Yep, and a lot of what he did was just that. But the best moments of teacher-student transference were unexpected. Like for example he would make a bad execution error, a mistake, and still make money on it. It was less technical and more just...being in the presence of someone who could make money. We would spot the same entry, take the trade, I would get out with a decent profit feeling good about myself, then 25 minutes later he would still be in the trade, and I would already be back in the red trying to chase it again. Another thing he made me aware of is the effect of creativity on trading. He just had certain technical tools that I've never seen anywhere on the internet or in a book but almost seemed like he just had fun noticing things and making up names/concepts to go with it, but that wasn't what he ultimately relied on to make money.
Mentorship
- Thread starter mikeriley
- Start date
Yep, and a lot of what he did was just that. But the best moments of teacher-student transference were unexpected. Like for example he would make a bad execution error, a mistake, and still make money on it. It was less technical and more just...being in the presence of someone who could make money. We would spot the same entry, take the trade, I would get out with a decent profit feeling good about myself, then 25 minutes later he would still be in the trade, and I would already be back in the red trying to chase it again. Another thing he made me aware of is the effect of creativity on trading. He just had certain technical tools that I've never seen anywhere on the internet or in a book but almost seemed like he just had fun noticing things and making up names/concepts to go with it, but that wasn't what he ultimately relied on to make money.
Changing a life so much is equal to saving a life & if you saved someone's life, then you lived a life worth living.One day I asked him why he teaches free of charge. He replied.."I choose the poorest
and the dumbest in the room". I didn't always agree with his brutal honesty.
Better few i say.
Or even few thousands.
Am mentoring last guy I will ever teach again, we on second year? It's been long road, some weeks he gets it and others...Few days been emotional melt down, we work through it, change timeframes and symbols...
Remember first year, he be down on day and I be driving, would have him call out prices and I identify support/resistance so he buy/sell till he got even for days. I'd ask him how far in percentages from yesterday's close or today's high/low, tell me when 30 minutes left till close, any H&S, small breaks, wedges, what is trend. Each one is an concept within itself, each one goes against retail trading.
I have traded live with him and he does well, but we all have other desires in life, watching screens for 44 years, I don't care to do. I check his charts each nite...
Trading takes so long to understand concepts then to memorize them like breathing which is subconscious. It is not methods that cause lossing days, it is not reading today's chart on when not to take trades.
I will keep plugging along, eventually he will get it.
Disagree.
IMO, (short term) trading is a very marginal business meaning that you essentially need to perform at a very high level in order to be successful, i.e., mastery. And this takes time and experience.
What you suggested was to let someone see you trade successfully. Fine. I don't disagree with that.
You could watch someone compete/perform at a very high level on TV, but seeing how it's done does not make you successful.
So, I have to strongly disagree that mentoring someone is ridiculously easy. Showing someone how to trade successfully may be, but that's not the same thing.
The only exception would be if someone had a mechanical system that required some discretion to use. Maybe that could be taught rather quickly. But anything beyond that will not be easily taught/learned.
There's no substitute for experience.
What a mentor can do of course is to steer you on the right path and shave years of our learning curve as your efforts may be concentrated better and more efficiently. I still don't think it will be a substitute for gaining personal experience in bull markets, bear markets, slower markets, faster markets and so on.
Good Evening mikeriley,Tribute to a friend named Doug.
Why?
Because when I was in the graveyard of desperation overcome with mental anguish, and emotional turmoil a wonderful friend helped me. Quite frankly, there are not enough words to describe all that he did for me and my wife.
One day I asked him why he teaches free of charge. He replied.."I choose the poorest
and the dumbest in the room". I didn't always agree with his brutal honesty.
I know my own shitty ego had to be broken, which is still a work in progress.
Maybe it's similar to those that have went through a near death experience. When you come out the other side your perspective about life and people does a 180.
