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Forex Training Explained:
“Borrowed brains are useless”.
-
Yiddish saying
Where are the Graduates’ Yachts?
Or a Good Hard Look at Forex (training)
Street.
In 1940 Fred Schwed wrote a book with a
mischievous title that went on to become a classic in
investment literature. The book Where are the
Customers’ Yachts? or A Good Hard Look at Wall Street,
debunked, amongst other things, the myth that there
was a system, a fool-proof system out there, that could make
you money.
This from the back cover of my copy:
“It’s amazing how well Schwed’s book
is holding up after 55 years. About the only thing that’s
changed on Wall Street is that computers have replaced
pencils and graph paper. Otherwise, the basics are the
same. The investor’s need to believe somebody is matched by
the financial advisor’s need to make a nice living. If one
of them has to be disappointed, it’s bound to be the
former”. – John
Rothchild, Author, A Fool and His Money
There is so much scrambling for that
big, elusive, consistent profit-making system that very
little is left over for trading. If people put in as much
effort learning the trade as they did seeking the system,
they would probably be successful traders. But short cuts
tend to be long cuts, and nowhere is this more true than in
the trading game.
I think, therefore, given the
inordinate amount of time (not to mention money) that is
spent by the average newbie trader on training, education
and trading systems, that we should ask the question of
these graduates – the same question Fred Schwed asked of
Wall Street - Where are the Graduates’ Yachts? Or a
Good Hard Look at Forex (training) Street.
In this
newsletter I want to share with you some ideas around
training-to-trade forex.Take
a step back
Trading in the financial markets
doesn’t come naturally. It isn’t taught at school, college
or university. It isn’t part of your upbringing, many people
come to it late in life. Yet as trading, because of advances
in technology, becomes available to more and more people,
the training-to-trade industry is thriving, and this growth
is likely to continue at a brisk pace.
Forex is new, and many people come to
it after a sometimes unhappy experience trading stocks,
futures, commodities and options. Many are lured by the
marketing wizardry - no commission, high leverage and 24
hour trading. Everyone comes with expectations, hopes, and
fears. I realised I needed some sort of picture of this,
some feel for what my mentored clients are about, and that
is why I always ask them to describe their trading history
to me.
But it is not just for me. If they
answer some simple questions honestly, it enables them to
take a step backwards, and gain some perspective. This is
critical if you want to take a step forward. I find their
answers fascinating. It is a rich source to understanding
the journey and the psyche of the typical aspiring forex
trader. I can assure you that without a shadow of a doubt
you will be able to recognise yourself if I provide a
“Typical road to DrForex’s Mentoring programme.”
Training
The most dominant theme from these
trading histories is … training. Without exception,
complete novices apart, everyone had engaged in some sort of
training, be it a course, buying books, going to a lecture
or studying graphs.
Closer inspection also reveals common
themes: the course was usually high profile (hyped),
presented by a “guru” with “international credentials”. The
basics are often well covered (though not always): technical
analysis, money management, trading psychology, practical
trading.
In fact, the courses in and of
themselves were not necessarily inherently flawed, but there
was unquestionably something missing because the traders
were unsuccessful where it counted –making money in the
market. It took me a while to realise what it was, and that
is why I have incorporated it into what I offer, or rather,
what I offer is done in such a way that the outcome
addresses this missing link. It has to do with the quote at
the beginning of this newsletter:
“Borrowed
brains are useless”
Some basic problems
Firstly, I am convinced that most
people do not take ownership of the process of
training-to-trade. For me it is pretty obvious. If lots of
people have to learn this and there are only so many
learning channels offering a basic curriculum of learning
that is more or less the same across the board, then
arriving at class with a bucket-load of enthusiasm isn’t
enough. You better have a good plan or this venture is
doomed to fail for you as it is for many others.
Secondly, most people do not own the
fundamental building blocks of whatever system they are
currently trading or experimenting with. This is a different
way of saying that they don’t really understand what they
are busy with. This goes deep, and I want you to get this
point – it is subtle but crucial. All successful traders
trade uniquely because they are unique traders. That is to
say they have made their learning their own. It has become
original.
