BadTrader

If Hoffman shows all his trades in real time then it shouldn't be a problem for someone to show an accounting of what he has made in the last year. There must be someone that is tracking it. I have heard that he made about 100k in trading profits in the last year... up until the big loss, that is. Can anyone verify how many *paying* members he has? It used to be that he had a chat room and you could see how many people were in there. I highly doubt he has 1000 people. I watched him for awhile in the early days when he had a few hundred people. You could watch the numbers drop off until he cut off the chat room so no one could see how few were left. During the first year or so he would have quite a few good days and then blow all the profits on one bad trade. He did that a number of times. I tracked his P&L and depending upon what his commissions were he was lucky to break even. Back then he was trading ES and would often start with 10 to 20 contracts. He then smartened up and dropped down to starting with 1 or 2 contracts so he didn't get in over his head so soon. I guess this strategy worked for awhile as he overpowered the markets, but eventually it caught up with him (as the Martingale strategy always seems to do). His winning percentage was always impressive, but in the end it didn't mean anything. The markets can always stay irrational longer than a wild trader can stay liquid. What you can be quite assured of is that if he took that large of a loss and is still coming back to teach people, he is making even more money on training. It takes a lot of guts, not to mention a grandiose personality, to trade like he does and then turn it into a "learning experience" for everyone else and charge them in the process. The bottom line is that most starting traders will never make it with his style because they never know at the start of a trade if it is going to end up as a large position. I think what he is doing is financial suicide for most daytraders.