| Author |
Message |
     orangeguy
Member
Username: orangeguy
Post Number: 53
Registered: 07-2004Rating: N/A
Votes: 0
|
| | Wednesday, March 22, 2006 - 05:41 pm: |  
|
Hi,
Just want to see if anyone has done the course run by hometrader (run by jason davis)? If teaches you to develop your own trading system with mentor support. About to goto an intro session to see what its like. Its $6k and i have always been weary of these courses. Can anyone share any views on the course?
Many Thanks.
(Message edited by orangeguy on March 22, 2006)
|
ingot54
Member
Username: ingot54
Post Number: 1229
Registered: 05-2004Rating: N/A
Votes: 0
|
| | Wednesday, March 22, 2006 - 06:04 pm: |
|
Orangeguy
Your question is another in a long list of similar questions posed to this forum.
It seems the prices get higher for these courses the longer the bull run continues.
By all means attend, but if you were running this course as a business, (as opposed to operating the system to make money for yourself that way), how would you pitch the business to potential purchasers?
I imagine you would trot out a few of your most successful traders, and as many stats as possible, to show that indeed this can be done.
You would also need an "angle"- a method no one else has publicised or sold before, so that your product appears unique. Perhaps an unusual combination of indicators...?
Most of these courses can show their profitability on the night. When you go along to check it out, try to find out how strong they are on money management. Ask as many questions as you can, publicly, and see how much detail you are able to (publicly) receive in response.
At the end of the day, there is nothing new under the trading sun. Most methods will work, provided stops are placed in appropriate places, and entry is set to provide safety, plus an edge on probability. As well, the method needs to allow for unlimited upside.
As is often stated in reply to questions like this, there are some on this forum whom you would be better served to approach privately, with an offer of $500 per hour for tuition.
Your $6k would buy you 12 hours. I guarantee you would be profitable after 3 hours with someone like Tony_M, Peter1, Spider, Justice, Stickman, Stevo, and on and on. That leaves a lot of change for you to invest.
I think you know that - you have been around here long enough.
I have seen the adverts for Home Trader - they do look impressive, and they always pop up whenever the ASX Trading Game is in full swing. It may be co-incidental, but it just happens to be the time when many Mums and Dads "would-be" traders are feeling for the first time the thrill of placing an investment into the share market.
Please report back on your findings. I hope I have not appeared too cynical, and that you are not put off.
Also ask yourself if the style of trading would suit you. That is, do you have to stare at the screen all day? Is this the kind of "freedom" you had in mind when wanting to be a trader? Locked in your chair, following tick-by-tick?
Incredible Charts
now with US Data
- AMEX, NASDAQ and NYSE data
- OTC BB and Pink Sheet stocks
- more than 500 market and sector indices
|
|
|
|
Keep Smiling
Trading style :CFD's predominantly. Looking for ways to enter CFD trading over long term.
|
ingot54
Member
Username: ingot54
Post Number: 1230
Registered: 05-2004Rating: N/A
Votes: 0
|
| | Wednesday, March 22, 2006 - 06:06 pm: |
|
PS - My response was not specifically directed at you, Orangeguy - you were honestly seeking out if anyone else has had a look at this.
My response was also an attempt to warn any would-be readers too, about the risks of paying for courses of this nature, particularly at such a premium.
Keep Smiling
Trading style :CFD's predominantly. Looking for ways to enter CFD trading over long term.
|
orangeguy
Member
Username: orangeguy
Post Number: 54
Registered: 07-2004Rating: N/A
Votes: 0
|
| | Wednesday, March 22, 2006 - 10:08 pm: |
|
Hi Ignot,
I thank you for your reply and your very useful opinion. From a chat I have had with them so far, they do emphasise heavily on money management, most notably stop losses and position sizing. The aspect I like about the course is that they are not selling you a blackbox, rather they 'coach' you to create your own trading system to suit your trading style and back test it with a mentor allocated to you for 12 months.
I also understand that as a business, they will put a positive spin to the whole course at the intro session. I am considering a few options at the moment and hope to become a full time trader.