It isn’t possible to understand trading
on the theoretical level. Trading must be experienced. Yet
people make very important choices about trading systems or
approaches without understanding what underlies those
approaches.
This then goes back to the fact that
they don’t have a proper executable plan to take ownership
of the process of their training, and this is seldom
part of the training. That, for me, is the critical
element.
This is not amateur hour
So let’s talk a bit about training,
because training precedes trading. It is important that you
grasp from the outset the reality of the trading environment
you are training for: trading in the financial markets is
highly professional. Two examples:
Golf: Will you be properly
prepared on the Pro PGA tour after watching some golf video,
being madly keen on golf, completing a coaching programme at
your local club, hitting some practice rounds on the driving
range and putting green for a few months? In other words,
trading demo for a few months before going live without a
plan and a proper understanding of the game you are in.
Boxing: Or, similarly, you work
out in the gym, hitting the pear ball and punch bag for a
few months, and then you get in the ring with a pro. The
theory of the gym is suddenly going to seem a long way away,
isn’t it?
People’s misconceptions about what
trading is about is often shown by how few of them give
credence to the notion that in order to be successful they
are going to have to trade for at least a considerable
period. The all too common attitude is that I am going to
retire after a couple of years because the forty dollar
e-book I bought said I would turn my five hundred dollar
capital into a fortune within that time. Ain’t gonna to
happen.
I strongly believe so many more people
could have made a success of the early stages of their
trading if they just had a more realistic approach to what
it would take if you really are serious about trading.
This is the healthy start you should be
visualising and one of the first points I want to make.
Training-to-trade is a D-I-Y (Do-It-Yourself) process.
You are both the student and the teacher. You are also the
examiner and moderator of your progress and success. Buying
a book, e-book, course, service or programme does not mean
you can pass any responsibility for your education on to
someone else. You have to be in charge of your destiny
My own training
I want to share with you the route I
followed. Though I still sit at the feet of the Great
Teacher (the market) every day, and listen to what it tells
me, I had a primary learning phase that will probably
resonate with many of you.
Firstly, I fitted the demographic of
the average forex trader: above average intelligence and
income, relatively successful in what I did, married (now
with three lovely daughters ranging from two to almost
eight), young, and looking for “financial freedom”. I also
had an interest in the financial markets. This interest
sharpened when I became a financial advisor in the early
1990s. At that stage insurance companies were changing to
investment boutiques, offering investment products linked
with insurance policies as well as pure investment policies
(endowments) and also unit trusts (mutual funds). The unit
trust market was booming here in South Africa and it is in
my nature to understand something very well if I get
involved in it.
And so I bought a correspondence stock
market investment / trading training course. This was
before the Internet and online trading days. It was a
general introduction to the stock market, fundamental
analysis of companies and the basics of technical analysis,
chart patterns, moving averages - the usual stuff.
My focus at that stage was more on
developing as a financial advisor than as a trader, and as a
result my practical interests in stocks faded away rather
quickly. But not my general interest in the financial
markets. Then, in 1998 upon getting some capital from the
sale of my interest in a business venture I decided to
“become a trader”. This is something I had in common with
many forex hopefuls: I wanted to make a change in my
career. By this time online trading was all the rage, even
here in South Africa.
I dusted off my old stock market
training programme material and subscribed to an Internet
daily data feed. Applying technical analysis once more only
served to confirm my initial distrust in its value as a
primary tool for analysing the markets. But we were in the
technology boom and trading and short-term profits seemed
easy.
The stakes were pretty high. So,
like many others (maybe you too) success meant outperforming
George Soros and Jim Rogers’ Quantum Fund in percentage
terms, starting immediately. I wanted to succeed
because I didn’t want to go back to either being a financial
advisor or to my previous business interest and I had
limited capital. But this meant that I had to perform
really well because I had to use my capital to generate an
income on which to live. The decision to trade and fund a
trading account at a stockbroker was separated by about 4
months.
By now I was reading a weekly financial
magazine and I had a strong general understanding of the
financial markets. I had a good handle on technical
analysis techniques (though still wary of them) and also,
through specialist financial advisor training, I had some
knowledge of analysing company fundamentals. I bought and
read a few more trading / investment books.
