brownsfan019

No doubt. It's too bad the general public doesn't get it... Broker = makes money if you make money. Broker = makes money if you lose money. hmmmm

ouch! Hey, we got the Cavs too. How's your basketball team doing?

Oh the things I could tell you guys about about brokerage firms REALLY work... I've mentioned this here before, but prior to going full-time in my trading, I was one of those brokers you love to hate. And the stories I could share with you would take me days and days to compile. I'll try to keep this short as I really don't feel like getting in a massive rant tonight... 1) No one will care for your money more than you. 2) Brokers get paid when you buy/sell something or remain in the investment itself (as many pay trailers or ongoing fees as long as you stay in the investment). 3) Brokers earn ZERO if you sit in cash waiting for the optimal time to enter. 4) Brokers get paid regardless if you make money or not. 5) Mutual funds and annuities are the biggest ripoffs in the world and they've done a marvelous job at smoke screening how that industry actually operates. I sold everything and sold it to completely uneducated people (on this subject) to those that had some knowledge and in the end, if you didn't buy, I didn't make any money. The markets at a high and could easily retrace? So what, buy today. Bonds are overvalued and will probably plummet in value soon? So what, get the return today. This CD we are selling is going to tank as soon as the fed raises rates? Oh well, just buy today b/c my quarter ends tomorrow and I gotta get this sale in to count for the vacation contest going on. This mutual fund has high fees and piss poor performance? But look at these pretty brochures they crank out and if I sell enough of them, they are going to send me some neat free stuff and probably send me on a vacation or two this year. Here's what I tell anyone that will listen when it comes to what the average person should invest in - a few ETFs. That's it. Buy a nice basket of 3-5 ETFs and reinvest everything. Dollar cost average into it if you can. Is buy and hold dead? I say no and that's b/c the majority of people out there have done it, will do it, will continue to do it and will teach their kids to do it. "Active" investing is an oxymoron to most people. If you are investing, you are not active in any way other than checking your statements (if you do that). If you've never been in that industry, I suggest staying out of it. I saw so much crap being peddled it's not even funny. This was part of the reason I wanted out. I'm a very loyal person and was a loyal employee until I really saw what was going on. Then I spoke my mind and shortly thereafter I was being guided to the door... I was tired of playing the game. Any idea what it's like to go to bed wondering if that retiree's IRA you just brought over will do ok with the stuff your firm is selling that month? .... It eats away at you and I got out before it was too late. Regardless, tell your non-trading friends to educate themselves on ETFs and then use them. If their company has a 401k and offers a match, use it! That's free money! Even if the funds are terrible, you can probably park it in a money market account. And if you really want to educate them, after they learn about ETFs, teach them how to buy puts on those ETFs so that they now have 'insurance' on their money. It will blow their minds. That's enough for tonight. A nice stroll down memory lane there. lol

These are OECs published rates. I would suggest however, that you try to negotiate. The worst that can happen is you pay normal retail.

That's what I was going to say - just log into the site and get it there in your back office.

I use Open ECry. Right now just using them to trade futures, but they are branching out into forex and stocks so I may be doing more trading there.

Sounds like you might have been lucky and found a loophole, which has now been closed. You at least got options though - open a small account or pay the $25/mo.

I just started kicking the tires on this but it's a big upgrade. Looks like a lot of effort went into this. I'll try to update back here as I learn more about this upgrade.

I downloaded 3.5 on the demo side and all I can say is WOW... This upgrade is a HUGE upgrade. There's so much that I can't list it all here. I did see that stocks are integrated into this one and will be nice to see the final product (not all features are available just yet for stocks). But this upgrade is a big one. If you haven't demo'd OEC or it's been awhile, download v3.5 and take it for a spin.

2-22-10: +$670.00 2-23-10: +$220.00 Mon good, Tue was alright. Weird day on oil today from my point of view - felt like an inventory day where not much movement off the open and then bam, off it went. Felt and looked like inventory even though inventory is on Wed. That's something that you can really only learn and feel by being in the markets daily and seeing what is the norm and what is not.

Exactly - there is no perfect one size fits all answer, even if grey1 wants to ramble on about how he knows it all. The CL is a marvelous instrument to trade and can be traded on a variety of timeframes.

