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On the one hand, I do not have a problem to pay $1000 for a valuable piece of advice, that improves the performance of my account. The amount you are willing to pay is probably a function of the account size.
On the other hand, I trade successfully for many years, and there are not many occasions where I need help.
Many successful traders give their advice free of charge. They make enough money from trading, and are not interested in the administrative work in relation to receiving money for advice. This forum is an excellent example.
We are surrounded by enterprises that are geared to making us part with our money; the successful ones are expert in it. The only reason I have enough savings to think about trading (I have investments but haven't started 'trading' yet) is because I developed a strong resistance* to this urge. So my answer is 'no', I wouldn't pay money for any kind of advice; if I couldn't find it on the Internet, I would assume it wasn't possible and move on.
* I don't know how to turn off the technical analysis pop-up**, sorry.
** Oh dear, there's another one.
I would pay a percent of my profits for a limited time. This wasn't a survey option.
Skin in the game!
If you're believe in yourself as a teacher and in the content you're teaching, you should love this.
Yes I agree that there is the "cost of tuition" with trading and that most of us (perhaps all) of us are extremely--to a fault--independently minded. Which means we have a burning desire to do this by ourselves and make it. We really have to be completely honest with ourselves and address how much that tuition has cost us and can that be reduced by paying to learn the right way. And I mean learn not only our edge but more importantly learn about ourselves--aka pay for therapy.
Having gone through this entire process myself with some success and a lot of losses (you have seen my journal I am still trying to improve and get consistency). I see value in paying for knowledge and services. A lot are scams etc. so be careful here (caveat emptor).
For me i see value in the following to spend $ on rather than purely try and blow it approach:
1. books, research materials to find ones edge.
2. Personal time (there is a cost there) invested to find ones edge
3. Consulting by a professional trader to work through the chaff and prior experience. This can include prop trading firms etc. who take a % of profit for training/teaching approaches and market behavior that works (again careful here)
4. Therapy with someone with proven experience dealing with traders. A good psychiatrist can work wonders however I believe they also need to have the perspective of a trader or what traders deal with.
I answered no and then I saw the clarification on the poll about help on technical or other problems. Regardless my no was based on the fact that I had done this before, spending over 10k and have not seen any returns. Maybe it has told me why I shouldn’t trade in certain ways but I am still in the deep after 1.5 years of trading. Still going but I’m with those that say that you just need to go at it on your own and learn what is keeping you profitable.
Trading: Primarily Energy but also a little Equities, Fixed Income, Metals, U308 and Crypto.
Frequency: Many times daily
Duration: Never
Posts: 5,059 since Dec 2013
Thanks Given: 4,410
Thanks Received: 10,226
I'm reasonably competent with VBA and R so use both. The advantage with R over Excel is if you want to perform say 1,000,000 simulations rather than 10,000. But generally excel is so much quicker to prototype I normally use that.
Monte-Carlo has a 'complex aura' associated with it. In reality it's just generating a bunch of random numbers and using those numbers to generate a bunch of random paths. It's very easy to do in excel, without even using VBA. So when I'm doing quick projects that's often what I do. With the old excel this was limiting because of the sheet size limitations but with the newer excel this is no longer a problem. So for example lets say I want to do 10000 simulations of 10 trades. First I generate 100,000 random numbers, in a 10000 rows x 10 columns grid. Normally I then 'copy paste values only' into a grid next to it, so the numbers aren't continually changing. Next I'll convert each of those random numbers into a trade (again 10000x10 grid), either buy calling a distribution function or by looking up actual trades from a list based upon the random number. Then you build your 10000 equity curves, starting equity+trade1+trade2 etc. Then you perform whatever calculation want. Literally in a few mins you have a custom built monte carlo. Normally takes longer to create pretty charts to show the results than it does to perform the calculation. Using a similar methodology very quick to generate price series which can then be used to calculate the values of options, including exotics that you couldn't evaluate with a closed form solution. Don't do much of the latter any more but in previous lives I did.
Kevin's tool is great and pretty much idiot proof. If you can open Excel and copy in a list of trade results, you can use it. Saying that one of the first things I did after taking Kevin's course was to rewrite his monte-carlo spreadsheet. Kevin's spreadsheet, performs a complete monte-carlo for every starting equity level. The biggest change I made was to only perform a single monte-carlo analysis but calculate performance for every starting equity level based upon that. The results table is then a lot smoother and less prone to outliers effecting a single starting equity level. I also changed the code so that it stored all the results and performed all the calculations in arrays in VBA rather than have to write them to excel. This allows me to quickly add additional performance metric calculations by just adding columns to the arrays to track whatever I want.
While we perform monte-carlo simulations to model equity curves, and model risk of ruin probabilities, return and drawdown distributions why do we stop there? Each one of those simulations has a different Profit Factor, Win Ratio, Sharpe Ratio, Ulcer Ratio etc etc. I'm currently working on a monte carlo that calculates a large number of these of statistics, and shows the distribution for each. I'm hoping that this is more informative than looking at a single number, based upon the actual backtest.
Sorry to hear that. It happen to me as well. See my latest post my story. And join me in the new motto, no 1 year track record no cash for the trading trainers. If you want to see my cash, let me see your cash.