When you running a business and you want customers, and possible customer asks for statements, business owner has two options, one will most likely get You as a client and the other is not to get you as a client. If you a good trader and selling your services to the public, you should be proud of your accomplishments and be open on your past trading. Long ago I tried chat rooms cause of the boredom, never found any to be profitable, matter of fact, I was either asked to leave during trials when my calls were better than people who had service or was offered a job. I can't trade any more concentrating fully and do a chat room, just way too stressful. If you are trading size, let me tell you, you watching ticks when you scalp, not like I put on a trade and go make a Dagwood (for those too young, very huge sandwich). I just think it will take you longer to learn to trade unless the room is geared for you to learn and trade. But I have never seen any really good traders mess with chat room services for any long duration, dealing with public-usually not profitable traders- just complain about everything. Plus, you have to be there everyday, it becomes a real grind to call out signals and knowing most clients will change signals.
This is a huge red flag for me. You mean you have to buy indicators from them or else the setups wont work? How have you made your SIM money so far? Free use of the indicators? I myself am not big on indicators, but they can perhaps work well if you would use them to automate strategies. But guys who do this know the indicator inside and out. If you say first to trade live, and next to buy the indicator, how can you do it live first if you don't have this indicator that you say you need? How expensive are these indicators that you consider them an investment? I honestly think when it come to trading, you can either trade or you can't. About one week should do it. In that one week you should hopefully have some trends, have some ranges, have some reversals, have some chop, etc. So if you think you're ready to trade, open up an account and go for it. I think its the best way to gauge how far you really are and it will quickly show you exactly where you are at. But what any of this has to do with the trading room I'm not sure. If the trading room is so pivotal then the success is theirs and not yours. But all of this is of course only what I think.
That implies they have no public archives of their performance and no public archives of their broker statements to explain why you need to "request" such information. That info should have been available at their website for anyone to view unless they do such (not post it) for marketing purposes to encourage people to request that info so that they can get access to email addresses. There's another possible reason why they don't publicly archives of their trading records...overall they have a poor performance and they hope that during your free trial you're profitable because you caught a small duration when they were profitable. Just beware that trading rooms have their ups and downs. Thus, you may have free trialed a room when they were doing good and you're not aware of their performance from month to month going back for several years...reason why public archives are extremely important to have access too. My personal experience...if there are no archives or the archives just show a few days or weeks worth of info...they most likely will not cough up that info when you email them and the few that do...it'll most likely be a excel or spreadsheet format and not something from a broker. That's the other issue about trade signal calling chat rooms...they (the signal callers) are there every trading day. If you're not there every trading day...there's a very good chance you can have a profitable trading day when they had a losing trading day or you can have a losing day when they had a profitable day because you've missed key trades on that day due to your absence for a few hours out of that day. Just the same, their weekly or monthly performance will be different from yours because you missed particular trading days. Simply, the only way you can have similar like performance as them is if you're there every day for every trade signal called and you then take every trade...most users of signal calling chat rooms are not there every day for every signal called...reason why their performance can be worst or better than the signal caller. My point...don't do free trials unless you're absolutely confident you'll be there the entire duration of the free trial. You'll be a little more accurate in your assessment of the trade calls for that duration but you really need access to the archives of their chat room and broker statements...very few have such...most don't. Seriously, if some chat room tells you they've been here many years...they should have documentation (logs) of every call for those years. Simply, I'm talking about documentation for EVERY trade signal call and not just some monthly or weekly point/dollar summary. There's a site out there that list the trade signal chat rooms that do maintain a detailed archive log...you'll have to use Google to find it because I can't remember the name of that research site that say they've researched thousands of chat rooms...they list the ones (not many) that have verification out of thousands researched.
