My Impression of Online Trading Academy

Trading Discussion
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I posted something real quick about OTA yesterday, but I thought I would expand on some of it with a more detailed review.

[B]The Free Workshop[/B]
I actually had some good interactions at the free workshop and more specifically with the individuals that actually trade. The instructor touched on a few things, such as stop losses, profit targets, the supply/demand strategy that OTA uses, but mostly I would say it was an introduction to their three day course, which is fine. I expected that.

The three day course is $299, which doesn’t bother me too much, but after meeting with an assigned counselor I was disinterested pretty quickly.

[B]Counselor Meeting[/B]
The idea behind the meeting was really to learn more about me and a little bit more about OTA, but it really seemed like the counselor really didn’t have any interest in what I had to say.

He asked me what I was doing for trading and I mentioned some of the chart tools I use, such as identifying triangles and rectangles,etc (a lot of the content on BabyPips). He was quick to claim that most retail traders use this strategy, but the institutional traders, big banks, know retail traders do this so they will trade in the opposite direction causing the market to move and knocking out the retailers. He also went on to claim that the strategies I’m using may have worked in the 80s, but not as much any more.

Then there came the cost, which came out to be $23,000 to take their pre-requested stock class, which included access to a counselor, additional training material and the forex course.

There were a few other options, but all included bringing in about $10,000 to take course material.

Now since he only just touched on the supply and demand strategy they used I had to wonder…what other material are they going to be teaching that I’m already finding that’s free. Are the strategies I’m using outdated? or is this guy just a sales person that hasn’t ever traded a dime in his life?

(Quick side note - I did a search for supply and demand trading - I’ve only just briefly looked at it, but how are they able to patent this so called strategy and how is it different from support and resistance?)

Whatever the case may be I decided not to take the three day course since it had nothing to do with learning to trade and from what I understood had everything to do with selling me on taking courses that were thousands of dollars. Seems odd since it’s three days long.

[B]The Next Day[/B]
After letting that all sink in for a while I think I found I was discourage with OTA because I didn’t have an opportunity to really talk shop. I think it would have been worth while for me to go over in more detail what I’ve been having success at and finding a little bit more about their strategies to see how similar or dis-similar things were.

Am I really suppose to believe that some of the very things that BabyPips talks about aren’t relevant any more?

I really think this “counselor” is a sales person and knows very little about trading the market and only knows what he’s been fed by OTA.

1 Like
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A little update on this…after contacting the owner about my experience I found they canceled me out of the three day course because I don’t have the funds to pay for their $5,000 classes.

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Hi, this all sounds a bit like hard sales tactics…
Pretty distasteful, in my book…
I really enjoy listening to Merlin Rothfeld’s Power Trading Radio (it is free) because not only do they have great instructors or industry professionals on it, including from precious metal trading, former Chicago mercantile exchange floor traders, options traders, DailyFX currency experts… They do plug the OTA on the show, but on the whole it is pretty good at not doing that…

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Most courses these days try to reel you in with initially free lectures or lessons and then say that if you want to continue to the best part - you have to cough up.

Nothing wrong with that, but it’d be great if they said it upfront.

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Yes, i also met them years ago in london in one of there rented offices. They are nothing more than a structured sales team trying to con unexpirenced new retail traders into courses costing £1000’s. They also could not provide proof of results from apparent past successful students. A real waste of time, never bother with OTA, the most patronising & uneducated sales pitch you will see…then again if you want some fun then make an appointment!

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In 2006 i happened to bump into a representative of OTA who wanted to open a branch in Dubai. I was offered a position. I had just quite my job as a strategist after ten years of work, and was planning to start my own thing, online research firm and education (similar to OTA but far smaller). I was standing on a cross road, work again for someone, or do my own thing. I decided to do my own thing. It was the right choice for me.

