I've tried to post the following review on fxknight.com at the "review site" forexpeacearmy.com (www.forexpeacearmy.com) but it was not published for whatever reason. That's why I post it here. Judge yourself.
When I relate to "this site" I am referring to forexpeacearmy.com as I wrote my review initially for that site.
As this is a very long post, I've divided it into 2 parts.
PART I:
*****************
It has now been some time, since I've attended the pro room of fxknight.com. However, since then I've always felt this anger inside me when I think about these self-proclaimed experts in this market who fool aspiring traders by providing their services. I have to admit, that I did attend only fxknight.com and no other educational service, but I am pretty sure that in this business about 99% of educators sell mostly crap to their clients. So, my review would probably be similar for many other educators. Unfortunately for Andrei Knight (or Andrei Pehar or what his real name is) I've attended his service...
A. My background:
Traded stocks and options since the 90-ies, but without a concept (only gut feeling). Started taking trading seriously for over a year now, i.e. doing it full-time. It's been quite a journey.
Did all mistakes one can make at the beginning, including believing that an educational service would teach me how to trade. That's why I joined the pro room of fxknight.com for a few months. When I saw that these guys have no (or very little) clue themselves I've started to continue the journey on my own.
I've educted myself from many many books and trial and error, sitting endless hours in front of the screen and analyzing methods. Unfortunately, there is not one "bible" out there. The "truth" about trading is scattered over many books (the better ones only... more than 90% is also crap in this field)... you have to put the pieces of the puzzle together by yourself. That's how "it works".
However, I am now an above average profitable trader.
B. Main criticism regarding fxknight.com:
1. Lack of disclosure of performance metrics
He advertises that he backtested and forward-tested his methodology. But, if you ask him for concrete performance metrics of his system, he is beating around the bush! The only figure I've heard from him several times is that his trades "work about 75% of the time", i.e. that's his win rate. But why is he focusing so much on the win rate? What about profit factor, avg. win, avg. loss, % draw down, etc.? And on what instrument(s) did he test his method? During which period(s) did he test his method? You don't get any answer from him on these important metrics. He prefers to stay intangible. Why is that so?
This communication strategy of him can backfire. One can assume that he focuses on the win rate as it is easy to fool uneducated students with such figure. A 52% win rate does not sound good, of course, but every professional trader knows that the win rate alone is meaningless. It can be very misleading as many very profitable systems or methods have way worse win rates than 75%. The fact that he focuses only on the win rate gives an educated trader the feeling that his service is only fooling people.
But to make matters worse, in one of the sessions, his co-coach "YR" revealed by chance that you can not expect to make more than 1% return per month trading fxknight.com's methodology (without giving more info on risk per trade, etc. to get the 1% p.m.). This figure is for sure realistic for most folks getting into trading and trading any method. If you put this into perspective together with the 75% win rate you get an idea of the other performance metrics...
However, getting so few basic information regarding a method's performance should make anyone suspicious of the service.
2. Hindsight methodology
His complete methodology is only useful to describe what has happened so far. In hindsight he can explain very well the price action. That's where people get fooled. However, his methodology is almost useless when it comes to tradable ideas. He used so many support and resistance and fibonacci lines on his charts that later on you could always make sense out of the price action as some of the many lines always fit to price action. Also, several times he claimed that he forecasted this or that development in price in previous sessions, but if you had listened carefully, you knew, that he did not do that the way he presented it later. That left also a bad feeling about his methodology or his way to present things.
A further thing that makes any educated trader suspicious is the fact that his methodology relies heavily on indicators. He looks also at price action and emphasizes that price action is more important than the indicators (so much in his defense), but still, the use of ADX, stochastics and MACD shows that he is not a great trader. Such indicators are lagging by nature, they just describe what has happened so far. They have no predictive value at all! Most of the good traders do not use indicators to trade at all (I said "most", not all!). They rely mostly on price action alone.
3. Unreliability
He was late very often in the few months I've attended his service. Often by 15-30 minutes, sometimes sessions were cancelled altogether! As you can see on this site from older reviews, this problem has been there before as well.
4. Overemphasizing of positive thinking mumbo jumbo
His positive thinking/visualization sessions can be outright dangerous for some weaker personalities. I believe also in positive thinking and visualization, but only to a certain degree. You have to still have a good sense of reality. Some weaker folks out there could really get into problems if they believe too much in this stuff and rely on it. Just to give a stupid example of what he wants to make his student believe... In one of his sessions he gave an example of the power of visualization by telling that one of his employees or co-workers on the site was visualizing to get a free parking lot on a saturday afternoon at a busy mall, something that he never got... he visualized it and.... bingo! He got one! ... this is just one funny example that comes to my mind, but you understand my point...