But what did I really know about
trading? Zip. I hadn’t really made anything my own.
My initial trade was to buy into a new
listing (IPO) at the pre-listing phase. We had a listings
mania here and the new listings all made big money. So here
was my hare-brained scheme: I decided to invest all my
funds on the opening day and use those profits for my future
trading. Fool proof. Proven fool.
Rude awakenings
Waiting for the IPO I told a
stockbroker about it, and his advice to me was to bail out.
It was a time of international turmoil – the Asian crisis
was no more than a year old. In May of 1998 there were
issues in Russia (default on repaying government debt) and
the smart money was already anticipating the Russian default
which did materialise in August 1998. (I realise now
looking back that because of this market volatility I learnt
a valuable lesson: financial markets are globally
interconnected, the performance of individual stocks are
influenced in the short term by these global factors. This
all with hindsight. At the time, waiting for my first big
trade, I was blithely unaware of any dangers.)
So came the big day … Trader Du Toit’s
first trade, 25 August 1998, the day of the listing. I
followed the broker’s advice and sold about 80 - 90% of my
shares through the day and eventually, after costs, made an
insubstantial profit.
Even though Plan A didn’t work out I
still had my capital intact and was trading. But I hadn’t
realised my dream of making a killing, and the following
report made it unlikely that I ever would:
Since July 17 (1998), when the
Dow Jones Industrial Average reached its all-time peak
of 9,337, the market index has plunged nearly 2,000
points, half of it in the four (trading) days
beginning August 26. More than $2.3 trillion in
market capitalization has been wiped out--again, half of
it in the past four trading days, with an estimated $589
billion erased on Monday (September 1) alone.
Long afterwards I understood the
importance of what happened during that week and how it
influenced everything - the importance of the bigger picture
was placed in stark relief.
Be that as it may, it didn’t take me
very long to grow increasingly unhappy with my attempts to
job the IT stocks based on my holistic approach which
included technical analysis, price context, market context,
and other factors. I needed something new.
Moving on to treasuries
I started trading the benchmark South
African long bond (treasuries) on margin. My limited
practical experience with stock trading made me realize the
importance of the big picture themes: market sentiment,
fundamentals, the global issues that move markets.
The whole concept of stock picking –
being asked to literally pick the one or two stocks that
won’t be dogs – is extremely difficult for a novice to do
and even if he picks the right ones, something unexpected
can happen on the other side of the globe which changes the
whole set-up. I wasn’t feeling in control, though I was
still imbued with enthusiasm and excitement.
In bonds, for the first time, the
concept of inter-market price relationships was thrust upon
me. To understand the dynamics of short-term bond price
movements in South Africa, one needs to have a feel for
global market sentiment and global financial market
parameters such as stock indices, gold, oil, other bonds,
interest rate expectations, major currencies, the local
currency and economic issues of importance. In short one
must have one eye on the home front, and one eye abroad. I
liked this. I was really drawn to this market with its
margin and leverage and two-way trading.
My ongoing self-education
I want to now mention the vital
concept, and one often missing in forex training: the
understanding of the price-event-time relationship, what I
call P-E-T in Bird Watching in Lion Country (BWILC)
speak. The sustained, intelligent, real-time observation
of price action within the context of the financial markets
globally of the instruments you want to trade is what will
make you successful.
It goes without saying that the fewer
instruments you need to observe, the more detailed and
focused the observation can be. Price, event, time are the
three building blocks of markets, it’s the blood and gore of
trading, the meat and potatoes of this job.
When I changed to the new market I
started with this P-E-T exercise and I continued doing it
for a period of about six months. By that time I had a
very good understanding of why, how and when prices change.
The next step - making money from this - was pretty easy
(with a dose of luck).
For the first time I really understood
this market – and without reference to moving averages,
stochastics, Fibonacci ratios, Elliot waves. I didn’t need
charts and their fancy indicators. I was seeing the deep
relationships.
The rest of my education was based on
very short daily telephonic discussions with my mentor. He
was a bond portfolio manager. We covered things like market
sentiment (I call this market dynamics) in the very short
term and the abovementioned parameters that affect the
decision-making of market participants and price changes.