Not this again w/ you. You show up, provide some gibberish talk that reminds me of Jack Hershey speak and then disappear into the sunset. And then reappear to tell everyone how great you are and everyone else is wrong. Fact - I trade the CL on a timeframes under 10 minutes. Fact - I trade it profitably (and prove it). So you can ramble on and on about knowing the 'truth' (whatever that means) but your opinions are just that and I was providing an opposite view of you (shocking).

nice to see you back - maybe this will start to appear weekly? careful, b/c you are starting a trend.

10,30, and 60 min timeframes are incredibly way too long for daytrading. Just the other side of the coin. One's opinion does not necessarily reflect absolute truth. I could not imagine using a 60 min chart to 'day' trade from...

This is being posted in the Open ECry forum, so we are referring to the OEC software.

Open ECry has a very nice paper trading platform if you are interested in futures.

There's no right or wrong answer. Some people trade breakouts, others trade reversals - some win and some lose with each method. There's very good breakout traders and very poor breakout traders; there's very good reversal traders and very poor reversal traders. I personally hate trading breakouts for the reason gsx mentioned - you will encounter quite a few fakeouts UNLESS you can filter them to the point that you get in the reliable ones most of the time. Simply buying new highs and selling new lows is a losing game IMO but if you can filter out the bad ones, then it can easily work.

Current profile has a lot of stuff in there. I would take some time to familiarize yourself with that part of the program. Many different customizations can be done there.

It's grey b/c it's tied to the color of your candlestick outline. If you change that color, the scale will change color too. This might be a situation where you want to overlay another contract in the background to get the color you want if you don't want your candlestick outline and scale the same.

2-19-10: +$680 Nice day on oil, wish they were all this easy. Great moves until the lunch lull kicked in and I said adios. Note - if you are trading or watching the CL contract, you should be trading the J0 contract today as that has the most volume. If you are on the old one, you are ok for today but change over on Monday. CL is a monthly contract.

Options are a real b*tch to learn and get ahold of. I'll never forget my last option trade - bought a call on Boyd Gaming (which means you are bullish on the stock), the stock went up nicely and my call lost a ton of money. :doh: Trading is very difficult as it is, but when you can be bullish on a stock buy a bullish instrument and lose b/c of implied volatility and all that other rubbish, that will turn you off quickly. I like to know that if I think something is going up, I go long and it goes up that I will make money. Options trading is very difficult IMO.

ROLLOVER I forgot to mention that when it's rollover time (like today for oil) the easiest way I've found to do this if you using the multiple symbols as explained above, just recreate your chart from scratch. At least for me and based on how I set my charts up (and being ocd about wanting things in a certain spot) I just recreate my chart. Now, I'm just trading oil so this is a quick process. If you are trading a bunch of markets, this might not work for you. You can adjust everything in your current charts, but depending on your layout (in particular what you display in the data box) it could end up in a different order. For me, I have to have my data box so that H,L,C,O is displayed right at the top. And as long as I put the symbol on first, it is always displayed at the top. If I remove the old symbol and then add in the new symbol while I still have my other stuff on the charts, the O,H,L,C ends up at the bottom of my data box and that won't work for me. I've trained my eyes to go to a certain spot for certain info. That's how I do it. You may find that you can just adjust everything in your current chart and it doesn't bother you.

Well said James. It is a lot of work (in the beginning). Good to see you back btw.

2-18-10: +$300 Small account got 1 short and 30 ticks. In an uptrend, I will take it.