I did not always believe that. At one time I scoffed at psychology being important
in trading. Doug once told me.."Mike, you will fail, and continue to fail
because your ego is too big to learn anything"
It was a hard lesson to understand trading strategies, risk management, discipline, and a host of other trading related material was not my real issue.
I struggled because my ego was is in the way.
I thank Doug for giving me a program to subdue the beast of ego.
It's definitely NOT easy, but probably the most important element
in my trading.
Thank you for being a Mentor when I needed you the most,
and an even greater Friend. R.I.P.
Thank you for sharing buddy. Glad the world has good people out here who want to help others.
I hope I can mentor later in my trading career as well, for Free.
R.I.P. Doug
But perhaps what you see is what won't work. Its all about watching good habits be executed over and over. Imagine wanting to play tennis, and you think you're doing good because you know how to hit the ball, but for some reason you never win matches. Then after watching a pro play, you learn that they not only hit the ball, but they have to always run towards the ball because the other player hardly ever hits the ball back to where you are. It might sound stupid since we all know how tennis works, but watching just this one profound change can make all the difference to your game. Everyone might say just hit the ball, and you're already hitting it when it comes to you, but nobody ever says how aggressively you have to run after it as well.
I'm just honestly so sick of people saying they will help other traders work on their own method. Fuck, each one of us that have been here for years can help someone else. All we do is look at their stats, look at their trades, see where the losses are, and magically come up with a set of rules that would turn those losses into wins. Then we sound so smart! We can throw out catches phrases like "here you chased the price, and now your stop had to be too big", which is always obvious after you know what happened. Or "here you used a tight stop when you're clearly trading in chop", which is once again only ever apparent in hindsight. It all sounds brilliant when someone wants to mentor you because they have the advantage of stating the obvious after the fact.
If I was to ever have a mentor, I would say let me watch you trade for one week so I get a feel for your trading style and stats. Then for the second week let me follow your trades. If of course I find that I can't even blindly follow a winning trader and match his performance, then its a big clue about where the problem is. Third week I would want to start anticipating the setups and make suggestions in advance to see if he would agree. Like here comes a double bottom and it looks oversold, do you think a long here would work? Its not about him teaching me anything, its about me asking questions and picking his brain. I don't expect him to have a curriculum planned.
He probably doesn't even know how to teach, as is the case with most professions. To be an excellent teacher is an even higher skill than to excel at that activity, assuming of course that you excel at said activity. To do it well and be able to teach it is extraordinary. So why are we looking for such a person? There really are only three combinations.
1. You're not really that good at trading, but you've studied so much and do such great analysis that you probably have lots of great insight to share. And since you're never making live calls or can prove you're trading, its easy to demonstrate how vast your trading knowledge is. This is where most people fall into.
2. You're a great trader, but can't quite explain how you do what you do. You get hunches, based on tons of screen time, but its not something that you can really put down on paper, and obviously don't even care to. You have your rules, but know how to break them because each day really is different. So you're willing to take the risk to put on an aggressive trade because you understand why you did it and how you will manage it. You simply journal for yourself, or maybe not even anymore as what you're doing is essentially the same day after day, and so your main focus is on proper execution and counting your profits. This is the type of guy who would make a great mentor of the type I am describing.
3. This guy is not only an excellent trader, but an excellent teacher. He has a way of making concepts easy to understand, but most importantly, can asses where the student is lacking. Its like if you're teaching another language and the dumb teacher would just get students to repeat works after them hoping they catch onto the accent. The excellent teacher would understand that for some languages, tongue position is of utmost importance, and yet in other languages, sounds don't come from exact positions of the tongue. The teacher would know that even before we practice the sounds, we first need to make sure the tongue is in the right place of the mouth. This type of ability, to not only perhaps the task with a high degree of proficiency, but also identify where others are failing at it is truly unique.
With regards to trading, this teacher, as an example, would be able to assess that the student cannot process information as quickly as others, so its critical for this student to develop more of a swing trading strategy vs. having to make decisions in seconds. Or perhaps another student is extremely fearful of losses, so its perhaps best to look for a strategy without long hold times, focusing on high win rate vs. a strategy with huge wins, but lots of little losses along the way.
