hi howard,
yes thats what i realised after doing the trial,the dow can move 20 points very quickly,however the vendor's signals seemed to be pretty good,but you do have to be quick to get in at the right price.
The other system iam looking at trades the S&P and the russell,i havnt had an opportunity to do a trial with them,but from what i understand they usually have a 2 point stop loss,so iam assuming it would move slower?
Ive studdied both groups live results,(TI and puretick) and TI seems to be more impressive.(ive taken into account the number of contracts used to achieve those results and the numbers of trades per contract and the number of points gained/lost).
At the end of the day iam trying to establish which system gives me a better probability of making money,and which system is better suited for a newbie.
Hi szandor,
A 2 point move on the S&P and and 20 point move on the Dow will move with approximately the same speed. I don't really agree with Howard's comment that stops hurt systems. That would only be true if the 'system' is wrong or more specifically if the trading rules you use are poor - stops are part of trading rules. Trading without catastrophic stops might work ok for experienced traders who are disciplined enough to use mental stops, but probably the single most useful piece of advice a newbie trader can take on board is to use stop losses without fail - that will at least lengthen the amount of time before they blow out their account and quit.
I'd like to know what your calculations were with the two trading records because I decided the opposite to you. I'd like to know if either I missed something in the records, or if perhaps you are calculating things differently - for instance I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "trades per contract" - that doesn't make sense - do you mean contracts per trade?.
I can understand that your perception of the calls in the room you trialled is that you have to be very quick on the entry, and sometimes that is true, but having been in that room for a while now it's obvious that is the perception of a lot of traders that come into the room for a 10 day trial. It takes time to learn the set-ups - more than the 10 day trial allows. Once you start to know the set-ups the entries become a lot easier because you start to 'beat the buzzer' as we say, and often outperform the track record. The track record is 'dumbed-down' to show the lower end of results - a lot of the more experienced traders in the room regularly outperform the track record.
All of that aside, it is still a difficult decision to decide which educator to go with. I think that you should really look beyond the track records of both rooms and how much money each room will make you by following their calls and more importantly ask these questions: which room will I learn more in, and which room can I afford to be with longer? While around 90% of all traders will fail, that statistic gets flipped once traders survive beyond about 3 years. In other words, if you can gain a few years of experience, chances are you will succeed. There are really only a few ways to achieve that:
1. Have loads of capital, and just put up with consistent (and frustrating) losses for the first few years until you gain enough experience to start succeeding.
2. Find a good mentor that can help you minimise your losses for the first part of your career so that you can get to the point where you can start making money.
3. Somehow be self-taught - which is nigh on impossible. I've not yet heard of a well known and (more importantly!) successful trader who did not have a mentor. Traders like Mark Fisher, Linda Raschke, Louis Borsellino (unequivocally the best trader in the world) and Mark Douglas (his book 'Trading in the Zone' is a must read!) all had mentors.
For me, option 2 was the obvious choice. And when it came to deciding between the two rooms it was Puretick that allowed me to be in the room learning for the longest - for the cost of TI (which I think gives you about 3 months room access - someone please correct me if that's wrong) I can stay in the Puretick room for 18 months - that's long enough to start to head down the road to success and not failure. It is a shame that TI don't offer a trial - $7000 is a lot of cash to spend for something you might not like. Anyway, the crux really is that focussing on the learning process is far more important for your career as a trader (if that's what you want) than worrying about the intricacies of any system. There is NO holy grail system out there - there are merely lots of systems that can work well if the trader trading them has learnt enough about trading - and that takes time.