The vast majority (95% or more) of trading education, information and knowledge was created and/or written by people who don’t know how to trade.
They take observations and statistics of successful traders and pass it off as education material for how to trade profitably, even though they can’t do it themselves. The “trading guru” can talk all day about trading systems, risk management, indicators, having an “edge”, win rates, R:R ratios, trading psychology etc. All this “knowledge” may make sense to those who aren’t profitable but not a single one of these things are an actual trading skill. And without real trading skills (cutting losers and letting profits run), all this “trading knowledge” is basically useless.
Just to illustrate the absurdity, here’s a link to observations of the biomechanical movements of babies learning to walk (if you have trouble sleeping, I highly encourage you to read it). I dare anyone to try and teach a baby or even an adult to walk using this “knowledge”.
People find this hard to believe, but it’s absolutely true.
Trading education is a classic “desperate buyers market”, and that makes it far easier to make money by selling “education” than by trading.
Whoever’s figures you believe (I choose to believe the FCA, myself, because they‘re independent and objective), very few people who learn to trade forex ever become steadily profitable, and it’s therefore also no surprise at all that (both online in general, and specifically in a beginners forum) on very many forex-trading-related subjects the “widespread consensus of opinion” will pretty often be a collectively mistaken one.
Be careful from whom you choose to learn.
If they’re selling, promoting or marketing anything, be very careful indeed.
Yes, this is actually pervasive in modern society:
Wall street, the place where people pull up in Bentleys and Rolls Royces to get financial advice from people who took the subway.
Business universities, where professors with Ph.D.'s in “business” can teach you everything there is to know about a business except how to run one.
I was once “advised” by a Certified Financial Advisor at a bank to divest capital to certain assets because it made “sound financial sense”. I asked him how much he made from investing in those same assets and got a blank stare in return.
And finally the wonderful world of “trading gurus” and financial analysts (especially if they wear a suit & tie or have a “Dr.” or “Ph.D.” title) who don’t actually make money from the markets but can teach and advise you because “trust me, bro!”
I laughed out loud reading your reply, because this happened to me but from a university!
I graduated with a Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering (long before YouTube existed), I could describe to you every single component in an Intel processor or large scale factory automation systems, but I couldn’t put together a simple circuit for a car battery volt meter from a hobby store.
Strange idea.
Following those thoughts would anyone be a teacher of any kind?
If everyone thought this way the world would be really messed up since we wouldn’t have child care workers, kindergarten teachers, primary school teachers, secondary school teachers and so on.
Thankfully a good percentage of people decided to pass on their knowledge to others in all aspects of life.
Trader education and training gets a poor reputation because it does not generate consistently profitable traders.
This expectation is unrealistic. Nobody in training is going to give you everything you need to know for a single fee because that would leave them with nothing to sell next year. I am sure very few trainers sell TA techniques or strategies which cannot work. But what they will teach you about these things is incomplete. The net result is you will lose money slowly until you pay another fee for another course, after which you will lose money just as badly but from new techniques and strategies.
Initial training is great if you’ve never seen or understood a price chart and never traded. But pretty quickly the best thing that training can do for you is to teach you how to learn.
First, try to understand what a person is saying and then share your opinion about it. Kindergarten teachers, primary school teachers, secondary school teachers, and so on all have teaching as their profession. However, in other professions, people typically start teaching only when they are retired. And what’s the reason? The reason is a lack of energy or efficiency to continue doing their original work. But trading? You can trade until the last moment of your life, and if you ever choose to retire from trading, it means you’ve achieved what you started trading for, and now you just want peace. So, you won’t waste time with stubborn people who think they know everything. There are only two possibilities: either you’re not excelling in the field you’re teaching, or you’ve retired from excelling in it, which means you’re no longer up-to-date in that field. Just think about it sometimes, okay? Don’t accept and believe the first perspective that simply makes sense.
Those who can, do.
Those who can’t, teach.
And those who can’t do and can’t teach, preach.
