Following up from this post where I talked about learning to daytrade and trying to break into finance.
The trading has been going well for the most part. My scalping/quick option flipping strategy works and I've had a good number of +250, +500, and even a couple $1000+ days. I have some things to work on, namely keeping myself from reverting to my older self (re: gambler) and managing my risk. I gotta let my losers go faster! Because of one trade that immediately went wrong, and I screwed up handling it, last Friday was one of the worst trading days of my life.
As part of my journey I've been reading some books, looking at online posts, and enrolling in a class with a company called Trade With The Pros
I found them from an ad that promised a "Free In-Person Trading Workshop" in my area. I figured that's a low risk to take, let's hear them out. So I went to the free 2-hour class, learned some things about risk management and other issues I had to get over. At the end I was invited to the next level course: a 3-day training "Premier" at one of the campuses for $200. I liked what I learned from the free class and decided "sure, I'll take some profits from today's trading to pay for this." and paid for the next course.
I can go into more detail about the 3-day training in a comment, but what made me want to write this is what happened on day 2.
Day 1 went well enough. Still learning a lot, but a lot of the comments from the instructor were talking about "we don't have enough time in 3 days to teach you everything" (true) and "we're not sharing our trading system unless you sign up for the full education." What's the "full education"? That's apparently much longer multi-week classes that includes live trading sessions, student/community portal, trade webinars, and potentially a spot on the company's "prop desk" (Basically you trade with their money and system and split the profits 90/10. You get more leverage in exchange for 10% of your earnings.)
Sounds cool except for one thing: The course starts at $8500 for the "Market Structure" module, and then an extra $8500 for each module after that. So if I signed up for this and wanted to deep dive into say Options and Forex... good bye $25k!
I had a one on one with one of the instructors. We'll call him Steve. On Saturday Steve and I talked about how the class was going so far, how I was doing with my trading overall, stuff like that. I showed him my Profit-and-Loss and talked about what I hoped to improve on. He pitched the full class to me. I told him very clearly I can't afford it but will consider it in the future when I'm in a better spot financially. I thought that was the end of it.
I came in to start day 2 of this 3-day class, and as I walked in the door to take my seat Steve pulled me aside for another 1:1. I joked "Am I in trouble?"
"No, not yet!"
I wasn't ready for a hard sell.
It started with "you're too advanced to finish this three-day event".
I bet they tell everyone who's traded before that! My PnL doesn't match this claim. Maybe Steve said this because I was the only person out of the ten-or-so of us that had done any trading.
"We didn't want you to talk to other students"
That was a weird thing to say. In the class I was asked if I traded before, gave my honest answer that this was year #4, made jokes about the Friday market action, but thought I was being humble and doing the self-deprecating humor thing. "Don't listen to me! I lost a lot of money yesterday" type stuff. So people came up to me during a break and asked about what I was doing. I showed a PnL and was talking about how I screwed up this trade, just being friendly.
"The instructor said he didn't think you would be coachable."
Another weird one. I thought I was super clear with everyone that I am trading, yes, but I'd like to learn how to trade assets beyond Options and I'm making costly mistakes. I thought I was in the right place to be around people to keep me accountable and help me get over my issues?
"You're obviously very passionate about this and more advanced than a lot of people here. You should do this and get to that consistent profits."
Sounds great... and I'd probably say yeah teach me your system IF it wasn't 17 THOUSAND dollars!
"Here's the deal. We only want people to complete the 3-day if they're going to sign up for the full class. We already called some students and that's why they're not here."
"If you complete this class and don't sign up the price goes up as soon as you walk out the door. It will be $25k instead of $17k to do Market Structure and Options with us" I hate this pressure tactic.
"Or you can choose to leave us now, we'll give you your $200 back, and then you can do another 3-day when you're ready to buy in."
Steve talked about how one of the students worked Uber part-time to pay for tuition. The instructor talked about students borrowing against their 401ks to pay for tuition. And all I was thinking was just keep my money and let me finish what I signed up for.
But then I understood what was going on. The free workshop weeds out people who won't pay anything. You get sold on the $200 class right there (It's $300 normally yada yada). Then the next "step" is to get the people who paid a little and weed out most of them. Catch the few who are going to spend more than I spent on my car for the actual product.
Maybe the full course is worth it? There's not a lot of reviews for this company so it's hard to say. I wasn't going to spend a ton of money to find out the hard way.
I took the refund and left. It felt like shit and I'm writing this partly to work through these feelings.