Why is the trade room using a sim account? Big red flag. They want to sell you their "proprietary" indicators. BIG RED FLAG. Chances are the indicators are just tweaked versions of standard indicators. If this room is attempting to trade futures intraday with a bar chart and a few indicators I understand an average of 129 dollars a week. In my humble opinion that is not the way to trade futures intraday. You need to see WHY price is moving, not WHERE it happened to be. I do not believe you will get any good education by paying this "trade room". Take a look at this free educational video series http://www.jigsawtrading.com/learn-to-trade/free-order-flow-analysis-lessons/ The guys you are trading against are NOT looking at charts and indicators; why would you? I am using the Jigsaw tools, a 2 tick renko footprint chart and a 150 tick chart with no indicators other than a VWAP band, volume profile and a volume delta balance. When I first started I must have tried all the indicators. They "sort of" work sometimes; just enough to keep people hoping. I am sure they are better in a longer timeframe but if your goal is to take 10 - 20 ticks out of intraday moves they leave a lot to be desired. I wish someone had told me about orderflow trading when I first started; I would have saved a lot of time.
First I have to thank you for what is actually useful advice (you really can tell who knows their thing, by the quality and practicality of their advice) In theory you need the indicators, but I have simply been waiting for the signal to show up (you can see his charts in the trade room), and then taking it (which the moderators dont always take the trade - they are quite conservative ) Not sure what you mean by how I have made my SIM money, but I just been trading on demo for the past ten weeks. No I wont buy the indicator, just look on his screen in the trade room and take the trade (copy) The indicators are 4000 to own the indicators for life. Like I mentioned in my previous posts, I am still am learning price action patterns and programming in C# on the side @Stewie @Handle123
Thanks for your reply. All their trades are posted on their website for the past five years, should I still request broker statements? @Handle123 Yeah you are right, they were negative for November & October and I was profitable for those months b/c it just so happened that when I was absent they had losing trades. No they don't have this level of documentation. I googled the crap out of this firm and everyone that works there. The site you are referring to his Dean Handley's site, he himself is a scammer (but that is another story for another day) . @wrbtrader
Thanks for your replay @wartrace They are trading live, I am trading in SIM until I verify the profitability of this room. Yes the indicators are expensive, so I will trade without them at first. How long have you been trading with orderflow? and are you trading live?
Over two years; 6E live account. Before you spend a penny on these "indicators" just watch the videos I linked to and read the guy's free e-book. You will understand why I suggested it. Is there a link to this trade room? Maybe you should post it and see if anyone has had experience with them. Have you ever looked at a footprint chart? http://www.marketdelta.com/learn/footprint I would not suggest buying market delta due to its costs but there are plenty of good footprint charts vendors out there with reasonable pricing. What better way to see imbalance, support or resistance? Read the free material on the market delta site.
Wow. I just saw the 4000 dollar price tag for the indicators. PLEASE share the name of this company. Look; trading is a simple two way auction process. There are patterns that repeat regularly but not always in the same way. Instead of shelling out thousands of dollars on super spectacular indicators you might be better off learning HOW to trade. Here is something Market Delta sent me today. Simple analysis of order flow. If you combine this type of chart (Footprint chart) with the depth of market and the tape you are going to see inside the bars. You will NOT NEED a 4000 dollar indicator package that tells you the blue line crossed the yellow line. Indicators only tell you what happened "X" bars ago. It is pretty hard to drive a car looking in the rear view mirror. I guess I have said my peace. Good luck to you.
Thanks so much. I don't have it all figured out, but I've been around long enough to at least know what sounds fishy. LOL.. this really makes me laugh. A guy who is supposedly good enough to teach but doesn't take a trade because he is conservative? What does this even mean? The trade either sets up or it doesn't. If it doesn't set up, why not? Maybe the volume isn't right, or the pace isn't right, or it didn't get close enough to a level he is watching to get in at a good price where the risk is within his limits, but the excuse given is pretty crappy. Huge red flag. What I mean by this was if you were taking the trade cause you saw it, or if you took the trade cause you were told to. Simply put, if the so called "teacher's" in the room went silent for a while, would you still have taken the trade or not? I'm just trying to figure out how much of this SIM profit is your doing vs. their doing. This is how they make their money, and of course the fee for the trading room for those guys who pay. Their survival isn't dependent on trading income, its dependent on selling indicators and memberships to their room. You would only be getting trading income, so your trading better be better than theirs since you won't have access to a share of this indicator income.