While I am currently trading part time while completing my studies, my results are not great enough to sustain as a full time job. Hence why I am looking for a mentor to guide me into the right direction.
I do appreciate that you have provided me with another point of view, and I also look forward to hearing other people's opinion including any that have completed this course before.
Cheers.
|
ingot54
Member
Username: ingot54
Post Number: 1231
Registered: 05-2004Rating: N/A
Votes: 0
|
| | Thursday, March 23, 2006 - 08:04 am: |
|
Always remember when you are dealing with someone who wants what you've got, YOU are the guy in orange!
Keep Smiling
Trading style :CFD's predominantly. Looking for ways to enter CFD trading over long term.
|
tony_m
Member
Username: tony_m
Post Number: 580
Registered: 01-2003Rating: 
Votes: 1
|
| | Thursday, March 23, 2006 - 09:10 am: |
|
Orangeguy,
I have been reading comments for years on the forum about a range of courses and trading systems either black or grey box etc and mostly quite expensive, some have spent as much as $20K or even $30K or more.
I cant recall a case where anyone overwhelmingly thought it money well spent in hindsight, at least in the context of the exercise culminating with a working profitable system. Of course any exposure to market information probably adds incrementally to the store of knowledge and isn't necessarily all bad.
However, maybe a few well chosen books and some much cheaper seminars like those run by Chris Tate, Alan Hull and Daryl Guppy etc might just do the same job at a cost of a few hundred dollars.
A lot depends on what sort of trading you plan to do. For example if you are working from a small capital base there is a tendency to be drawn to the riskier end of the trading spectrum i.e. trading short term with leverage. The odds are that you have a 90% chance or so of losing your stake, particularly now with the market becoming increasingly volatile as it is nearing some sort of top.
The other end of the spectrum is medium/longer term trend trading, i.e. being satisfied taking bites out established longer term trends, long or short. This creates a different problem in that it requires a bit more capital as I think it works better with a portfolio rather than one or two stocks.
There is some work going on in the forum to try and longer term trade with leverage, in this case CFD's with a small number of stocks but that is a work in progress.
The main aim in my opinion is to get into the markets and get some experience whilst not losing your shirt in the process. Therefore it is tempting to go buy a trading system because it has a prescription built in hence the course you now contemplate.
However you might want to look at something like Alan Hull's system which is very prescriptive, is free on his website http://www.alanhull.com/download/Active_Investing_0312_com.pdf with his course notes or you can buy his books in most trading bookstores and if you want his newsletter which is not expensive, maybe $400 PA. He does run courses as well.
That is how I started out although I have since evolved my own variation and haven't bought the newsletter for a couple of years now. I am not trying to flog Alan Hull's stuff and I have no association with him but in my case it got me into the markets, I made money from day one and I was a rank amateur at the time.
The reason I intially looked at Alan Hull was because someone on the forum recommended it to me.
Similarly there was a former prolific poster on the forum 'Snifter' who also had a Weinstein like (as is the Hull process) weekly trend trading process which is worth a look and you can find this at http://forum.incrediblecharts.com/messages/12/333776.html
Hope this helps or at least doesn't confuse you further...Tony_M
|
orangeguy
Member
Username: orangeguy
Post Number: 55
Registered: 07-2004Rating: N/A
Votes: 0
|
| | Thursday, March 23, 2006 - 10:42 am: |
|
Ingot,  @ picture.
Tony, thanks for you recommendation and I will have a look at Alan Hull. Can you give me a brief overview on his Active Investing strategy? Another recommendation I got was Jim Berg, his home study course costs $550. Is he any good?
I have been trading just over 2 years and have been building my capital base using a medium term strategy through CFD's. I'm looking to develop a short term trading system (though not as short as day trading) as I think this matches my style. At this point of my life I actually prefer to sit in front of the computer looking for potential trades although this may change some time down the track.
