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The secret that all the Guru's are desperate to keep hiden.
- Thread starter Brandonf
- Start date
Quote from mokwit:
Op excluded, I would say 'The secret that all the Guru's are desperate to keep hidden' is that they don't make their money from actual trading.
Well, I think that the honest ones will admit that guruing is pretty popular. In my own case I made more money selling stock trading info then by trading stocks in the seven years that I did both. My total take on TFMS, Swingtrader.net, Teachmetotrade and Synergy was around $1.8million during that period. Over the same timeframe I both traded my own account and managed accounts for others. My total income from Mgnt fees and my own capital gains was just barely over $1million during this period of time. In my estimation I did well with both, though I'm sure some people will point to the lower figure trading and think that it says something. I will also admit that without the "guruing" I probably never would have reached the level of success as a trader that I did reach. First of all, just like in martial arts, the teacher often learns more then the student. Second though is that I never had to really worry about money. A lot of traders, if they go through a difficult month really start to worry and feel like they have to press stuff. Since we never lived off the trading income (that was saved and only spent for special occassions) having a drawdown in that account did not effect my life too much. It allowed me to never have to worry about paying the bills, or getting into trap of digging a hole every month. A lot of guys I know ended up broke because they had say a $50,000 account which they could do $4000/$5000 per month with consistently. That was great and it paid the bills until they had one bad month that they lost $10,000. Well now the problem is that they can only make about $3500 per month without increasing risk, and if they are living on say $4700 per month now they all of the sudden have to take $1200 out of the account each month. By the end of the year they have taken out another $15,000, and that's not compounding those losses which actually makes it worse. This is a scenario I saw happen to a lot of people, and actually the fear that it could happen to me was one of the strongest drivers for me in finally deciding to start a website.
Even to this day I have websites, but not any more for traders. I sell stuff for people with cluster headaches, yeast infections, scrap metal buyers, speed reading, time managment, back pain cures and picking up hot girls even if your a geek (I should really study my own material in this one). None of these business are huge, each one brings in about $1000 to $2000 a month for me, but the thing is each of them took me about three hours to setup, and I spend about 4 or 5 hours a month on all of them now. One of my goals for this year is to build up the number of products I have to offer and to break $1million in non "how to make money" related info products.
I did have my forex site up on clickbank for awhile. I created it while I was in isolation in the ICU this summer and it did very well. Four and a half months and brought in around $25,000 I think, but I just recently sold it because I'm not really interested in being in that market.
Anyway I'm just rambling now. I think I must be the only person in the world that percocets give INSOMNIA too because I'll be damned if I can ever sleep after taking the crap. Surgery went well, my leg is real sore, but for the time being Mr Perc is handling well...
Anyway..I hope the post here answers a few questions about the financials of someone running a site..what they are...what is the motivations etc.
Tomorrow I'll record a video on how to do the trading diary. I started to do one on viddler about 15 minutes ago, but when I listened my voice is seriously slurrrrrrrrrrred...so I'll get a better one up tomorrow and then in the coming days after that get a text version as well. I know that I learn best if I can see something, hear it and read it, so that's what I will try to do in this case..because I do think that the trading journal is probably one of your most critical tools towards becoming profitable.
Quote from Brandonf:
I
Anyway I'm just rambling now. I think I must be the only person in the world that percocets give INSOMNIA too because I'll be damned if I can ever sleep after taking the crap. Surgery went well, my leg is real sore, but for the time being Mr Perc is handling well...
Ahhhhhhhh .... Now there, finally, something I'm interested in buying from you Brandon. Yes. They are all "Crap". Let me take all that "Crap" from you. How much for the rest of the bottle?
Your best pal,
Ole Bob
Quote from mokwit:
Thanks for your honesty and the figures Brandonf. It confirms what I already had long suspected, setting yourself up as a guru has a much better R:R and payoff than trading.