I felt I had finally arrived when one
day my mentor, out of the blue, phoned me with the express
purpose of asking me my view on the market.
So, extrapolating, I offer a blue print
for forex trading from a training perspective.
A blue print for forex training
Phase one – Laying the
foundation
1. A basic interest in, and
enthusiasm for, financial markets
This would be the first aspect that
you can use to take control of your trading destiny, to
own your own brain, and not outsource your road to
success to someone else, so that later you can shift the
blame for your failure.
Don’t fool
yourself. If you don’t regularly read about the financial
markets or observe financial newscasts or even watch popular
financial programs on television you may probably not have
the necessary interest. Is your sudden interest not simply
the result of some over-hyped marketing wizardry?
Get-quick-rich or fast-fix dreams of instant solutions to
life-long problems?
Practically
it would mean you probably read financial dailies and weekly
or monthly magazines and have read a few investment or
financial market books. If you haven’t done this you have a
long way to go before being a successful trader.
2. Knowledge about the
financial markets and investment
You simply
can’t have any hope of long-term success in the financial
markets if you have little or no knowledge of it. Will you
be able to make a success of farming with a dream and no
knowledge of the agricultural landscape? If you don’t know
anything about farming in general and think you are going to
become a professional farmer from reading an e-book and
attending a two day seminar on “how to grow tomatoes” you
are fooling yourself. Anyone who suggests this is the way
to become a professional farmer would be laughed at. Why
should it be any different in trading?
It is
absolutely crucial that you understand the fundamentals of
investment before you even consider trading. Aspects such
as reasonable returns on investments, different types of
investments, the risk associated with these, liquidity of
investments – all of these are important. If you understand
this you will be able to see your trading aspirations in
context. If you do a good job of it you won’t need my
newsletters or the loss of thousands of dollars to teach you
the basics.
Can this be
fast-tracked? The answer is, partially. If you read a
handful of well-chosen books while taking a scientific
approach to getting a broad understanding of how the
financial markets work, as well as read a daily or weekly
publication on market news - this process doesn’t need to
take more than a few months and you should know more than
most. You will also have laid the foundation to move on to
the second phase.
Phase two – Focus
Your initial ventures will lead you to
some knowledge of the different markets, like stocks, bonds,
commodities, currencies. Chances are that you are feeling
more positive with a natural inclination towards one of
these markets. It is now the time to become more methodical
in your approach to owning your own brain.
I am assuming that at this stage you
are looking at forex.
1. Real time observation
The most practical way to start to
focus on a market is real-time observation of price
behaviour and the reasons offered by pundits for this
price behaviour. (Real-time is not tick by tick, second
by second observations. It can be on a daily basis.) In
BWILC speak: you will have to start to follow the
storyline of the forex soap opera with special attention
to price behaviour.
I
want to ask you a fundamental question at this point.
What did you do when you started your serious
investigations into the forex market? I have a source
of information about what others did: you probably
visited many websites, tried some services and bought
some “courses” and after weeks or even months, if you
fit the average profile, you will not have understood
the single most crucial thing about the currency market:
price observation. Answer honestly: what do you really
know about currency price fluctuation? Today? Now?
2. Addressing confusion
Let’s not beat about the bush
here. If you are a novice in any market, and the forex
market is no exception, real-time observation of price
behaviour is going to test your ability not to become
confused. Making sense of price behaviour over
different time frames (daily, weekly and longer) by
observing it and following the market participants’
comments on it, is often confusing because of
information overload. It becomes tough to separate the
chaff from the corn.
You can
address this effectively by studying analysis methods of the
forex market. This implies reading. There are several books
published by financial publishers about analysing the forex
market. Most of them are brand new (published during the
last two years). There are also many e-books and
“e-courses”. All of these offer clues to ways and means to
analyse the forex market for trading purposes.
It is
important that you have a learning attitude as opposed to a
judgmental attitude. You need to get a feeling for what
is out there amongst knowledgeable market participants when
it comes to analysing this market.
Clearly what
you are doing at this stage is prospecting for “experts”. To
align yourself with experts is a sound principle, whatever
you are doing.
If you do a
proper job of your real-time observation, it will serve as a
benchmark and inform your reading. There will be a positive
feed-back loop and you can use it to evaluate the quality of
the material you are absorbing, be it e-books or courses.