Our Man Goes Undercover and Tells All He spent days sitting through free seminars to become a super trader. Lesson number one: It’ll cost you. By Thomas M. Anderson From Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine, March 2010 Admit it: You’ve been tempted. You’ve seen the infomercials for trading systems that will teach you how to master the markets. Sign up for a free seminar in your area and you’re on your way to wealth and freedom. Ordinary people just like you are earning thousands each month. Why not join the club? With visions of early retirement dancing in my head, I decided to take the plunge, or at least the initial part of it. I would attend the free seminars of three big trading-education outfits: Online Trading Academy, BetterTrades and Profit Strategies. I wanted to see whether these outfits delivered on their promises to help people become successful traders. Here’s what I found. “Respect your capital” The first rule you learn at the Online Trading Academy (OTA) is not to trust Wall Street with your money. “Wall Street has trained us to be buy-and-hold investors,” the instructor, Chris, told me and the two other students attending the Power Trading Workshop at the company’s offices in Vienna, Va., a suburb of Washington, D.C. (OTA also has offices in the United Kingdom, Singapore and Dubai, as well as in 29 other cities in the U.S. and Canada.) This is a bad thing, Chris said, because the market goes up, down and sideways. And when it heads south, as it did during the 2007-09 bear market, buy-and-hold investors get crushed. OTA’s mission was to teach the likes of me how to make money regardless of what the market does. How, you ask? Through the power of technical analysis. Technical analysts study past data -- primarily a security’s price and trading volume -- to predict the future. They look for patterns to find reliable signals of when to buy or sell financial instruments, such as stocks, options, futures and foreign currencies. The process involves studying a menagerie of indicators, such as candlestick charts, Bollinger bands and something called the stochastic oscillator. Technicians care little, if at all, about fundamental analysis -- the examination of, say, a company’s earnings and balance sheet or of general economic conditions. Technical analysis has both passionate critics and ardent adherents. For example, an October 2009 study by New Zealand’s Massey University found that of more than 5,000 strategies that employ technical analysis, none produced returns in the 49 countries where researchers tested the strategies beyond what you’d expect by chance. However, scores of traders, including billionaire Paul Tudor Jones, say the discipline helped them amass great fortunes. So I tried to keep an open mind. But a debate about technical analysis was not part of the program at OTA. Instead, the seminar quickly evolved from a round of Wall Street bashing to a pitch to enroll in the company’s $4,990 Pro-Trader class. The seven-day course would show “how to treat your capital with respect,” Chris said. He added that some of the academy’s students had doubled their money in three months after taking the Pro-Trader class. Once I paid tuition, I could retake the course as often as I wanted. And if I used one of the six discount brokers that partnered with OTA, I would earn rebates on commissions up to the cost of the classes I took. Overall, I left my free OTA seminar less than satisfied. I wanted to learn how to trade and all I got was a sales pitch. It was time to hit the road. “Who likes money?” I drove to the Hilton Airport Hotel in Norfolk, Va., to attend the Financial Freedom Expo, sponsored by BetterTrades. About 30 would-be zillionaires, mostly baby-boomers, sat in a cavernous ballroom. Men outnumbered women two to one. BetterTrades’ presentation was the most lavish of the three seminars I attended. At the front of the room a large projection screen was draped in velvety purple curtains. Tables displaying neat rows of BetterTrades DVD box sets surrounded the screen. I felt like a contestant on The Price Is Right, especially after I met the expo leader, Steve, who was tall, tan and likable -- just like the game show’s Bob Barker. Steve fired up the crowd with questions such as “Who likes money?” and “Who would like to make more?” For Steve, successful trading was a matter of identifying support and resistance levels for a security. Look at a stock chart. If you draw a line that hits multiple points where the stock price bounces back from a low point, it is known as a support level. The line drawn on the chart that hits multiple points where the price peaks is known as a resistance level. Under technical analysis, a stock trader wants to buy at support (low) and sell at resistance (high). Sounds easy, but it’s difficult to know where the support and resistance levels are until after the fact. With the class wrapping up, Steve had a special offer for me. For just $3,995, if I acted now, I could attend the two-day Market Essentials seminar coming to Norfolk. The first five people to sign up would get free bonus training materials. Steve said I had nothing to lose because if BetterTrades’ strategies did not earn me three times what I spent on tuition within six months, the company would refund my tuition or train me free of charge for up to a year until I mastered the program. (His offer did not take into account how much capital I would put up.) Despite the guarantee, I wanted to know more about what I was going to learn in the class and what kind