Quote from Roark:
[B
snip....
So what does work: fear. If you want someone to lose weight, a good fright works wonder. Something like a heart attack that they survive. Or a demonstration from a doctor that shows while they chronologically may be in their 30's or 40's, biologically they are in their 60's or 70's due to obesity related health issues. It's the moment when they get religious about exercise and what they eat, at least for awhile....
Traders experience the same thing when they wipe their account out. When they've hung on to one loser too many and suffered the mother of all losses. That's when the trader has a personal come to Jesus moment and gets religious about risk control and cutting losers early, at least for awhile...
So now someone has had a big fright. They've reached the depths of despair and have given up all pretense of ego. They have taken the initial step, joined a gym, bought a pair of running shoes, created a trading plan, or whatever, how do you sustain the change and overcome relapses?
More fear.
snip....
It works in other areas too. Paul Graham noted something similar with start-ups. In in his start-up incubator, they have weekly dinners scheduled for all founders. The purpose is to motivate the founders to keep making progress. It's simply too embarrassing to show up at the dinner and admit to making no progress over the past week.
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Coaching works. That's why athletes have coaches. People are lazy, stubborn mules and they need to be brow beaten every now and again.
So what might help with improving a trader? How about calling trades live. Nothing like public humiliation to put the fear of god into someone and keep the ego in check. Get a coach or a sponsor or something. They don't need to be a great trader, they just need to keep a trader accountable. Like why the reporting of daily PnL suddenly stopped or why the trader hasn't made any progress. [/B]
Your whole post is a beautiful development of how people are incentivized and how they can be supported in this process.
Elsewhere in this thread a person commented that he did not know of any trading schools. Too bad.
As I continue to just talk instead of doing demos to train potential traders, I can attest to the immense value of live trading among learners and their mentors. There are so many great factors that come into play.
Most learners cannot go through an entire trading session. When I am trading with those learning, I only spend an amount of time that is reasonable in terms of attention span.
The OP pointed out the relationship of trading time with his students and without his students. For some reason he has an income difference. I do not notice that kind of shift. Mostly, those in the group are taking the same trades as I do.
The time when a great deal of learning goes on is when responsibilities are shared instead of all persons doing the whole job.
What can compress the amount of learning time before live real money trading commences is how using the mutual time spent as a time for doing a specific drill in a succession of drills. This setting doesn't change the trading profit segments or timing of trades; all it does is make the drill "bold print" for those sessions.
Our current set up is a larger table for about 8 people with laptops. We can cable any set of laptops (4 max) to a large wallscreen (52" screen was donated, for example). To the right of the screen is a 3/4 inch sheet of plywood painted light swimming pool blue. At the top is a 3X4 flow sheet of cycle 1. below it are cycle 2 and cycles 3. 3/4 tape separates the three flow sheets. 72 point type was used and pasted on the board. Four colors of chart tape connect the 24 modes (Alphabet ID's) on the top chart.
People have lasers they use to point to the market display or the flow board.
Logging is done as well as the conversation and the laptop trading.
One funny experience was finding out that IB as a trading platform was deficient. As Roark explained, a person trading really takes heat when his trades are not on a par with others. Moving money from one platform to another is good for a group to understand and witness.
We have two to three levels of traders. They are paired as helper and learner.
We went from scratch to where they are today. PVT first as a weekly planning experience. Several quarters made this an integrated team effort. the "sunday" meeting was standard and all the IAS's and DAS's were shared as was the Universe which was kept current.
The office appeared as a natural result of curiousity about SCT trading. It about 20' by 20' and built out to supply power and cable to all laptops. The printer runs a lot. Getting the office "scuritized" took a lot of effort. the skylights had to be shaded as well.
The incentives of the group are not like weight loss. EVERYONE is supporting their chosen local problem solving operation. As the OP pointed out the people he trained are making millions by doing what he taught them. This group started on whatever individual level of "investing" they were doing and converted to "position trading" PVT. They showed up by word of mouth; so the group is a stellar one.
SCT is what caused the office to appear. SCT is a replay of PVT for commodities.
Trading the ES begins when a person can go from inter day to intraday. The incentive was having learned PVT using common Universe. By learning the timing of the markets while doing normal family activities, people gradually recognize what else is going on in the world.
We do pool extraction and do NOT do edge type trading. The core of skills and knowledge is how and why the markets work as they do.
YOU GUESSSED IT, THE DEMO IS THE MARKET AND NOT THE GUY WHO SUPPORTS LEARNING.
The oldest trader in this group asked to come to my office since he knew 3 others were trading with me there, at that time. We traded the first part of the day which is before business hours in Tucson. We watched and told the other PVT traders what was going on. It is an experience ot sit in with a few commodities traders. Everyone knows what the OP's account looks like as he trades intraday. The market moves many points in short order as the day begins. Trades of many points only last 2 or 3 bars per profit segment. It is something to watch a screen recording the succession of partial fills on each reversal and the P&L's are spinnning like a one armed bandits all the while. Realized profits are not very static during frequent am trades.
In that setting I used screens rotated 90 degrees to make it possible for those there to see my annotating and marks for coming turns. I use both multicharts with indicators and TN with all the snippet oriented customized automated annotation. There is a thrwad on all these modifications elsewhere in ET (it is less than 200 pages long at this point).
Today, most in the group who are assigned others to help, agree that they are able to do much better as a consequence. For me it is a requirement of those learning to help others ASAP. Everyone agrees that a person can wait as long as he wants to begin to do drills. when that beginning is made is the time when a potential trader goes from observer to acite learner.
Drills support learning best. Second best is being in a group trading setting everyday. third best is having Q and A sessions where the mentor does the A's for the Q's learners come up with.
As mentioned in this thread, books don't count for much and neither does "training".
So this post is just âtalkâ to spurt. For those of us in Tucson and elsewhere this means not having the âproblemsâ the OP has.
Obviously all of this can be automated simply since it is based on a very hardedge binary vector system. Using binary vectors throughout leaves no noise and no anomalies. This is a real break a fast track learning experience.