3. Attempts to make sense of
it all
If you have
done a good job of the previous two steps, you will know all
about technical analysis, fundamentals and news trading (an
evil that is difficult to avoid), risk and money management
principles, and so on. Furthermore you will have a good
idea about all the basics of forex trading such as forex
brokers, forex pricing, currency pairs, costs involved, the
importance of psychological aspects of trading and even some
ideas of your own about the application of these things as a
trader. Nobody will now laugh at you if you are serious
about applying some of your knowledge in a demo or small
live trading account. Nor will anyone laugh at you if you
get serious about training before you do anything practical.
Unfortunately, very few people I have come across have ever
done a good job of observing the market or simply exploring
ways to analyse the market for the sake of understanding it
better.
What they do
is to immediately go into “expert” mode, be judgemental, and
consequently they decide this or that way of trading is the
right way and start to clutter the issue of market price
action with mostly technical analysis, without even knowing
about the drawbacks of technical analysis as a way to
analyse any market, including the forex market. A
consequence of this is that they also have nowhere to turn
to if things don’t work out as expected. And they usually
don’t.
The
following is very important. Technical analysis is easy to
present in a sexy, funky manner as a solution to trading
problems. It follows that the majority of all analyses
solutions touted in the retail trading world are technical
analysis packages. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: it
is so ubiquitous that most people think it must be the only
real solution. Nothing could be further from the truth.
4. A fork in the road
At some stage you are going to
decide: go it alone, or find a mentor. Your answer to
this dilemma will depend on your confidence.
Some will
feel confident enough to go it alone. And they will do so.
But many of them come back seeking a mentor because though
they have experience, it is often not the right kind of
experience, and therefore not particularly valuable.
Here is what is wrong
with the experience: almost without exception the
experience is simply an inadequate attempt at technical
analysis of historical currency price movements, based
on invalid assumptions, that cannot predict future price
moves.
The main reason people
don’t make money in the financial markets and
specifically in the forex market is because they think
technical analysis is an adequate solution to analysing
the forex market. It is not. Especially not on its
own.
And if you have ever
wondered if a coach, guru or mentor is worth his salt,
you should simply investigate his attitude to technical
analysis in the forex market. There are so many that
say “ignore the fundamentals”, “you don’t even have to
think about them”. Avoid them like the plague.
I don’t
dismiss technical analysis in its entirety. But you have to
reduce it to its specific role in owning your own brain. It
is simply one piece of the puzzle and it is a piece of the
puzzle that many can do without and still make good money.
Much more important
however than if this or that little technical analysis
trick you evaluated may be useful or not is the way you
have investigated it. You can’t get past this: The
buck to own your own brain stops with you.
So what did you do? How
many two-week trials of signal services have you
subscribed to? Why? Ask yourself this. What can you
possibly learn from a two-week trial which is a small
window on a system that is supposed to work for eternity
and have its ups and downs (for eternity)? Now, let’s
take this further; if the person that offers this
doesn’t know this, you better run. And if he knows this
(the trial is essentially useless to make a decision
about its long-term value) and he offers such a trial,
keep running.
So you get
the drift. Now let’s turn to all those back tests you’ve
done to find the elusive system that will generate
consistent long-term profits. Do you have any idea what the
probability is that a pattern that existed during a
back-tested period of up to 5 years will repeat
itself? About 50 / 50.
So the
most critical question you have to ask yourself at this
stage is: do I really know what I am doing?
Some of you will feel you still lack
some confidence and will look to supplement your current
knowledge and experience before plunging into the process of
systematic trading by taking the important step of engaging
the services of a mentor.
Phase three – Making
real progress
Not so many years ago the only place
you would be able to get a mentor for trading purposes would
have been at some local dealing room or brokerage. It
simply wasn’t available elsewhere.
But the Internet changed all of that.
You can now engage the services of willing and able people
that can help you along the road. Deciding which one is
best is obviously a very personal decision and something you
should take great care about.
Unfortunately it is an undeniable
fact that marketing wizardry can create the illusion of
market wizardry. So you have to be thorough and
proper. But if you took good care with your due diligence
you might be closer to the solution than if you started out
thinking you can be judgmental about this market and its
role players.
