Quote from smilingsynic:
I'm not flip-flopping. I still say he's a nice guy (at least to me so far), but find it suspicious that he cannot stick to trading the same market(s). I am also suspicious of ANYONE who would charge $500 a month to teach someone how to trade (six grand is about two years of tuition at a decent state university--that's a lot of money for "education").
Is that so unreasonable?
I think its unreasonable to think that a trader should stick to trading the same market especially when markets are constantly changing.
Also, I don't know what type of method austinp is using but I do know that some of the most profitable traders I know will change markets.
I myself trade ER2 and when its throwing a temper tantrum...
Either find something else to trade, lower the position size or stay on the sidelines during its temper tantrum price action.
In fact, had austinp stayed with ER2 during one of those infamous price action temper tantrum periods...
Continue trading it without adapting (position size change, sideline or finding something else to trade), I would then say that's suspicious considering he's suppose to be a veteran trader.
Here's another way to explain it.
Lets pretend you are using profitably a trend method.
You know your method works great on markets that trend and isn't so hot on markets that are range bound.
Your favorite market you've been exploiting and other traders have gotten use to seeing you exploit that price action then suddenly the price action stops trending and goes into a range bound price action.
You then decide to switch to a different trading instrument you can better exploit until your favorite trading instrument is no longer moody.
How is switching markets a suspicious behavior when a change in trading tactics is merited because the trading instrument is temporarily not exploitable via a particular strategy.
Further, this also tells me that austinp may not be using different (multiple) methods that allows him to continue trading the same instrument when ever price action does change.
Nothing wrong with that as long as he knows when to leave ER2 alone due to the fact he's using one strategy that's appropriate only for a particular type of price action.
You also mentioned
teaching how to trade.
First of all, most fee-based signal calling chat rooms are not actually trying to teach someone to trade...
Although some market themselves as being able to do such to attract clients that are newbies.
Thus, most (not some) are specifically setup to keep traders dependent (not a good thing) because they only provide signal calls and no education what so ever.
Other types of fee-based chat rooms will provide the method(s) used to produce those signal calls but they too fall short of teaching someone how to trade due to the fact that the student does not have the exact same trading tools as the teacher nor does the teacher know the trading environment the student is trading from.
http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=32793&perpage=1&pagenumber=7
http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=66973&perpage=1&pagenumber=3
Simply, teaching someone how to trade is usually associated with
mentoring and I'm under the impression (call it guessing if you want) that the fee-based signal calling room for $500 per month is not mentoring...
Those whom have actually used his chat room can correct me if I'm wrong about what's occurring inside the chat room via anything I've discussed at the above links.
Furthering my opinion, teaching someone to trade (mentoring) cannot be accomplish online via a chat room no matter how great a method may be and if the signal calling chat room is being marketed as such (teaching someone how to trade)...
It's already flawed out of the gate when its purpose should only be there to allow traders to mimic the calls, make some money until they have figured things out on their own so that they no longer need the chat room.
As you can see, I'm not a big fan of signal calling chat rooms because most of them market themselves incorrectly and allow traders to think they will
learn to trade when in fact they will only learn how to mimic someone's signal calls.
Once again, I do not know what austinp offers nor do I know anything about his market approach to trading whatever it is that he's trading.
I'm just a little amazed at some of the misinformation floating around in this thread and forum about how a profitable trader should trade.
Good night all.
Mark