Is Paying For Education Worthwhile?

There was an interesting comment to the blog last week from a poster who said he benefited from all the free stuff in the blog, but was questioning if it was worth paying for education like the Workshop.


He wrote:

EL, I have been following you for a long time and I think the free information you provide your readers with on a daily basis is great. I know it has helped me a great deal but reading this post really has me wondering how this workshop is worth $5,000? It seems kind of obvious and basic, particularly if you have been following this blog for any length of time. I too have hundreds if not thousands of strategies that show 63% profitability. I also know that if I add more filters and backtest more I may be able to get one of them to 65%. I considered joining the workshop but then decided not to mainly due to the fact that no indicator, book or seminar has been worth any dollar spent so far. I know I would be pissed if I spent another $5,000 to learn how to write an algo like the one you posed above. I know for a fact that your algos have losing days and I think it would be instrumental for you to post those as well. Its clear you are trading standard deviations masked in EMAs, and CCI triggers. Is that all there is to this entire blog?

Firstly, thanks for the comment.


Let me start out by saying, I agree that no indicator that I have found or seen is worth paying $5,000 for. I often buy bits and pieces I see if I want to look at them, paying up to a few hundred dollars if it's good. My last such purchase was Pete Steidlmayer's VOLUME STRIPS software, which I am looking at. I don't know if it will be any use or not yet, but I certainly thought it was worth $350 to find out and to learn something new from the person who has been a proven innovator.


Back to the comment. Some people can work things out for themselves and prefer doing that. I had to do that because I had no source of deep knowledge to teach me, although I was a member of CompuTrac and I did go to a number of seminars from people like Steidlmayer, Dalton, Larry Williams and a few others. I always learned something.


For me, the purpose of education in trading is to learn something I did not know, to learn how to do something that would take me a long time to figure out, or something without which I would probably lose a lot of money before I learnt it for myself.


The attendees at the workshop and those that will buy DVDs of it will get not only the knowledge that has been transferred during the workshop but the mentoring and assistance that I give them afterwards. The Workshop has two parts: the delivery of the material over the week and then 3 months putting it into practice. In addition, the trade logic and easylanguage code I supplied meant that re-inventing the wheel was not necessary.


The Workshop was full of material that took me years to figure out. The support that the attendees get is based on 45 years of trading. All short term day trading is trading deviations from mean or return to mean. How you do it is not all that simple, otherwise most people would be making money rather than losing. We have a dozen basic pictures to trade and a great many variations and nuances within those dozen pictures. Also money management is another part of trading. I hope you have read those posts too, because that is an important part of trading.

Today was biz as usual in the DAX. That means it took no prisoners. The highlight of the morning (London time) was the Fib to Fib trade. As you can see, I had several bites of the cherry as I know that the way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. Those food metaphors really mean is that I am a very short term trader and don't hold a whole position for a long move. I scale and reload or All Out and reload.