So this type of teacher is not only just showing a student how they make money, but able to asses the failings of the student with regards to their own trading, and put them back on the road of the path that they are on. Its like they are the world's best coder and can not only code themselves, but fix other people's coding deficiencies, which I hear is extremely difficult to do if you are tasked with fixing the bugs in what someone else wrote without the luxury of starting from scratch and just doing it how you would want to.
Clearly finding a teacher like this is an impossible endeavor. But striving to find someone in the second category is I think vastly superior to picking up someone from the first. We have tons of people here at ET who fall into category 1. Category 3 we can all just forget about.
Hello NoahA,
I respect and understand what you are saying.
I am not sure why ET members love bullshitting so much and not keeping things very simple.
The purpose of a mentor is to show the mentee how to makes money. PERIOD
The first thing the mentor should do is show the mentee how he/she makes money.
Teaching someone how to make money, when you can not make money yourself, is stupid and dumb and waste of the mentee time.
Trader fail because they have no-one they trust to show them how to make money. PERIOD
I have no business on this planet giving trading advice, teaching, mentorship, knowledge about trading, because I am NOT a consistent profitable trader.
I wish everyone gets seriously.
If I was to ever mentor someone, I would simple and common sense do the follow in the exact order:
1. Show them my tax returns or broker account the past X years of my trading.
2. Tell them shut the fuck up and watch me trade for the next XX days and learn how to make money.
3. Done.
lol, why is everyone acting like they do not want those 3 steps in their current trading journey.
like seriously, everyone stop bullshitting so much.
The goal and purpose of mentoring is show someone how to make money consistently, you can not do that if you are not making money. Period.
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I like the cut of your jib.
How much of your commentary consists of Price Action Setup Calls?
e.g. Hey Double Bottom setup forming on ES 5minute at 9:56 Eastern Time
...aaaaannnddddd TRIGGERED on close after breach of the neckline in classic fashion at 10:01:03. Here we go...
...and how much is other stuff?
5% setups and 95% interpretation and mentoring and other stuff and silence?
I like 5% of it so far.
especially if there is a common understanding of what's being called, e.g. a classic Double
Bottom is generally statted out with these parameters. e.g. https://elitetrader.com/et/threads/...t-right-here-baby.335635/page-18#post-5309309
Nuances to the classic DB could of course be the responsiblility of the trader e.g. aggressive
entries resembling a Sperandeo 1-2-3 as much as a DB...
e.g. https://elitetrader.com/et/threads/...t-right-here-baby.335635/page-29#post-5610677
Man, that's what I like. Use a gang of sycronized calibrated eyes to cover multitude of
products and timeframes and sharing a common understanding of simple documented classic
PA setup/triggers in real time intraday trading.
Hell yeah brother. Who's interested? oh, yeah, you gotta have rules based traders for that.
lol. Still interested up in here. Barebones not for education nor entertainment calls. ET
works well as accompanyment for the rest of what a trader might want to communicate
about.
But when it comes to - Use a gang of insync calibrated eyes to cover multitude of products
and timeframes and sharing a common understanding of simple documented classic PA
setup/triggers in real time intraday trading. PM me. Most certainly absolutely, hit me up! Thank you.
Chart posters, think about it.
Hello MacBookProHo,
You are right.
That is why I will always say the Trading Business is BEST legal Business that EVER existed. It is really remarkable how easy it is to get rich so fast in this Trading Business.
All you have to do is sell trading products/books/courses/algos/mentorship and add this at the end of your website and all is good.
Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. Results not typical.
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SimpleMeLike, if after five years of paper trading testing you haven't cracked the code yet...
You should seriously consider just being a Trading Teacher Guru/Personality/Showman/Salesman all across social media and the web.
If you want that magical Million....you will have to be real about reality.