Cormac,
<what is the weak link in the chain>
The trader is always the weak link. This has been said before but I'll say it again: traders fail due to lack of discipline, not lack of knowledge. For the most part, trading knowledge isn't proprietary or secret. There (mostly) is no Rosetta Stone that, once known, will turn your lead into gold. It doesn't work that way and never has.
Quite frankly, I've become convinced that all the recent talk about "mentoring" is a lot of horse manure. Not that the concept is wrong. I just don't believe new traders really want anyone to know how badly they screw up.
Here's one: I'm a professional trader, respected author, teacher, blah, blah, blah. Suppose I told 10 people it was OK to send me their last year of trading slips/reports and I'll tell them all the ways they messed up, made bad choices, failed to exercise risk management, didn't follow their own written trading plan or chased the crowd. Chances are that few of them would take me up on it because their egos could not handle the humility of knowing just how poorly they acted on what they already knew and how little discipline they had exercised.
Folks ask me why I only charge $99.95 for a trading course other organizations might push for $999.95. The answer is that they are pushing the illusion that you can actually buy their knowledge if you pay the right price. And they know that's nonsense.
Only time and experience keep you in the game after you get the basics. You don't need anymore than the basics to set firmly along the path. You need time and experience and the trader-experts can't give you that.
After doing TA for many years, I still discover completely new things about it. Should those "secrets" have been taught to me by Murphy or Elder when I first read them? Of course not. They're my realization, not theirs. I own that inside knowledge, they don't.
Instructors/teachers/mentors cannot transfer ownership of inside knowledge. That always comes from personal realization, period.
Alan |