There is a lot of money that can be made for sure, some people do very well, but others dont. My friend Ivica just closed his chatroom after having tried to make a go of it for the last year and a half or so. Ivica is one of the most sincere and talented teachers I've come across in this business and is also a good trader, but it just didnt work out for him. For others it does though. Over the years I have helped 9 guys start up trading related websites. Of them 1 is doing very well (seven figures) 3 of them are doing pretty well (mid six figures) and 2 are doing ok (high five figures to low six figures). Three of them where never really able to get much traction and quit. One of them I think gave up too early and could have had a great business, the other two I think did not "have it".
The thing is there is a lot of money to be had on the web. For years the only thing I offered was my trading related products, but then a year and a half ago I was in the hospital for a little over a month and started to mess around with other things as well. Now I have 11 sites total, my "worst" one makes about $250 per month, my "best" one about $3000. I'm not setting the world on fire - but it's kept me off welfare over the last few years when I've been too sick to trade or run a trading website. It's kept my mind occupied and given me a reason to wake up in the morning, I think it's probably a large part of the reason I'm starting to do better.
The thing with the internet is there is so much stuff. You can sell physical products (books, shoes, food (I'm in the process of researching to launch a discount gourmet coffee seller, (blatent self promoting here) ). I've also helped my sister Breann setup three sites on the web in the last 7 months. She's a full time nurse with the transplant team at the University of Iowa, so she's not got all the time in the world, but one of her sites brings in about $500 a month, the other around $800 and the best one around $1200. It's not lighting the world on fire, but for a single 27 year old with a mortgage, car payment and student loans it's pretty damn helpful. She probably spent 40/50 hours getting them setup and then about 45 minutes per day to keep it going. Her total start up costs came to about $1000 which included Dreamweaver and Camtasia.
I helped my cousin Sara launch her own product on training horses (she used to be a trainer for some big horse show that travels all over the world). In six months we were able to go from zero to launching a training series that brought in just over $100,000, plus she got 90 subscribers to a $50 per month newsletter. We are getting ready to relaunch the course and I think we can expect to do 50% better this time.
On the other hand I tried to teach my cousin Justin and his wife Shelly how to run a few business online and it just didnt work. I never wanted to help someone so much in my life because Justin is more like a brother to me then a cousin and he has had a lot of financial trouble lately. We tried to launch three sites (three is really a key number) but it just didnt take. He ended up investing hundreds of hours and around $5000 that he couldnt afford to lose (mostly because he thought he needed to create his own fancy ass product (which you dont have to do) and then on one failed adwords campaign after another.
I think that if I look at the three of them the biggest difference is in how they approached things. Breann (my sis) and Sara both pretty much said "well I have never done this before, so tell me what to do and I will do it". They pretty much followed a paint by numbers type methodology. Justin on the other hand went at it more like "Well tell me what to do, and I'll think about it and try to improve it so that I can get an even better result then you tell me I can get". He could just never get excited about the idea of 10 sites making $300 per month (which is easy to do), he'd much rather have had 1 making $3000. You can do that too once you learn how to scale your business..but I think that starting small is the key.
So anyway, I'm posting this stuff because for whatever reason over the last four days I've gotten a ton of PM's from people asking if its really possible to start a business online and make money from it. A lot of the people asking this are people who are just learning to trade, and so the passive income would be a huge relief to them in psychological terms (not to mention it just pays a few bills). So anyway, I have created a poll which basically asks "Would you like me to teach how to create a profitable online business". I know this is not the purpose that ET was setup for - so I think I'd keep the thread in Chitchat - but I also think that it's something that could help a lot of people. You would have to keep in mind that I've never "formalized" the teaching process for this stuff before -so I could really suck- but If there are a enough people here who would like to learn I think it might be fun for me to teach something new.
The poll is here: http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=149376
If you don't care one way or the other, don't vote.
Brandon,
I really, really want to believe that you made money trading but did you ever showed your statements like your friend Vad or have audited records ?
I really, really want to believe that you made money trading but did you ever showed your statements like your friend Vad or have audited records ?
Quote from freewilly:
You only prevented losing $350 a day by not trading from 10:30am to 2pm. Why don't you take one step further, if your observation is so true. Why don't you trade exactly opposite from 10:30am to 2pm? Would that make you $350 a day other than wasted 3 hours?
freewilly
Good luck with that willy.