Entering into a mentoring relationship
is like marriage, a long-term commitment. Being with the
wrong partner can be hell. So be careful. If you still have
a short-term view of the forex market, get rid of it now.
This doesn’t exclude the possibility that you can make money
in the short term. You can. But your whole expectation
should be to get a show on the road that will have staying
power and that is not dependent on short-term “success”
measured in stratospheric returns on investment. Don’t
underestimate this. Making 100% or 200% on your margin with
highly leveraged trades and a dose of good luck means
nothing in the long term. In fact, seen in the long term,
it is probably your death knell.
A few thoughts about mentoring – my perspective
“How to groom your dog”
The concept of a training course
too often engenders the notion of “instant”, “quick fix” and
“easy way to riches”. People see courses as
something that you attend, usually for a short period of
time, after which you have gained all the knowledge you
initially didn’t have and you can then implement it
perpetually. Some courses work like that. “How to groom
your dog” for example. That is the kind of course that will
probably work well and for which you don’t need mentoring.
Mentoring is not a
“course”.
Mentoring is a big thing in the corporate environment.
Mentors are experienced people who lead and guide juniors
through the corporate jungle. Sure, there are elements of
training and coaching but it is eventually much more than
that. It is a relationship between two people, one that
develops over the years.
Mentoring in the retail trading world
can’t be a course. It is a process and it must be
structured to acknowledge this and evolve into a long-term
growth process.
Make a paradigm shift
As I have mentioned above, most of the
knowledge retail traders have about analysing the market is
severely limited, and flawed. Most people on my training
programme had to make significant changes in their whole
approach to the market and a mentoring programme should be
designed to place your future trading on a sound footing.
You have al lot of things to unlearn
or even better, simply wipe from your memory, if possible.
A rude awakening?
A clear indication of a course as
opposed to a proper mentoring programme is the reference to
“learn exact entry and exit techniques” for trades. It is a
seduction technique, it is saying trading is easy if you
simply do this by rote.
What you really have to learn is “how
to cope with randomness”. The type of randomness we
encounter in the financial markets and specifically as
retail forex traders doesn’t gel very well with the way our
brains are wired to make sense of life. Our brains are
wired to be systematic, break things down into smaller parts
and assemble them in a recognisable form or pattern. Our
brains like patterns and work on the basis of repetition.
That is why it is so easy to be fooled into believing that
technical analysis gives all the answers in trading. You
want to believe it and find it easy to believe because it is
soothing and very acceptable to your brain.
Then you get a rude awakening! Most
people don’t have the faintest clue about the randomness in
the financial markets or how to cope with it. But that is
what you have to learn. And you don’t learn that in a book,
or on a course. But a proper mentoring programme is best
suited to train your brain to benefit from randomness in the
forex market.
I gave you the formula for how I do
this in the free part of Bird Watching. The 4 X 1
strategy. I also mention Einstein’s famous formula E=MC2.
Just as you can’t take this formula and build an atom bomb
with it, you can’t take the 4 X 1 strategy and attain
financial freedom just because you now have a formula to
cope with financial market randomness.
A personal relationship with shared goals, values and
vision.
Mentoring implies a one-on-one
relationship.
In a corporate mentoring model, the
personal growth of the mentored person benefits the
corporation in the long run. Mentors are people that are in
contact with and understand the context of the people they
mentor. They work in the same departments and share the
same goals and values and vision for the corporation.
The challenge in non-corporate,
internet-based mentoring is to gain this same relevant
context where shared vision, values and goals form the basis
of the relationship. This can only be realized in a
one-on-one relationship. One-on-one means a personal
relationship with shared goals, values and vision.
A tornado in Alabama
“Life is something that happens
while we make other plans”
One of the very first things I ask the
traders I mentor, is if they are aware of any personal
things that may affect their trading or planning and
goal-setting in terms of the mentoring programme.
