Spike Trade.com
- Thread starter deaddog
- Start date
yes I was on it, its very poor. The group consistently underperform the S&P and their gold star traders barely out perform it. You ask a question and you get told to buy another course or listen to a paid webinar. Website is prehistoric and their online tools are like an 80's video game
The only positive thing is that they are an honest bunch and in some ways its vital to see how the reality for most traders.
I thought Alex Elder was a guru after reading his books but I realised that he is just living off hype like all the other ones and their main income is not from trading
To be frank most of these well known traders are not a smart bunch in the traditional IQ sense, it's just that they learned a craft over years and become good marketing themselves. It irritates me that they invent some new system and give you a long story how they suddenly became enlightened like Moses getting ten commandments from the God himself
For example Alex Elder Impulse system : Quote "I woke up in the middle of the night in a faraway hotel and sat up bolt upright in bed!"
Its just MACD and EMA for trend , nothing more! and that just boils down to a pile of MA. If you want to understand the New Highs - New Lows index (lets ignore volume by the way ), you buy the book ,.... or just read the title and you have it pretty much figured out.
The devil is in the detail and often right information is presented in a misleading way e.g "I made $3,8000 on a day trade", until you start looking closely at the the amount of shares they bought, $500,000 capital outlay! (0.76%)
Trying to be positive: like all of these sites, it could be worth signing up for a month or two go through old picks and see what happend, you might learn something.
The say I see proper verified and audited trading accounts by a national company is the day I will sign up to another service.
The only positive thing is that they are an honest bunch and in some ways its vital to see how the reality for most traders.
I thought Alex Elder was a guru after reading his books but I realised that he is just living off hype like all the other ones and their main income is not from trading
To be frank most of these well known traders are not a smart bunch in the traditional IQ sense, it's just that they learned a craft over years and become good marketing themselves. It irritates me that they invent some new system and give you a long story how they suddenly became enlightened like Moses getting ten commandments from the God himself
For example Alex Elder Impulse system : Quote "I woke up in the middle of the night in a faraway hotel and sat up bolt upright in bed!"
Its just MACD and EMA for trend , nothing more! and that just boils down to a pile of MA. If you want to understand the New Highs - New Lows index (lets ignore volume by the way ), you buy the book ,.... or just read the title and you have it pretty much figured out.
The devil is in the detail and often right information is presented in a misleading way e.g "I made $3,8000 on a day trade", until you start looking closely at the the amount of shares they bought, $500,000 capital outlay! (0.76%)
Trying to be positive: like all of these sites, it could be worth signing up for a month or two go through old picks and see what happend, you might learn something.
The say I see proper verified and audited trading accounts by a national company is the day I will sign up to another service.
this answer is the most detailed and to the point without BS i have seen in many days on this forum. People like you encourage us to visit these forums . Please remain same my friend.
I agree. Thanks you Captain Caveman.
cheers man, I have been around the block a few times and my view is that trading is like any other discipline, sure you need smart advice , learn from other successful folks. But when you look around you always have someone selling a quick fix somewhere and skip the details. It takes a lot of courage to analysis yourself and take responsibility. Fatties are the very ones who keep buying fitness videos but never lose weight, skinny guys trying to look like arnie but stay weedy, someone learning piano trying to become a master in 3 months, language learners claiming they are fluent in a language through Rosetta stone, traders who religiously following Warrior trading etc , there is always a common denominator with all this. People sign up living on an "its all going to turn good now, just a matter of time " dream, that never really comes.
I have been there many times
Most of the advice I see in these paid services is just fluff. Its like saying to a fat man, "stop eating KFC and move more", or in the trading world "don't risk more than 1% and use stops", "no sh@t man, 2 bad trades and I worked that out for myself "
Don't get me wrong there is good information out there , finding it and sifting through the BS is hard. With trading I have a rule of thumb, I ignore all there cherry picked charts, open up my own chart , jump back a 1000 bars and go through it bar by bar saying "ok what would I do here based on a selected indicator, buy/ sell? where do I put the stop / limit?" and so on, and see what actually transpires. You hear everyone talking about the important time frames , what happens when an analysis based in a 10/ 2 min TF results in a LONG trade being on around all day, use the 1 hour and daily TF and the 'secret' indicators the gurus suggested to use are all telling you to exit?. Common for trades to last much longer than your initially expectation but the fact they thought to never mention it makes me think, they just repeating each other.
The great thing (unlike other disciplines I mention above） is that all the tools you need right there for free！ News , Yahoo or Barchart price charts / indicators etc. I did this with silver and my performance immediately improved, It's tedious I admit but better than constantly blowing cash every week
After I read your post, went back and re-read Dr. Elder's book.
It is actually a good guidepost for new traders. You won't get winning recipes but some of the practices he preached are worth following.
Yeah indeed, don't get me wrong, the book is very useful for starting out and understanding the concepts but I always have strong reservations with many of these type of books. I wouldn't say it's deliberately misleading but the book is called "Trading for a living". The odds of becoming successful are not stated enough and the gains are too exaggerated . Even if you quit your job and have a 100k trading account, you are going to struggle to make 20k in 2 years for the average trader. If one had a job with a salary of say $70k pa, this soon puts a damp rag over getting into trading. In my view authors have a social responsibility to keep it realistic
All these authors lead the reader into believing they are on a path to riches. They downplay the negative aspect a LOT and put a veneer of simplicity around the potential positive side. For example , no author should ever talk in $$$ amounts, only %age gains. Dr elder examples are up to $500k position sizes which doesn't get stated. This is it unrealistic for the average reader. Also he favours the MACD approach but this is notoriously misleading at times, yet the books are constantly, filled with cherry picked charts . There is no study on intensive back testing, failure rates of traders /indicators and so on.
Also the main gripe I have with these authors is that given I have done many different things in my career and it's the one discipline I see whereby no one ever seems to prove their ability. This is a serious problem especially simplicity of getting a trading account audited, However they just talk about it and readers are suppose to take in on faith alone .
How much faith would you have in a book on orthopedic surgery if the author has at no point proven he held a medical licence ar even performed did an operation?
Perhaps a harsh review buy it's wise to be somewhat cynical
Me neither, I don't trade his indicators, I now use price charts without any indicators thanks to some coaching from @MrScalper.
For me the chapters on trading psychology were helpful because they steered me away from the crowd, got off the beaten path, away from the methods he preached.