I have bought Al Brooks' Trading Course

Wouldn't agree with you here. Most successful traders have win rates of less than 50%. I myself have a win rate historically of 37%. ( I hear George Soros has a win rate of less than 30%).

I've had a losing day with a 90% win rate and nicely profitable day with an 11% win rate.
 
The issue here is not whether technical analysis is a fraud or not, clearly technical analysis mixed with years of experience and individual discretion can be profitable, however, very few sellers of trading products mention this.

Are marketers of technical analysis and day trading, whether they are misinterpreted or not, a bigger threat to individual traders' financial and mental well-being than technical analysis is, in-and-of-itself? Is this a case of beneficent trading gods (presumably profitable for-profit educators) giving fire to the ignorant masses, and whatever blame for damage caused by this should be placed solely on the individual trader and not on the individual marketers and the industry as a whole?
 
Wouldn't agree with you here. Most successful traders have win rates of less than 50%. I myself have a win rate historically of 37%. ( I hear George Soros has a win rate of less than 30%).

My perspective is day trading.

With a low win percentage you need some fairly large winners just in order to break even. With huge volatility that may be possible, but as soon as markets change, as they always do, you're chopped to pieces.
 
> the concepts he illustrates and discusses require context and are part of a larger framework

This is probably the one most important aspect that has to be taken into account to see the value in Al's work and PA overall! Al is a very discretionary trader and CONTEXT is the reason that keeps him away from trading in other ways.

The advantage of context is that, utilized appropriately, results in a very impressive win rate. However, most will not be able to appreciate Brooks' style and methodology purely because of the fact that "context" is not one single element that you note/observe. It is a collection of many components, which in turn have their own context imposed by other market activities. Once this part of Brooks' is understood, which I think may be the hardest to grasp, a trader should see a huge paradigm shift in their trading.

Most traders that see no value or disregard Al's method, may be doing so due to the context (among other things) not being understood in it's truest nature.
 
Did you read his book, Reading Price Charts Bar By Bar?

If you did read at least the majority of it, did you it read slowly enough to understand it?

The reason I doubt you read it and/or took the time required to understand it is because

> it's a difficult read and I personally spent about an hour reading a few pages at a time and rarely understood all of what I read until later, sometimes much later and only after discussing it with another trader.

Yes. I read it and studied it very carefully at least twice, took notes, printed charts and made my own.

...and most aspiring traders are looking for something that feels like a Holy Grail to them because "hard work/long hours" is for losers and they know darn well that traders make easy money hand over fist while lounging on their yachts, therefore any method that seems confusing or complex is a scam.

What the fuck?

> it's not at all about trading individual isolated price bars.

That's the premise behind his approach. He says that every single tick matters.

> the concepts he illustrates and discusses require context and are part of a larger framework.

And what framework would that be?

I'm fairly confident that not even once did he mention something as simple as trading in relation to yesterday's OHLC levels or other simple statistics that's extremely useful.
 
This is probably the one most important aspect that has to be taken into account to see the value in Al's work and PA overall! Al is a very discretionary trader and CONTEXT is the reason that keeps him away from trading in other ways.

The advantage of context is that, utilized appropriately, results in a very impressive win rate. However, most will not be able to appreciate Brooks' style and methodology purely because of the fact that "context" is not one single element that you note/observe. It is a collection of many components, which in turn have their own context imposed by other market activities. Once this part of Brooks' is understood, which I think may be the hardest to grasp, a trader should see a huge paradigm shift in their trading.

Most traders that see no value or disregard Al's method, may be doing so due to the context (among other things) not being understood in it's truest nature.
This is probably the one most important aspect that has to be taken into account to see the value in Al's work and PA overall! Al is a very discretionary trader and CONTEXT is the reason that keeps him away from trading in other ways.

The advantage of context is that, utilized appropriately, results in a very impressive win rate. However, most will not be able to appreciate Brooks' style and methodology purely because of the fact that "context" is not one single element that you note/observe. It is a collection of many components, which in turn have their own context imposed by other market activities. Once this part of Brooks' is understood, which I think may be the hardest to grasp, a trader should see a huge paradigm shift in their trading.

Most traders that see no value or disregard Al's method, may be doing so due to the context (among other things) not being understood in it's truest nature.

What is that context you're talking about?
 
To put it simply, I'm trying to see if Al Brooks has info that can help me become a better trader on the technical side.

@Visaria if you truly want to judge Al's method, I'm afraid you are going to have to dig into his books. The difficulty of Brook's video is similar to Volmann's work, which I would rate as an introductory level to pure PA.

The books are 3-4 times harder and very time consuming. Most people do not finish with his book, but benefit hugely even if they go through half of it.

If you value the videos (more a summary of the books), you might want to get your hands on his books.
 
The reason it's so hard to read is because it's very poorly written and because it's largely subjective, intuitive and poorly organized.

And the reason they're writing books is because they're not earning any money as traders. :)

I mean - If you had something really, really good that you had worked really hard to put together. Would you be publishing it and selling it to others almost for free? Would you be spending all your time on forums trying to educate others?

Or would you keep it to yourself and become filthy rich?
 
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