I have read a few books, namely books by Weinstein and Bedford. Found them to be useful but I will have a look at buying those books by Hull and Guppy.
|
tony_m
Member
Username: tony_m
Post Number: 581
Registered: 01-2003Rating: N/A
Votes: 0
|
| | Thursday, March 23, 2006 - 11:38 am: |
|
Sounds like you are well on your way already. I didn't realise you had been at it for a couple of years.
I cant help with short term stuff, not my patch but good luck anyway...Tony
|
pancho
Member
Username: pancho
Post Number: 23
Registered: 02-2004Rating: N/A
Votes: 0
|
| | Thursday, March 23, 2006 - 12:30 pm: |
|
Hi orangeguy . Check books out by W.d.Gann "How two make profits in commodities", the other by Robert d Edwards and John Magee" Technical analysis of stock trends".
|
medicine06
Member
Username: medicine06
Post Number: 2
Registered: 03-2006Rating: N/A
Votes: 0
|
| | Thursday, March 23, 2006 - 11:34 am: |
|
Thank you ingot and tony, the information you post is very useful for people like my self.
In 1999 I went a very famous broker firm and lost over 100 thousand dollars ( I also paid them in high charge fees). Then in 2003 with out any knowledge of market I am foolish enough to listen to someone's tip and loos another 50 thousand dollars.
After having lost part of my capital, I spend quite amount money and time went to trading courses and reading books, but in my experience this incrediblecharts forums is the best teacher overall. Ingot you are right " I guarantee you would be profitable after 3 hours with someone like Tony_M, Peter1, Spider, Justice, Stickman, Stevo, and on and on. That leaves a lot of change for you to invest". I have reding this forums messages for some years, most people in this forum are very experienced, high quality warmhearted and generous to share they knowledges to many of us. I believe that many people learnt a lot from you, I just want to say thank you very much to you all.
Excuse of my poor English it is not my first language.
Good trading to all.
M
|
tony_m
Member
Username: tony_m
Post Number: 583
Registered: 01-2003Rating: N/A
Votes: 0
|
| | Thursday, March 23, 2006 - 05:40 pm: |
|
Orangeguy and Medicine06,
re the brief overview of the Hull system it is basically pretty simple and better for you to read the downloadable course notes which are quite comprehensive. It all makes sense when you read the material which includes stock selection, money management, sector exposure, risk management and entry/exit criteria.
The Snifter process is pretty good in its own right as a trading system on a stock by stock basis but you need much more in the area of money management, stock selection, portfolio/sector allocation, and risk management. If you execute these latter factors properly and in a disciplined way it is difficult to lose money from my experience provided the market conditions are ok.
In any system no matter how prescriptive, there are some subjective elements that still need to be mastered and this comes with experience. The main trick is to get the exposure to build the experience level in the least risky fashion and that is why I started out with the weekly trend trading or as some call it 'buying dips in uptrends'.
Some people paper trade but in the end it takes real trading to really garner the necessary knowledge that paper trading simply cant recreate. Good luck and feel free to ask questions, I will help if I can ....Tony
|
smallworld
Member
Username: smallworld
Post Number: 392
Registered: 01-2004Rating: N/A
Votes: 0
|
| | Thursday, March 23, 2006 - 11:33 pm: |
|
OrangeGuy,
One of my friend has been a long time member of the Hometrader, way before Jason and his crowd has bought into the company. I've been to a few of their evenings as guests and have been shown a few of their systems. Their approach is to focus on developing mechanical systems. I trade systems myself and from my evaluation, their approach is sound, though their charges might not be. I have tested some of their systems, they do provide you with a positive expectancy based on backtesting results. I dont think they are scam and you certainly learn a systematic way of trading vs discretionary style that are mostly on this board. Having said that, you probably could learn all that with much less cost if you are determined and resourceful. The advantage is that home trade gives you a course to follow upto intermediate stage of competency.
So by all means go along to their intros and before you go, make up a list of questions before you go. If you currently have some ideas about systems, then may be you already have a lot of questions. if not, trying getting a book on developing systems. such as Beyond technical analysis by Chande( not sure of spelling?) to work out what you need. The main thing is to work out what you want out of going to the course, and then evaluate what they can provide versus other alternatives. And dont let others put you off.
