This is what it is all about, when I was first convinced to start teaching again when I was living in Ethiopia I wanted to try and create something different. Normally the storyline with day trading companies is they have members of the “organization” teaching best practices and showing us what we should do.
How convenient right?
I remember this like it was yesterday when I first started to learn how to day trade. I paid over $7,000 for my first piece of day trading software that would automatically show me how to trade. Aside from borrowing over $25,000 in student loans that I didn’t know how I was going to pay back, it was the same storyline we all normally here.
The software will do this for us & the indicators will automatically do that. Here is a rule of thumb:
The more colors you see and the more control a software has the faster you should run away
Little did I know back then that I had to remove the software & indicators in order to pay attention to what’s important, the actual market.
This lessons alone costed me tens of thousands of dollars in indicators & software that I didn’t need. If I would have been paying attention to the market in the first place I could have become profitable in a few months. Moving on with the story, one day all of the sudden there was a new trainer in the room.
He happened to know much less than the students that were already part of the program (I was in the program around 6 months at that time).
Most of the students in the room were dumbfounded by the fact that most of us knew more than him but knowing no other way, we continued on and he eventually did learn.
To this day he has never actually traded live successfully but at least after the fact he did try to trade live. He is still the head trainer with this company.
The real life Camelot in Gondar Ethiopia
Enter The Day Trading Academy 10 years later, I had a very big decision to make when traders from the previous company I was with wanted me to start coaching them again. After I left the company the same storyline occurred. A high school friend of one the business partners that had never looked at the stock market in his life started to run a live classes after 1 month of training.
The students obviously knew something wrong when they realized that they knew more about the market then than this new man that was made “head of education.” He of course had attained years of experience in the market in order to run live classes, of course he did.
They reached out to me for help and I felt responsible considering that I was their main point of contact when learning how to trade. I decided to train them and allowed each and every one of them to decide how much to pay for the training.
Bad idea possibly? Terrible idea right?
WRONG. When people know that they are getting something of quality, price isn’t the question. I wanted to allow them to decide how much they wanted to pay not only to allow them to learn at a price they could afford, but also to find out what a fair price for the program would be.
Since I make a living day trading, I wanted to ensure that if I was going to start coaching others that they would take it seriously. If I was indeed to continue on this new venture I would be day trade my own account a bit less also do less day trading & travelling. I wanted to make sure I was going to be wasting my own time.
Sidenote: Just arrived in India and it is absolutely AMAZING.
I understood that they had already paid a hefty price at the previous company in order to learn how to day trade and if I was going to start teaching again I was going to make them a very important promise:
I would never allow anyone to teach that wasn’t trading their own accounts live
I am no Donald Trump, I have an idea of how to build residential skyscrapers and sell them at ridiculously overpriced amounts. I have an idea but I can’t take on that challenge and actually build a high rise because I don’t know the intricacies of building a structure of that magnitude. For starters, I have I never actually done it before.
I can’t tell you how to build a Ferrari, Mercedes Benz, or *gasp* a Ford because I have never done it before.
So how can someone that has never actually traded their own account live teach someone else how to day trade? This is one of the common day trading scams out there that many people don’t know about.
That long story was a way to explain why I am having students now run live classes. The best way to learn how to trade is learning from those people that are actually doing it. I am no guru and stay humbled at the fact that the market and new traders alike continue to teach me new lessons about the ever changing market dynamic.
All of this week we have 4 different traders with completely different personalities & trading styles that will be teaching classes.
This will be invaluable to the small number of students we accept every month into the training program at The Day Trading Academy. People explain things in different ways, some explain things better than others, and the one thing that I have learned in the last 10 years of being in the day trading industry is that we must never stop learning.
When we stop learning we become complacent & we start losing money
Powerful things happen when we have a group of people teaching rather than just one or two people coming up with ideas. A group of ideas is much more potent at creating a sound proof system (with day trading or anything in general) rather than just one person.
Entrance to the Roman Baths in England
The Roman Empire was not built behind the idea of one man and neither were any other empires. It started with the idea of one man and then that idea culminates and changes and becomes even more powerful with the ideas and input of others.
And I do have to admit something, I did start teaching again because of selfish reasons.
It actually makes me a better trader when I teach.
This is another reason why I want the traders that are trading live and making money to start teaching classes because it will force them to see things that they wouldn’t otherwise see and make them better in the process.
I cannot wait until we have the DTA Trading Army with a group of traders that are successfully making money in the markets. We already have quite a large group of traders that are doing very well which is the reason that we are working on improvements to the Congressive Trading System with updates to the curriculum.
A new advanced & pro curriculum are currently being added as we have now a new problem on our hands. So many traders are doing so well that we have to create a new advanced curriculum to make sure that they keep learning. Remember what I said when we stop learning.
It’s going to be an amazing 2013 for day trading, have you planned how you are going to dominate the world?