What you are actually paying OTA for is:
1- you become a member of the club
2-you can go all the way and become an instructor and teach the OTA course
3-you will learn supply demand zones and some other theory and practice then trade with a group under the supervision of an instructor. They will teach you to do it over and over and over till it becomes a habit

IMO you can do all this without paying one cent (or for much less).

1- you can make your own online trading group and do this together, plenty of interested people on babypips and other good forums, elitetrader are very active during the NY market open, plenty of tips there as well.

2-the CMT program doesnt cost you more than $3000 for the three levels, and this is the highest degree in technical and quantitative analysis. It gives you the theory, you have to work on the practical part. After level 3 you can always teach or trade, or both. If thats too much money, just buy the books and read them!

3-the best traders are the self made ones. Most of what they teach can be found online. Supply and Demand zones have been around since 1997 (18 years) it is not that new anymore and there s plenty of material about it.

The OTA can be useful for people who have retired, have some extra cash, know nothing about the markets and want someone to take them by the hand step by step and don’t mind to pay that amount of money.

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Regardless of how legit the courses may or may not be, there aggressive and insulting sales approach says more than enough. Asking you to take your own trading funds out of your account to pay them for education, taking each person into a seperate interigation room so no other person can influence your decision when they press you for “the one time offer price”. Oh well!

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I had some bad experiences with OTA myself. I watched there free introductory video learning courses when I first started learning about FX. When I started asking the wrong questions there booted me from there free seminars. I started getting E Mails again from them and they tried like crazy to get me back in, but I relented. I don’t need them. Everything you need to know is all free on the Internet. One thing I have found helpful is comparing my analysis to the pros. That is free to. Babypips Blogs are good, and if your using MT4 or MT5 or any platform they have, or should have, free commentary and analysis from pro traders and even Big Banks analysis on FX you can gain some insight on your trading skills, and what better source than an institutional bank for learning. And if you think there giving you the wrong advice just reverse your thinking. All free!

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Oceanmen,

that is an impressive career!

respect!

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Thank you! I have never been more happy. To be free and to do the things you love is simply priceless! I may not be as rich as my colleagues who are still in corporate life, but that is a price i am willing, and happy to pay.

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OK where do I start. First the trading method does not work. Second, Online Trading Academy uses sophisticated predatory sales techniques [I]engineered [/I]to take your money.

If you assume the trading method works (and they will make it so you do), you will be ripe for the predatory sales method that works on your deep psychology. You won’t have a chance. You’re money (all of it) will be gone and you’ll wake up wondering what happened. What happened is that you got scammed!

[I]I know this because I worked there.[/I]

So let me get right to it: OTA is a con, a scam.

The “educational counselors” are all commission sales people making $150,000 to $350,000. The “instructors” are also entirely on commission, making more than the “educational salespersons”. No one at Online Trading Academy is a real trader and no one uses the system to make money. Because the system does not work.

OTA is a hard core sales operation. You’ll be asked a series of “pain questions” like, “What is the cost of doing nothing?” “How do you feel about it?” They get you feeling terrible so you’ll buy.

But the trading system does not work. It uses simple fibonacci and support and resistance to get lucky once out of eight times - so you lose seven times, but win once. This makes you think it might work if you could learn it better.

Since you will always be losing money with their trading method, this gives them the opportunity to up-sell you on more markets, at about $12,000 each. They say, “More markets, more opportunity” and “You’re not making money because you need more training!”

But that’s the secret lie - it is the trading system that doesn’t work, not you. A study by Univ of California, Berkeley, Haas Business School found that 98% of day traders lose All their money.

They say that you lose small and win big - just another lie to cover up the many many losses for one small win. Your account slowly goes down and you blame yourself for not making the system work - but it’s a losing system, not you! You may even fall for buying more education for thousands more dollars.

Note that OTA’s trading method supposedly uses supply and demand levels that they identify - some from many years ago! But big traders and institutions never leave pending trades lying around, never. Not even overnight or over the weekend because a news event could cause a huge loss. In fact, most institutional trades are high frequency trades in and out of the market in less than a second! But OTA will try to tell you supply and demand levels last for years. Don’t believe a word they say. It’s all a scam and like all cons, the lies really sound good!

No you can’t trade like the institutions (who often lose big, by the way) - you don’t have the money like they do and you can’t push the market around like they can.

Before you come in to a seminar the salespeople take half the chairs out of the room - so it looks like lots of people are showing up, more than expected, then they bring back the chairs. Smart, right?

There will be one or two OTA employees acting like students in the room. They buy and everyone else thinks, if they bought, I should too. OTA calls this “social proof”. They have about a hundred more tricks up their sleeve - you won’t have a chance.

They’ll take you for $12,000 to $60,000. No money, no problem, you can finance it at 17%. The back of the contract says you can’t sue them and also you can’t join a class action lawsuit.

Online Trading Academy is exactly like Trump University and Corinthian Colleges, all scams selling a product that does not work to hopeful people ripe for it. Note: they illegally record all telephone calls with “Tape-a-Call”.

The salespeople are trained extensively to act sympathetic and listen to your woes about not making enough money and needing retirement, then they tell you your salvation is to pay $12,000 to $60,000 to solve the problem. “All you need is self-discipline and commitment,” they tell you. “Earn while you learn!” But no one ever makes money with their “patented” system. Patented does not means it works!

I know all about it. Don’t believe the positive reviews. They wrote them. That’s why almost all the Yelp reviews are positive.

Everything they do is totally designed to take your money, leaving you dry. When you figure out the trading method does not work they’ll try to sell you further training on more markets. See how it works? They tell you that you just need more training for thousands more. It’s your fault!

Here’s a good trick: The instructor is going on about how you can make lots of money. And then he shows you a live trade he made during the break. It’s now up $2000 in one hour!

And think how much you can make doing this. He tells you, trade for one hour a day and make $2000/day times five days a week gives you $10,000/week, easy! You just need to sign up for the training.

The trick is he made Ten random trades, half long buys and half short sells. He chose the one lucky trade that made the best profit to show the class and hides all the others that are losing. He only shows the profit trade!!

Isn’t that a great trick? If you saw that, you’d be calculating. $10k/week x 52 weeks. One hour a day… Yes! I WILL give you all my money! That’s how they get you.

The instructors do not trade themselves, they just say they do. Everything is fake. If you see a statement or a testimonial, it’s fake. The instructors make much more money from you than they could from trading a losing system.

Online Trading Academy is a brilliant, exceptionally well designed scam that rakes in $100,000,000 per year from wannabe traders.

Attachments:

-Pricing!

-These are the “Pain” questions the OTA commission sales people will ask to soften you up when they get you alone in the “Pain Room”.

-Online Trading Academy Sales Process; they’re trained to act the exact opposite of a 100% Commission Salesperson. You will hear, for example, “pattern interrupts” - you ask a question expecting a sales answer and they will say something completely different. This softens/opens you up. You bob, they weave. All your defenses will fall away, and you wake up without any money!

-Sales questions the commission salesperson asks you over the phone - which are secretly tape recorded, using “Tape-A-Call”.

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Banner1, thank you for that post. Wow, I am pretty shocked. I’ve heard of Online Trading Academy before but I’ve never explored any of their offers or options and now I know why. This inside information is priceless. What it bothers me is how they can fool the real traders in spite of the fact that their “Instructors” do not trade. I guess their target group are the people with a very little experience. You can feel that a company is a scam when its salespeople are that aggressive like in the OTA. I guess the positive reviews can be found only on their website.

Oceanmen, you do not need to be rich in order to be happy. The personal freedom and the fact that you can do what you love are way more important than the wealth from the corporate life.

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Thanks, Banner.

Here is a critique of OTA Sam Seiden’s ‘Unfilled orders’/Supply-and-Demand methodology:

The Essential Guide Supply And Demand Trading– ForexMentorOnline

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Yes, it’s really a brilliant scam. Many people are turned off by the sales tactics or the price but they continue to believe that the OTA “supply and demand” actually works. The deeply hidden secret is that it doesn’t work, at all. This is a scam built on top of a scam.

I’ve been trading for eleven years and know what questions to ask. Since I know how hard (almost impossible) it is to make a consistent profit with small drawdown by trading, I started asking everyone, “Does it work??” They did not want me asking that question!

Almost all the “educational counselors” (100% commission sales sharks) assume the OTA trading system works and do not ask questions. ( ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.’)

This is the mark of the best scams: The people involved do not know it’s a scam! Some of the non-trader educational counselors think they are actually helping people! This makes them very enthusiastic and sympathetic sales people. They believe. Enthusiasm is key in sales because it transfers to the buyer and we all buy 80% on emotion (I want it!) and 20% on thinking (Can I afford the price?). OTA knows this and their sales method is world-class.

I am trying to warn as many as possible about the scam, so please cut and paste onto yelp and everywhere else to spread the word. Especially show everyone the pricing.

I’ve attached some pics of the daily Mastermind Grid for December-14-2015. These are the actual suggested trades but I need more than 5 attachments to prove my point. I will try to post 5 pics more on a follow-on post.

What these will show are 1) Sam Seiden’s supply and demand OTA trading method is a scam because it does not work and 2) it’s just simple fibonacci with support and resistance.

The Mastermind Grid is updated by Sam Seiden and his crew every morning for multiple asset classes. You pay $50,000 to get this level. With fibs and S/R you can do this for free in two minutes - but why would you, because Fibs and S/R are not enough to make you consistently profitable.

They do work occasionally, just enough to make a newbie trader think there’s something there, so you stick with it, slowly losing all your account.

Note also that the OTA trading method is against the trend. Trend trading is always best because 1) your winning trades go farther, 2) your stop loss is smaller, 3) you have a higher probability of a winning trade, 4) and lower probability of your stop getting hit, 5) If your trade does go bad, it’s more likely to quickly turn around in the trend direction. Since trading successfully is all about stacking the odds in your favor, and free trades (moving stop to break-even), trend trading is best. I’ve heard that some people do well counter-trend trading, but I’ve never met them and it doesn’t work for me.

Note also that contrary to what everyone says, you do not always need a 2:1 reward to risk. The reason is that, with 2:1 reward to risk levels, it is twice as probable for a trade to stop you out as to exit with your take-profit. This is the concept of expected value given random probabilities (and randomness is about right in short-term trading). I mentioned to one of the OTA instructors that you needed a “directional bias” for 2:1 reward to risk to work but he was clueless. Newbie traders do not understand expected value. In a nutshell, your trade risk is not just the size of your stop, it’s the size times the probability of getting hit.

Back to the OTA supply/demand trading method. The Mastermind Grid has boxes with two numbers (prices) each. Each box’s’ two prices is the upper and lower range of one supply or demand zone. The row of boxes (with two price numbers) closest to the middle red or green lines will get hit first.

There are two other rows further from the green or red lines; these are for medium and longer term S/D trading levels (ranges). We will ignore these and just look at the row just above the middle red line and just below the middle green line.

The row of boxes just above the red line are supply zones, where price will go up to hit and bounce back down. Current price is somewhere between the middle red and lower green lines. Prices in the boxes below the green line are supply zones. If a box has a thick black border, it’s a newly updated price zone.

Let’s look at an example. First column is Spot Euro and the box closest above the red line has 1.108 and 1.125. So you draw 2 horizontal chart lines using these two prices to get a supply range/zone. Current price is below the red line, so it is supposed to come up to the red line supply zones and you enter short at 1.108 with a stop just outside the upper supply zone boundary at 1.125. Now you place your take-profit at the first price below the green line, which is 1.0665.

The two numbers in the box above the red line give your two horizontal price lines for the upper supply zone. The two price numbers just below the green line create the demand zone. So now you have an upper supply zone and a lower demand zone with price bouncing around in between. The zones are where you put your entry and take-profit. The farther side of a zone is for your stop-loss.

Now see what happened with the actual charts. The vertical orange line is the time the Mastermind Grid published it’s S/D zones. So that’s when you put on pending trades at the suggested price levels.

Then, to the right of the vertical orange line, you can follow what actually happened. Did price go up to the predicted supply zone, and reverse back down with your sell order, or did it blow through and stop you out?

I’ve also placed Fibs and support/resistance lines on the charts. Note that OTA’s $50,000 Supply and Demand zones are the same as support/resistance zones and fibs.

It’s worth the time to see what happened… I have the charts and the results for each of the suggested forex trades from the Mastermine Grid. None worked out, all lost your money. Of course you also lost the $50,000 you paid to get these special Supply and Demand Zones.

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Aussie Chart trade according to Mastermind zones.

GBP Charts with Mastermind trades

Euro/JPY Chart with mastermind trade

attached…

Look to the right of the vertical orange line to
see how the Mastermind trade did.

The yellow horizontal lines give the Supply
Zone above or the Demand Zone below.

Price is in between.

Sell at the upper Supply zone or
buy at the lower Demand zone.

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this is the worst money-bin for any wannabe trader

and they should steer well clear of it…

On balance, do traders make money from OTA trading?

Do they publish their results?

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That’s just it. They don’t make money - they lose money. And no one ever publishes their results. The commission sales sharks are told to say, when asked about results, “OTA does not ask our students about their results.” Also, the sales people are not supposed to ask the students how their trading is going.

But these are newbie traders with stars in their eyes. They lose slowly because some trades work out (as one would expect with Fibs and support/resistance) so they think they just have to work harder at it and buy more classes.

In psychology there is intermittent reinforcement; a behavior takes more time to go extinct with intermittent reinforcement. You keep trying because it sometimes works. The occasional wins do not allow you to believe that the trading system is at fault, you always think that you’re the problem. It is a brilliant scam.

Note that I’m not only saying that the OTA Sam Seiden Supply and Demand trading methodology does not work, and they are all scammers, I am posting [B]proof [/B]with these charts. And I go further and show that their trading method is just support/resistance with some Fibs.

So, to be clear, I am stating that Sam Seiden is a con man, along with Eyal Shahar, Gene Longobardi, Aaron Neilson, Jeremy Nosek, Eyal Marmareli, Steve Albin, Tony Harkey, Lisa Kolibar, Ralph Loberger, Keeley Hubbard, John O’Donnell, and Nicola McDowall.

The above are the executive team. But everyone else at OTA are also con men working the scam. Especially the Instructors, Educational Counselors, and Educational Directors. They never say “sales” or “salespeople”, by the way.

The above are all con men running a scam that takes about $100,000,000 per year from wannabe traders. They are selling a product that does not work with predatory sales techniques. They’re taking advantage of poorly educated working people and retired people who feel bad about not having much money and see OTA as their last hope to get ahead. I’ve seen them sell to an uneducated deaf guy (who had a social worker who could sign with him) and to an older sick obese woman who used a walker (she had been a missionary all her life and had almost no money, so they financed her).

The people at OTA are the lowest of the low, taking people’s savings. Everyone named above is making over half a million per year. Shahar is the President and Owner (drives a Bentley) and a total con man. I should mention that they all hug everyone!! How can you say and think bad things about people that hug you? It is a brilliant scam.

Keeley Hubbard is listed on their site as VP Admissions. She’s the head sales trainer and has nothing to do with admissions - unless you consider being “sold” as being “admitted”.

Spread the word and post everywhere, with charts. These people should be in prison.

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Mastermind CAD charts

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Jesus, it is so bad…

I’ve been a fan of Merlin Rothfeld and John O’Donnell (Power Trading Radio) for about two years,

and there is some good value in what they do on their show…

…as for the OTA, it is clearly overselling its usefulness…

What a shame

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I’ve met Merlin and John. They are low-life con men.