Good luck
SW
|
orangeguy
Member
Username: orangeguy
Post Number: 56
Registered: 07-2004Rating: N/A
Votes: 0
|
| | Saturday, March 25, 2006 - 09:54 pm: |
|
Thanks SW for your post. Will check out that book at my local bookshop later.
Tony_m, I have just read the course notes and have a question regarding Hull's system if you don't mind answering.
From your experience of using Hull's system, on average, how many trades has it generated per year and what type of returns has it been generating?
Many Thanks.
|
tony_m
Member
Username: tony_m
Post Number: 588
Registered: 01-2003Rating: 
Votes: 3
|
| | Monday, March 27, 2006 - 08:29 am: |
|
Orangeguy,
I dont think it is really relevant to discuss the number of trades because it depends on the individual trading plan and the size or number of stocks in the portfolio.
I trade a lot more than one would expect from the perspective of a medium/long term trader so it would not stack up when compared with someone who religiously followed the Hull process.
For example I was out of the market for a period when things looked dodgy in October 2005 and started going back in during late October. I use pyramiding a lot which drives up the number of trades and right now I have 11 stocks consisting of 31 parcels.
I also have different rules to Hull and use percentage stops usually no more than 8% when I buy in and revert to trailing stops when in profit. I do this because I normally buy in retracements (but not always) and if the retracement fails to resume the uptrend then the sometimes wide Hull stops can hurt. So I probably have more early exits than a strict Hull follower.
I have my designed my own market scans so my candidate list although often overlapping Hull's can be different.
I occasionally use FA stops and have bailed when I thought something was becoming seriously overvalued or overheated. I occasionally bail out or rebalance holdings due to sector rotation. e.g. Not much point holding coal stocks if it is obvious coal stocks are moving into a cyclic down for example. Better to redeploy the capital into something with better immediate prospects.
So you see that it is too simplistic to just talk about the number of trades because it depends entirely on how individuals evolve their trading plan and style to suit themselves. I still follow a Weinstein like process but with elements of Hull and use FA etc.
The returns have been good, last financial year 50%+ and I expect this year to be much the same providing the market holds up. I dont trade short at this point.
I have mentioned the Hull process for beginners because it gave me the opportunity to get into the markets as a novice and to trade successfully within a prescriptive framework whilst I learnt on the job and evolve my own style over time however the framework I now use is still broadly similar.
Tony
(Message edited by tony_M on March 27, 2006)
|
taniaoakley
Member
Username: taniaoakley
Post Number: 1
Registered: 04-2006Rating:
Votes: 4
|
| | Thursday, April 13, 2006 - 12:01 am: |
|
Ok, I'm going to weigh in on this...first post in this forum.
Orangeguy, if you want to develop a successful short term trading system the first thing you have to do is recognize that there is no one system that you are going to be able to apply to everything. The further down the volatility scale you go, the more subjective trading becomes. If you are going to play in the volatile end, you need to have a really good grasp of where to draw lines and you need to really understand the volume data and what it means in different situations.
Throw out all of your indicators, they won't work down there or they will be too late. Everything you do needs to be a break of some kind of resistance confirmed by the appropriate volume pattern. Forget market noise as a 'significant penetration' measure too, it won't help you either.
With this kind of trading, sitting in front of the computer constantly watching it is actually detrimental to what you are doing unless you have nerves of steel. You might want to develop some time management that allows you to watch it every 20 minutes or so. Stop losses become more subjective too. Trailing percentage stops are usually not the best way to manage a volatile trade. Trapping profit using intra-day support levels seems to give better trade management for higher profitability. You have to be aware of the size of the move you are trying to trap and what kind of time frame you are expecting it to happen in to allow for correct distance of placing stops.
Some traders make the mistake of trading off a bounce of support, if you are going to do this successfully you need to have a really good volume confirmation underlying the bounce. The higher probability of profit lies with trading for a break of resistance. Whether it be a horizontal line, falling line, flag, triangle, whatever. As long as it is resistance confirmed by appropriate volume, accuracy is unbelievably high...as long as you are good at drawing the lines that is.
