Excellent question.
Much of this depends on the extent of help you will be getting. If you were going enter into some sort of paid mentorship, then I think its absolutely legitimate to ask for proof of some sort. You will hear people say that anything can be faked, and this is true. Some ways to fake things would of course be photoshop. A person can easily add entries onto a chart that aren't there, and they can just as easily remove exits. They can also show all their trades while SIM trading, and it would be easy to hide this fact with some platforms. Statements can be just as easily faked, along with time stamps of trades, etc. At the same time though, if someone goes to the trouble to do this, you are at least dealing with someone who is very motivated, and most people on ET probably aren't that motivated, so simply asking for a bit of proof is enough to scare most away.
Now if what you are getting is just help online from those that claim to know what they are doing, then asking for financial type proof might be a stretch. It certainly makes sense though to ask for some sort demonstration that their trading help or method would prove to be useful. There are some common ways to get around this that in a way makes the teacher sound smarter and in some ways makes it sound legitimate to the student, but one must remember that this is simply side stepping the question.
What I have come across are answers such as:
1. "It doesn't matter what I can extract out of the market, what matters is what you can." On the surface, this sounds fair. Some guys are happy to get 5 points out of a move, others might not bother unless they can see getting at least 20 points. But this answer doesn't really help all that much.
2. "My tolerance for risk is different than yours". This one also sounds fair on the surface. To someone trading an hourly chart, risking 10 points might not seem like much, but if you're only using 1 min bars, 10 points might be quite a large stop.
The problem of course is that if someone is trying to help someone along with how to trade, then it makes sense that what they do themselves and what they teach should in some ways match up. Therefore, showing someone how to trade shouldn't be so much different from how they trade themselves. If the teacher is teaching a supposed easy method, then why wouldn't the teacher use this same method? Likewise, if there is a better method that the teacher uses themselves, then why wouldn't they be teaching this same method to the student?
I think much more could be learned from watching what a trader is doing and seeing everything they are looking at, rather than listening to them go on and on about how they trade. What they tell you to do and how to do it pales in comparison to seeing what they actually do themselves with their own money on the line. Its a classic case of "do as I say not as I do". Every successful trader could have a firm set of rules, and every single one of them will break their own rules because of some subset of rules they forget to mention. This subset of rules often comes from intuition gained by lots of screen time and this is difficult to teach. But at the very least, if you can see what the trader is doing, you stand a much better chance than just following what he tells you to do.
Take this an an example. Handle123 posts lots of charts here in some of the journal threads. They are a little difficult to read sometimes (I have yet to figure out where the entry and exit is exactly.. LOL), but the idea behind them is sound. He is buying or selling based on price in relation to a moving average and bollinger bands. He keeps tight stops and it seems like tight targets. But you can't just buy or sell every time price touches a line, and you can see him add lots of other info such as triple tops or double bottoms, or time factors or, etc. The devil is in the details and hence weighs heavily on lots of experience. My main point though is that at the very least, he is showing what he is doing and how he does it, and even then who knows what else he is looking at, what other time frames, and perhaps other instruments to gauge the market as a whole, etc.
So a teacher might say that you can test the method out for yourself to evaluate it, and this is yet another valid excuse to not show any proof, but I think a demonstration of how they themselves trade via their own method would be the best proof of all. Good luck seeing any of this.
