<i>"Because all you need to do is read the threads for different ideas, work on them to adapt them to your own trading style and simply develop your own approach and methods..."</i>
Replace that with: "Because all you need to do is watch the Texas hold 'em shows for different ideas, work on them to adapt them to your own poker-playing style and simply develop your own approach and methods."
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Both statements are equally 200% false. Gambling for a living (which is what we do), either day trading or card playing is not nearly that simple or easy to learn. No online forum period, including but not limited to ET will ever teach anyone the basics on how to trade. Here's why:
#1: Newbie has no idea where to begin. Scalping? Position trading? Buy & hold? SCT? SPM? FX? XYZ?
All of them are/were mentioned before, none covered in depth except for SCT by Spyder.
#2: Newbie has no idea how to self-teach. ES 5min chart ledges, multiple hi/lo failures, candlestick patterns on swing trades, scaled in & out tactics can be given all the rules on. Makes no difference... unless someone rolls up their sleeves, spends weeks = months = years with students showing them how to learn, it ain't gonna happen like that.
School of hard knocks, aka trial & error will eventually work. Just know that you better pull a big wallet out for that one, as the months & years roll by while stuck in the mud.
For every person here who touts they learned it all with nil lost or spent money, 10,000 who pass thru will fail big-time and trickle away huge sums of money trying to learn on the cheap. No different than the card player who tries it on his own at $1 or $5 tables.
The only difference between poker and trading is that poker has some excellent tech-analysis how to books covering the critical stuff. None of those, not one title exists for trading by comparison.
#3: A few examples on charts look good, in hindsight. Problem is, those ledge failure = breaks or candle patterns do not look nearly the same while unfolding in front of newbies in real time. Read & react via self-taught approach takes years for most to accomplish. What is crystal clear to some is opaque glass to others until they develop the same "vision" to see.
#4: Newbies will seldom develop an overall approach with an edge AND MOST IMPORTANTLY learn to manage themselves, the biggest block of our learning curve by far.
Trying to self-learn where to start, how to hone an approach, how to manage it thru all three separate market trends (up, down and sideways) while learning to manage all inner emotions is a herculean task. Good luck with that.
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$6,000 is too much money for any education other than one-on-one, direct personal coaching. But, I've known literally hundreds of traders who lose that in a week, day or single trade to end their career before ever catching on to the entire process.
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ET is a fine place to visit, much like the local coffee shop. Gives a chance to talk with like kind, share some war stories, laugh at the crazies and once in awhile add some tidbit of knowledge to the base core. As for finding a base core approach here, maybe it exists. Best of luck with that.
This profession is hard, damn hard to master. I know two ES traders that push 100-lot or bigger size and make six - seven figures annually. Both of them admit it took about ten years from their beginning to consistent success trading with size.
Many traders here have put in five, six, seven, eight or nine years and will quit before they reach the point where the professional traders I refer to now enjoy. How many work too long and quit too soon? Who can say.
One thing I know for an absolute fact: gleaning a couple tidbits here from ET and then reading a few books ain't preparing anyone for anything except consistent donation to pro traders' accounts. No one has to spend a dime purchasing education from anyone else... but everyone will most assuredly pay for their knowledge from the market herself.
Beware of those price tags on that. It is by far the steepest cost of all.