As for other types of trading, top 300 ASX works well with trend trading and weekly charts. Break of falling resistance line with market noise of around 2.5% works well, if you confirm with a flip signal on a MACD within 5 previous periods and the current period, percentage probability of a profitable trade ranges between 75% and 86% for signal on week of penetration of market noise value. Outside this window, probability drops to 55% (these stats work on weekly charts using a 12.26.9 MACD only)
Re-entry trades in an already moving uptrend work best if it is a break of resistance rather than trying to buy the lows. Probability is increased if confirmed using a RSI(14) or a 10.3.3 Stochastic (don't have the stats on those though). Resistance is defined as diagonal, horizontal, previous turning point, flag, triangle. All of these work.
For any trading plan, all of the people above me are correct with money management being the most important aspect, followed by good trade management (exiting) and entries being the least important.
For money management, you need to be sure you have covered the 4 main areas of risk. Catastrophe (crash), sector risk, technique (how good you are) and individual companies.
A combination of 2% rule, 6% rule (not the one in text books, the true rule), sector diversification and limited percentage of capital on any one stock...plus a ratio rule that forces you to trade some capital up at the big end of town, will cover all of these risk areas.
As for educators. If they can't explain WHY and HOW what they are talking about works...they aren't worth jack. Having said that, there are some extremely good, ethical educators out there. Just do your research. Beware the sales team, they don't know anything about trading. You need to ask questions of the actual educator themselves. The most important thing is access to back up and support because you are going to need it. Beware the mass marketed seminars, the only mass market is beginners so every time you go to one of these you will have to start fresh, and they will contradict each other. If they are free, great. You will always pick up something you can go and research, and get a good idea on what they are actually on about. Multi speaker events are always sales pitches. Especially if they are free. One or two speaker events work better. Ongoing progressive education also works better. You are never going to get to hear advanced stuff if you aren't in progressive education. There is simply no market for it as 'stand alone' events.
The same logic can be applied to books. Generally, the cheaper the book, the more aimed at the mass market it is. Books starting at around $70 - $140 tend to be the best ones for the intermediate level trader, which I would peg you to be. Over $300 plus is advanced level. The cheap and nasties are probably not worth your time.
I hope this helps. Sorry to be so long winded on my first post.
Cheers
Tania
|
david_louisson
Member
Username: david_louisson
Post Number: 230
Registered: 02-2004Rating: N/A
Votes: 0
|
| | Friday, April 14, 2006 - 04:18 pm: |
|
Generously informative post, Tania.
Many thanks
David
|
peter1
Member
Username: peter1
Post Number: 37
Registered: 12-2005Rating: N/A
Votes: 0
|
| | Saturday, April 15, 2006 - 01:42 am: |
|
taniaoakley, more like "annie" oakley!
You have hit the bullseye on short term trading.
|
orangeguy
Member
Username: orangeguy
Post Number: 57
Registered: 07-2004Rating: N/A
Votes: 0
|
| | Saturday, April 15, 2006 - 11:09 am: |
|
Tania, excellent information. Thanks for that.
|
nutmeg
Member
Username: nutmeg
Post Number: 20
Registered: 03-2006Rating: N/A
Votes: 0
|
| | Tuesday, April 18, 2006 - 03:12 pm: |
|
Tania, thank you.
.
Learn your lessons quickly, and move on.
.
|
davkell
Member
Username: davkell
Post Number: 405
Registered: 07-2004Rating: N/A
Votes: 0
|
| | Tuesday, April 18, 2006 - 07:16 pm: |
|
Tania;
A combination of 2% rule, 6% rule (not the one in text books, the true rule).
Can you elaborate a little on your 6% rule as stated above. I'm curious. And a little explanation on your ratio rule about the big end of town.
Thanks, muchly appreciated.
"Trade Your Way To Financial Freedom" - Van K Tharp
"Manage the downside; the upside will take care of itself" - Donald Trump
|
|