of return I could realistically expect to earn. Profit Strategies gave me a glimpse of what to expect. “Work your tail off” Profit Strategies (PS) takes the total-immersion approach to education, kind of like throwing you into the pool to force you to learn how to swim. That’s how I felt during PS’s free Active Investor Methods class at the Hilton Miami Airport. The two-day course, which had about 40 students, mixed beginners with trading veterans. We skipped the introductory material and jumped right into trading strategies. The instructors, Mike and Jay, detailed several complicated systems. One moment we were discussing how to use a spike in a stock’s one-day trading volume to predict whether the price would rise. The next moment we were reviewing how to construct an “iron condor,” a strategy of buying and holding four different options with different strike prices. Between the presentations, Mike and Jay flogged PS’s eight-week courses on various trading systems, each of which cost $3,495. Students in the course would meet with the instructor online once a week for class and to review trades. “Only a limited number of seats left,” Jay said. The audience had the opportunity to pepper Mike and Jay with questions. A newcomer asked them what kind of return one should expect to earn from trading. Mike said that a 5% monthly return sounded reasonable. That works out to 80% annualized. All the seminars I attended were quick to point out that individual results will vary. And there’s the rub. Because the performance of individual traders is not public, you have no way of knowing how well these trading programs work. Sure, the seminars present testimonials from their top earners, but you don’t know how well the average student does. Studies show how tough it is to succeed at trading. In 1999, for example, at the height of the day-trading craze, the North American Securities Administrators Association studied the accounts of day traders. Only 11% consistently generated profits, and 70% sustained losses that wiped out their accounts. None of the seminar com-panies monitors the success rate of all their graduates. Says Judy Hackett, BetterTrades’ marketing chief: “We can only track the satisfaction of our customers, and we have lots of very happy customers.” Students who have succeeded with these systems swear by them. Jeffery Kronenberg, a 30-year-old former life-insurance salesman, says he is able to support himself in New York City using the skills he learned at OTA. He has been a full-time trader since October 2009 after taking a class last May. “You have to work your tail off,” says Kronenberg, who typically gets up at 6:30 a.m. on trading days and works until the markets close at 4 p.m. “They will teach you, but you’ve got to really want it,” says Abba Genes, 26, of Mount Vernon, N.Y. He adds that the skills he acquired from BetterTrades allow him to earn about $1,000 a month to supplement his income as a concierge. Genes, who trades three hours a day in the morning, plans to become a full-time trader after he completes college. He says it took months before he learned how to generate trading profits. Meanwhile, big early losses nearly wiped out his account. The seminar instructors I met said they made a good living from trading. But it’s impossible to know whether they are successful traders or just great salesmen. The trading-education industry does not have a good track record when it comes to sales practices. Seminar promoter Teach Me to Trade shut down in the U.S. after the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a 2008 complaint against two of its salespeople. The SEC alleged that in Teach Me to Trade seminars the pair claimed to be successful traders, but they actually earned their millions from commissions selling seminars rather than from trading. In December 2009, Investools paid $3 million to settle an SEC complaint that two of its salesmen misrepresented themselves at seminars as expert traders. As I completed my journey, I couldn’t help but wonder why those who possess the magic formulas for successful trading would give away their secrets -- even if they did earn $4,000 or so per customer. After all, if you can earn 80% a year, why would you run the risk of seeing the effectiveness of your strategy diminish as more and more people started using it (a common occurrence in investing)? That aside, what’s clear is that if you decide to learn how to trade from any of these companies, you will need to have faith that your instructors know what they are doing and that you can convert their knowledge into winning moves. The odds will be against you. Why it’s hard to trade and win High costs. Most trading programs charge more than $4,000 for their workshops and tutoring packages. In addition, trading generates a lot of commissions, usually $5 to $9 per stock trade at the typical discount broker. Too much time. It can take years of practice to earn trading profits consistently. Even if you are not trading on a daily basis, you will have to dedicate several hours a week to studying charts and related data. Potential losses. Trading can lead to huge investment losses. This isn’t for widows, orphans and those with weak stomachs. Tough competition. Financial firms have better trading tools than you do. High-frequency trading systems utilized by professionals make it harder for individual traders to succeed. This page printed from: http://www.kiplinger.com/magazine/archives/our-man-goes-undercover-and-tells-all.html All contents © 2010 The Kiplinger Washington Editors