought that some of those points needed making, particularly as a few new traders have asked me about the K2A course recently, so here seemed a good place. I promise not to post too many rants on here…

(And ftr I have no link with K2A other than having done the course and having ongoing coaching, this is not a sales pitch, simply a call for some fairness in the occasional, ongoing debate about structured trading courses)

I’ll go calm down, now…

14

I remember paying pretty good money for some painfully useless university courses.

and no, they didn’t provide sandwiches either!

I’m sure someone used those classes to get a degree and a job, but not me.
It does feel like you’ve been scammed when you pay and you get nothing from it in the end, but that’s just the nature of education. Educators know they can’t guarantee its subjective utility, they just offer it and see if anyone’s interested.

15

Let me know if you learn how to trade successfully. I wish you the best of luck, but you will certainly struggle to make anything in this business with that approach.

One thing I would agree is that Knowledge to Action is definitely NOT the solution.

Let me give you a few pointers on how to become successful:

  1. Pick a strategy that you like, either from a book or the internet.

  2. Draft the rules into your own plan, picking the bits that resonate with you.

  3. Take 30 trades where you follow the rules exactly! Even if you lose every trade.

  4. Review the stats like average profit, average loss, expectancy, full pip move.

  5. Tweak the rules accordingly. i.e. if your average loss is higher than 0.6%, then you might have to be more aggressive with your stop loss and include some additional tools to gauge a bad trade.

  6. Take another 30 trades and review the stats AGAIN… Then tweak and repeat the above process.
    After a minimum of 6 months, you will have your own unique trading plan that works for you. This is what I did a few years back. I am now a full time trader.

By the way, I have been on all the K2A courses and they teach you NOTHING.

You will only receive some generic strategies that you could have got from the internet anyways.

If anyone wants any free advice on trading/training, then feel free to contact me!

Regards,
Richard

16

By the way, I have been on all the K2A courses and they teach you NOTHING.

You will only receive some generic strategies that you could have got from the internet anyways.

If anyone wants any free advice on trading/training, then feel free to contact me

So therefore you have no problem in telling us all about these courses, the indicators
they use, their psychology etc.

Can’t PM you because you are a new member.

17

All the Indicators have one thing in common is that they make use of the past data to get the analysis done and then give the future insights into trading.

Now it all depends on our own trading strategy that which Indicator suits us.

18

I think that that is a bit of a broad statement - you might not like it, or find it useful, but their approach does work for some people. I took the initial course, that combined with subsequent coaching and weekly webinars taught me virtually everything I know about trading, and I am full time and profitable. I started out knowing nothing, and agree that some of the early bits of the course would be too basic for someone who is already trading, but I think that in terms of being a one-stop shop for a rookie trader who wants to get up and running with support along the way the K2A product works, it certainly did for me.

‘NOTHING’ is simply not true but seriously lol - a couple of the courses cost a five-figure sum; if you found the early course so bad what on Earth were you doing giving them anything like that sort of money for the subsequent courses?!?

ST

19

There are number of experienced traders who run free forex seminar or training courses but ultimately their goals to be selling their books or services. So, I do not join these courses.

20

Their is no need to join any trading course or service. Even if you do their is no guarantee that you will be able to replicate the same level of success.

It depends on the Individual trader on how well he is able to understand the Forex markets.