I'm feeling a lot of things right now. Part of me is really just struggling to get this part of life figured out so I can work on other things that are also going on. Part of me wants this to go so well I can start becoming the modern Engels and fund some mutual aid work, feed people near me, etc. Maybe even run some pro-China ads, fund true left-wing candidates, stuff like that. A comrade can dream...
Is this a bit? Why would you ever pay for a class from people teaching you how to trade? If they knew how to make money doing it, they'd just be doing that instead of selling classes on trading
I hear you. Part of what attracted me to this program in the first place is that they audit all of their instructors. The instructors have to be active traders and they have to submit their PnL statements to the program every quarter for review. So the people running the classes should know what they're doing and have the trade logs to prove it.
Why teach people if you can do it yourself? These people will tell you its better to have multiple sources of income, that it's a "1% mentality" thing to think about adding more income streams while us working class folks have just one (aka a job).
Knowing how to trade well isn't an infinite money glitch. Traders that survive are making lots of small trades where they are risking $100 to make $300. It's way less important to have some "holy grail" trade (they don't exist) than it is to have a system that you can use without letting emotion get in the way, a clear risk:reward ratio that means when you win you make more than you lose, and some rules in place so that you pick trades with a higher chance of success than failure.
Realistically that means I'm hoping to make ten trades where my win rate is at least 30%, but the win rate can be that low if I can plan to risk money and set my take profit levels such that I am risking $1 to make $3 on every dollar I trade. So a good day for me would be making lots of these little trades and letting small profits add up. $300 daily becomes $1500 weekly, $6000 monthly, 72k annually.
The real trick, and the thing I'm going to focus on starting this week, is managing my losing trades better. When (not if) I lose I need to get out faster, not get caught in the mental trap where I think the trade is still good so why not add more to it? "Now the options are at a discount." No, that's not a discount, that's a trap. Get out and wait for a better opening. My big losses came from me self-sabotaging like this, watching the trade hoping for it to turn around. Hope isn't a strategy.
dude I'm up like 1200% of my initial capital since 2020 over thousands of trades across shares/options/crypto in only high volume markets, I know trading isn't fake, you don't have to mansplain this to me. That's why I think signing up for a trading course is a sign of somebody who is too easily taken advantage of for this
How do you know the instructors aren't in cahoots with the company to run a scam? Can you view these trade logs? Can they without a doubt prove that that is their entire trade history and not just cherrypicked data? Or doctored logs? What if it's just the history of one brokerage out of 5 that they use?
Every single real successful trader I've ever learned about either give away the knowledge for free like Qullamaggie because they want to teach people and obviously, if you're a good trader, you can easily make enough money to retire for multiple lifetimes pretty quickly
Or they work in a firm where they cannot legally give away their strategies and generally run strats that only work with portfolios in the dozens of millions at least
I am also reading this thread and know nothing about the subject so MayoPete's detailed explanation was very helpful to me. This is a niche subject and your original comment did not indicate your expertise. His writing a long reply to your comment is very clearly not a personal attack on you or an insult to your intelligence.
I'm also just really peeved that I'm reading some guys story about becoming a full time securities trader on my terminally online communist forum
I come here to get away from that garbage
What's next, somebody's gonna post about how Salesforce is crushing their B2B SaaS start-up by copying their product and stealing their customers away?
Haha now that I'm not gonna contest
If you hate me that much just block me and you won't see my posts anymore
I don't think gatekeeping what jobs comrades can have (besides cop, ACAB) is a good way to grow a movement. You don't know me and you don't know how much this has improved my life to do this.
I don't know who you are and didn't have that background when I was responding. Very good returns, maybe share your plan so we can learn from you?
I didn't get that far. If I was more interested in the course I'd ask to see trade logs. You're right that unless it's a tax return the docs could be altered. It's just as likely that you interview for a job and they tell you one thing about the company, and then when you get there you realize what a shit show it really is. Been there, done that.
There's risk behind everything we do under Capitalism. There's no avoiding that. Everyone of us with a "normal" job is risking their lives every day commuting to and from that job site. Something like 40k people DIE in car crashes across the US every year. That's not counting the much larger number of people who total their cars, end up injured badly, etc.
That's great you know who these traders are. I don't. I'll check out Qullamaggie. Thanks for the tip.
There's so much info out there online it's hard to know who is worth listening to. And that second point needs a big asterisk at the end. Yeah, if you start with $1M in your account and grow it 1200% you can retire, not if you are starting with $30,000. I can't afford to risk a lot on any single trade while the big guys can put down $100,000 and not sweat it if they lose.
Not everyone learns the same way. There's a lot of reasons to go for an in-person class over learning online: