Trader Meetups (Part 17)

I left off in part 16 discussing the vast amount of work required to move from beginner to advanced trader.  In my experience, meetups are notorious for making the road seem easy with alluring marketing materials rather than collaborative system development.

I have chosen to pick on meetups for this blog series, but they certainly don’t have a monopoly when it comes to misdirecting traders from the one “proven” road to success described in part 4 and part 5.  So many trader education programs, mentorships, newsletter services, coaching, and psychological services promise success with little time and effort.  For a fee, they will show you the way to Easy St.  I do not believe any easy street exists even though Wall Street (i.e. the multi-billion dollar institutions) wants you to believe it.

Listen to the voice of Wall Street:

> Go ahead, get happy and overconfident so you trade real big hoping to make
> millions with your greedy intentions.  You may even win for a while (e.g.
> 2006-7, 2011-2, 2013, etc.).  When (not “if”) you lose, though, you’ll be all-in
> and you will more than pay us off for our patience and sales/marketing efforts.

I should note that while my claims of the laborious work as a prerequisite for trading success make logical sense, I will never prove them.  For myself, I will one day be able to look back and determine whether I succeeded.  I have done and continue to do the laborious work, which will give me a sample size of one.  Only brokerages and the IRS see account values over time for a sample size sufficient to do this analysis.  Everything else–especially how successful people may claim to be–is just sales, marketing, and braggadocio.

I will conclude this blog series with my next post.