You made a lot of good points. Of course, it all boils down to education. But also to critical thinking skills. Or thinking skills at all. Some people simply don't have them.
Think about Big Mike and his sham, now re-invented as futures.io, before Big Mike Trading forum. He claims to have 75000 followers.
They follow a guy who blew 2 of his day trading accounts, and 5 years later is still not a competent trader. He rips people off by selling indicators you can get for free. He keeps them hooked up on the webinars served by dubious trading teachers, most of whom are about as successful as traders as he is. It's an obvious fraud. They get nothing out of it, their time and money is wasted.
Yet, they somehow (magically) believe that being in his company and in the company of his anointed vendors will help them become better at trading. Mind-boggling!
Some people fall for cults for the same reason. No critical thinking skills. And futures.io is operated like a cult. It's not a trading forum, but a personality cult of Mike Boulter. It's also a vendor syndicate.
I am not familiar of "Big Mike"? but then I am not looking for help or more entertainment I can get on this forum. This forum has a few good traders on it and occasionally good ideas come from inexperienced traders as their questions will give me an idea. WOW 75,000, I wonder if there is that many day traders that need help, sounds like "Woodie" and his bs of "I don't need charts", CCI - I know of one trader that does well with this indicator-think he waits for those who follow Woodie and goes other way. Only pattern I actually liked was "Ghost" but it didn't test out well enough for me to trade.
There was a guy I recall back in 90s? Ken Roberts, He wore a cowboy hat and lived out in Oregon, he was like dog and pony act and then some, He would trout huge trades and always keep the inexperienced into thinking something more to buy, and if YOU want the best broker around, use so and so, but never told you he co-owned brokerage. Where everyone was paying $12-25 for a round turn, you be paying them like $95, so a small trader be paying huge for a Eurodollar trade, only the real greedy would sign up with this guy. I always saw traders trying to find someone to buy their mistake of buying very expensive courses. I think NFA eventually got him but not before Roberts collected $60 million.
http://turtletrader.com/jake-bernstein-forbes/
There been a number of lawyers who have sold information like Bernstein and Bruce Bacock, although I think Bacock had couple methods that actually worked.
I found this book pretty good but traded for daily bars:Found it to work well enough on erratic markets like Meats.
Nofri & Steinberg – Success in Commodities: The Congestion Phase System – PP Press, 1975
This was a tough read for me, but started to get deeper into Price Structures.
Marvin Romley – Market Dynamics - Privately printed, 1981
And good reads.
L D Belveal – Speculation in Commodity Contracts and Options – Dow Jones Irwin, 1969
L Dee Delveal – Charting Commodity Price Behaviour (2nd ed) – Dow Jones Irwin, 1985
Al of them came before Home PCs, so many ideas back then were hand tested and drawn.
I won't say the above is stand alone systems that are fantastic, but offer added study to expand knowledge.
Have found Joe Duffy to have fairly profitable systems regardless of what others believe. His stuff is a little more complicated than most others. But what is cool, his advertising and gives charts, if you are experienced enough at chart reading, you can figure out how his entries are made. That is usually pretty much how many that sell systems, if they show a few charts and even if they omit indicators, can figure out what is missing due to the fact, if you did enough of indicators, you know what they should be doing based on the Price.