Of course there are exceptions to every rule and there are those who can do and teach but these are extremely rare. And with trading in particular, we’re talking about someone who has skills that literally makes millions. So these rare successful traders that also can teach, either they really love teaching or they will only take on institutional clients that are willing to pay $250k per head.
The losing trader is the other side of the trading education coin, I could write up an entire thread on this subject.
Let’s take these 2 quotes from the famous trader Ed Seykota:
“A losing trader can do little to transform himself into a winning trader. A losing trader is not going to want to transform himself. That’s the kind of thing winning traders do.”
“Win or lose, everybody gets what they want out of the market. Some people seem to like to lose, so they win by losing money.”
When you combine these 2 quotes within the “trading education” universe, you can see this beautiful balance between supply and demand in action:
Losing traders would rather feel comfortable, not change anything about themselves and continue to lose rather than go through the difficult mental transformation required to become a winning trader. And the “trading gurus” (who don’t know how to trade) are more than happy to provide exactly this sort of “trading education” that the losing traders demand.
The “real deal” profitable traders wouldn’t bother teaching losing traders because there are so few losing traders that are willing to do (or pay) what it takes to make it worth their time and effort. As I wrote above, it’s only those rare ones that can both trade and love to teach or they only take on institutional clients at $250k (or more) per person.
I am finding that I can present how I am trading and how it works for me, but showing the setup and strategy to others doesn’t tend to make them successful with it.
My conclusion is that the experience part can’t be taught by watching a few videos. It has to be absorbed by personal experience over time. My experience is that the time needed is going to be a few years.
It’s the shortcuts to success that can’t work until the psychology catches up.
From my experience, setup and strategy is irrelevant to profitable trading if the trader doesn’t have actual trading skills. If a trader has trading skills then he can be profitable with any setup and strategy, including random entries with a coin flip.
Another quote by Ed Seykota:
“The elements of good trading are 1, cutting losses. 2, cutting losses. And 3, cutting losses. If you can follow these three rules, you may have a chance.”
A professional trader not only has this quote seared into his brain but lives and breathes by it.
Losing traders look at this quote and can’t wrap their heads around it. They got into trading to make money, not read an old book from a boomer about how to not lose money. That YouTube “trading guru” with the Lambo and expensive looking watch is way more entertaining and has the “lifestyle” that they want.
I imagine another frustration with the “real deal” profitable traders who are trying to teach beginners (as well as losing traders) is that they’re more interested in trying to get the right RSI settings so that they’ll work on the 5 minute TF, and are not really interested in the longer term aspects of how the markets actually move. Therefore, requiring a certain level of experience before even entertaining them.
I realized that maybe my previous reply may not have been so helpful in how to move forward for those who are serious about becoming better traders. So I’ll spell it out here:
Profitable trading starts with managing the downside.
Any losing trader that is serious about becoming profitable needs to focus 90% of their energy and effort into mastering the art of minimizing losses until it becomes second nature. There are no shortcuts here, it takes time to re-wire the brain.
So, that means you try to find those traders that are talking / writing about lots of different ways to manage losing positions, these guys are the “real deal”.
“Trading gurus” (that aren’t profitable traders) never talk about this other than parroting phrases about “risk management”, using a stop loss and max 2% risk.
Yeah, I’m not very fond all “The Gurus” saturating social media. Not even exclusive to trading. But trading and financial gurus might be some of the worst.
Adding to my previous reply about who to listen to and learn from.
You’ll find that good traders are good at trading, they’re awful at things like making entertaining videos and marketing. They often aren’t the most dynamic, entertaining speakers but they know their stuff. Their videos often look very simple with low production value and they don’t have as many followers as the “trading gurus” with the Lambo, flashy entertainment and high production value.
Having said all this, here are 2 sources I can recommend and think are worth following:
Michael Martin aka Trader Mindset. This guy has more than 30 years trading experience and has probably forgotten more about trading than I will ever learn in my lifetime. He’s one of the few people that I learn something new from. If I was allowed to only follow one YouTube trader, it would be this guy. Ignore the simple low production videos, get a notepad and listen to everything this guy says: https://youtu.be/ncfaYYWtrXs?feature=shared