Recently (early in February this year)
I received this response from one of them:
Not
really. I happen to be at a time in my life when I can give
this my more-or-less undivided attention…
Then at approximately 1 PM on March 1st
a tornado hit Enterprise, Alabama and destroyed this
person’s house. This is obviously an extreme case, but
there are others I can talk about too: the person who fell
from the roof, the tragic death of a daughter, a handful of
very ill mothers and fathers, the death of a spouse, new
business contracts, changes in work situation …
The point I am trying to make is that
when we start out to master something as complex as currency
trading, even with realistic goals and the right long-term
perspective, we tend to idealize the whole process. In life
it doesn’t work like that. Your life will not become any
less difficult or real because you have decided to give
currency trading a go. The challenge is to integrate the
two in a positive manner.
It goes without saying that the
structure of a proper mentoring programme provides a comfort
zone in which it is possible to do this, even if a monstrous
tornado destroys everything you had, except for your will
and determination to succeed at currency trading.
On March 22, my client sent me this
email:
We
are adjusting slowly. The infrastructure in our town is
still damaged, so some services are coming back more
slowly than others. However, the will and spirit of
folks here continue to amaze me. We had wonderful
friends and family who have supported us beyond anything
we could have imagined. That certainly accelerates the
healing.
Your reports have helped orient me back into the market
and I'm deeply grateful for that. It was strange that
in my world, the market tumble and the storm that blew
away my former life all happened within a couple of days
of each other, so getting back in could have been much
scarier and more traumatic without your sensible and
solid guidance.
Recent improvements to my mentoring programme
In an earlier newsletter I referred to
the changes I wanted to make to the mentoring programme. The
reason for these changes was simply a problem with capacity.
One-on-one mentoring makes big demands on a dedicated
mentor’s time and energy. It is also not something that a
mentor can outsource. You don’t find a real mentor behind
every bush. To combine that with the development of my
bigger business model - developing from scratch a world
class currency investment firm - is a tough ask.
It needs a structural change without
damaging the sound fundamentals it is based on. As part of my planning I
have asked my existing clients to evaluate the “old”
programme and also make suggestions for improvements.
The changes on a structural level were made to
benefit both existing clients and new clients and made it possible to handle a substantially increase the
number of clients that will benefit from the programme.
This will enhance the bigger “corporate” vision I have, and
it will improve every participant’s experience and
opportunity to make forex trading for a living a reality.
The following changes were made at the end of 2007
I have introduced a communal approach, i.e. an Internet forum community. The community caters for different levels of participation, with the final level, my mentoring programme.
There are also sub-communities for the Eduletter subscribers and legitimate purchasers of BWILC.
The mentoring programme will from now start on specific dates. The first "new" group is the "Class of Jan 2008" which run until July 2008.
The personal aspect of the programme is not changed at all. We just enhance it with the dynamic of interaction through and on the forums.
Answers to some questions you may have:
Q: How does it differ from the
"old" programme?
A: Fundamentally very little has
changed. One of the things that will greatly improve the
programme is that whereas I have spent a lot of time
giving individual written responses to tasks I will in
future provide a knowledge pool with standard answers for
everyone. Because this will suffice in a majority of cases
there will be time to focus on those who need additional
instruction.
Q: When will the next programme begin?
A: “July 2008”.
Q: What is the cost?
A: According to the feedback I have
received from my existing clients the
value-for-money basis of this programme is unrivalled. Because the programme run over a period of time and because I am only interested to work with people who are prepared to make a long term commitment there is an upfront fee of $1,990.
But I want to make
it affordable for everyone who wants to join the programme.
In my experience the best way to do this would be to offer
two basic options:
First you can enrol for the long term
and pay up-front fees that cover everything. This is how it
currently works.
Secondly you can chose to “phase into
the programme with three payments of $850 each.”.
Q: Can I
now join the Class of July 2008?
A: Yes. Enrolment will be open until August 31 unless I feel to close earlier due to number of participants.
Next time
How not to beat a coin toss: The truth about technical
analysis.
Kind regards
Dirk D. du Toit
Read more about Bird Watching in Lion Country - Retail Forex Trading Explained
This book helps you to think and trade like the market movers, the big banks, the institutions that affect price. If you go up against them, you will be lion food. The big boys learn to ‘listen’ to every word the market is telling them. You need to too. Bird Watching will teach you how.
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