When I relate to "this site" I am referring to forexpeacearmy.com as I wrote my review initially for that site.
As this is a very long post, I've divided it into 2 parts.
PART I:
*****************
It has now been some time, since I've attended the pro room of fxknight.com. However, since then I've always felt this anger inside me when I think about these self-proclaimed experts in this market who fool aspiring traders by providing their services. I have to admit, that I did attend only fxknight.com and no other educational service, but I am pretty sure that in this business about 99% of educators sell mostly crap to their clients. So, my review would probably be similar for many other educators. Unfortunately for Andrei Knight (or Andrei Pehar or what his real name is) I've attended his service...
A. My background:
Traded stocks and options since the 90-ies, but without a concept (only gut feeling). Started taking trading seriously for over a year now, i.e. doing it full-time. It's been quite a journey.
Did all mistakes one can make at the beginning, including believing that an educational service would teach me how to trade. That's why I joined the pro room of fxknight.com for a few months. When I saw that these guys have no (or very little) clue themselves I've started to continue the journey on my own.
I've educted myself from many many books and trial and error, sitting endless hours in front of the screen and analyzing methods. Unfortunately, there is not one "bible" out there. The "truth" about trading is scattered over many books (the better ones only... more than 90% is also crap in this field)... you have to put the pieces of the puzzle together by yourself. That's how "it works".
However, I am now an above average profitable trader.
B. Main criticism regarding fxknight.com:
1. Lack of disclosure of performance metrics
He advertises that he backtested and forward-tested his methodology. But, if you ask him for concrete performance metrics of his system, he is beating around the bush! The only figure I've heard from him several times is that his trades "work about 75% of the time", i.e. that's his win rate. But why is he focusing so much on the win rate? What about profit factor, avg. win, avg. loss, % draw down, etc.? And on what instrument(s) did he test his method? During which period(s) did he test his method? You don't get any answer from him on these important metrics. He prefers to stay intangible. Why is that so?
This communication strategy of him can backfire. One can assume that he focuses on the win rate as it is easy to fool uneducated students with such figure. A 52% win rate does not sound good, of course, but every professional trader knows that the win rate alone is meaningless. It can be very misleading as many very profitable systems or methods have way worse win rates than 75%. The fact that he focuses only on the win rate gives an educated trader the feeling that his service is only fooling people.
But to make matters worse, in one of the sessions, his co-coach "YR" revealed by chance that you can not expect to make more than 1% return per month trading fxknight.com's methodology (without giving more info on risk per trade, etc. to get the 1% p.m.). This figure is for sure realistic for most folks getting into trading and trading any method. If you put this into perspective together with the 75% win rate you get an idea of the other performance metrics...
However, getting so few basic information regarding a method's performance should make anyone suspicious of the service.
2. Hindsight methodology
His complete methodology is only useful to describe what has happened so far. In hindsight he can explain very well the price action. That's where people get fooled. However, his methodology is almost useless when it comes to tradable ideas. He used so many support and resistance and fibonacci lines on his charts that later on you could always make sense out of the price action as some of the many lines always fit to price action. Also, several times he claimed that he forecasted this or that development in price in previous sessions, but if you had listened carefully, you knew, that he did not do that the way he presented it later. That left also a bad feeling about his methodology or his way to present things.
A further thing that makes any educated trader suspicious is the fact that his methodology relies heavily on indicators. He looks also at price action and emphasizes that price action is more important than the indicators (so much in his defense), but still, the use of ADX, stochastics and MACD shows that he is not a great trader. Such indicators are lagging by nature, they just describe what has happened so far. They have no predictive value at all! Most of the good traders do not use indicators to trade at all (I said "most", not all!). They rely mostly on price action alone.
3. Unreliability
He was late very often in the few months I've attended his service. Often by 15-30 minutes, sometimes sessions were cancelled altogether! As you can see on this site from older reviews, this problem has been there before as well.
4. Overemphasizing of positive thinking mumbo jumbo
His positive thinking/visualization sessions can be outright dangerous for some weaker personalities. I believe also in positive thinking and visualization, but only to a certain degree. You have to still have a good sense of reality. Some weaker folks out there could really get into problems if they believe too much in this stuff and rely on it. Just to give a stupid example of what he wants to make his student believe... In one of his sessions he gave an example of the power of visualization by telling that one of his employees or co-workers on the site was visualizing to get a free parking lot on a saturday afternoon at a busy mall, something that he never got... he visualized it and.... bingo! He got one! ... this is just one funny example that comes to my mind, but you understand my point...