$5000 to $50000 in two years - let the odyssey begin

[GreatPig]

Damok,

One thing to ask yourself about the software: if it can generate a return of about 40% pa with little effort, why are those guys putting in so much time and effort promoting and selling it for a measly $4K when they could be trading with it instead and spending most of their time lazing on the beach?

If I had a system that gave that sort of return regularly, I certainly wouldn't be telling anyone else about it. I'd be up to my neck in margin loans and derivatives just counting the cash as it rolled in!

GP

 

[Fugazi]

*Available on Mac

Probably the minor point in the scheme of things, but I'm having a mare trying to find some decent charting software for Mac, especially Intel. I've given up and installed boot camp, and I'm going to give Parallels a go. If you do come across any good software please let me know - Windows on my MacBook Pro really is a last resort.

 

[dubiousinfo]

You have stated that your starting capital is $5,000.
If you dont do the course, you save $4,000 dollars and your starting capital is $9,000.
Thats a return of 80%.
Sounds like a good investment decision to me

 

[clowboy]

I remember reading on the forums somewhere that Nick Radge tutors people on a one on one basis. Does he still do this? If so what is the cost?

I guess it would be far higher than the 4k you are planing to spend on this software and it would probally involve moving to queensland (i think that is where he lives) but I would personally much rather spend the money on something like that than some "software".

I am far from experienced or professional etc etc but from my limited understanding if you have what it takes to trade sucessfully then you would be able to do it with a newsparer, some graph paper and a pen. Yes it would be very time consumming but my point is that it is not the software that maketh the trader.

 

[Milk Man]

I'll tell you my story. I first started reading books on trading about two years ago after I got info on a different expensive program. It was twice as dear so that was a no-brainer not to buy. Then I found ASF to help seek out a profitable method. After about 15mths? here I got the confidence to trade a method I had concocted. The system has been running about 2 months now and I am 12k in the black on 50k outlay (could well be $1200 off $5000 coz its forex trading ). This is well within the blueprint of the system. Risk is an acceptable 3% per trade. Takes about 15-20 mins out of my day.

What has it cost me? (All what I needed anyways )
Amibroker software: $250
My system programmed by Kaveman (on these forums): $50
Nick Radge's 'Adaptive Analysis': $20-30 or something
Aussie stock forums: TIME

In summary: you can run rings around these turkeys if they need to sell software to make a living. TELL 'EM TO GET STUFFED!

 

[rex]

damok

To answer your questions there are heaps of programs that will do swing charts for you.

To give a few examples

bullcharts do it, as does protrader.

Both give you free trials. My advise is you try protrader, Frank is a no
bullS&^% moral man and a good bloke. His service is cheap and he doesn't promise miracles.

Leon Wilson is also a good man, you can learn from him, he supports bullcharts etc. A mentor is a good idea, you will find many experienced rich traders are very willing to help you out on an email basis, you just gotta find someone

In short use $1000 for software and books etc and use the other $3000 to invest. There are many kinds of scammers, SITM is just one breed of them.

Rex

 

[rubles]

Hi damok

If you bail on your course at this point, you will get your money back as well as a little time to think about things. Take your time to check out this forum - it is truly a great forum - and you will pick up a lot of ideas and thoughts on what to do. Anything from tips on what will help you create a trading plan to what software or data provider you could use, or even books that can get you started (Saturday afternoon, glass of wine, new trading book = bliss).

Give yourself a little time to see what you might be able to learn yourself from this forum and some relatively inexpensive books - if this doesn't work for you, you've lost nothing and you can always go and do the course later.

If you're even thinking you should pull out on Saturday, maybe the course isn't for you either now or for good. If you're going to do it, do it with conviction and no regrets!

Good luck, whatever you decide to do.

Rubles

 

[bunyip]

Is the software worth $4000?

SITM is a business... they've been around for years... it it were a scam, then they would have been eliminated a long time ago...

$4000 is the price of knowledge.

Good Luck.

Scammers are not necessarily eliminated. If they have outstanding marketing skills and are prepared to pour enough money into advertising, they can keep getting a new crop of unsuspecting clients to replace those who drop out after realising they've been duped.
I don't know exactly what pricing structure SITM are using these days, but I imagine it's not so different to what they used back in the early days of the company.
It used to be $995 for the Starter Pack, which was a simple system of entering a trending market once price retraced temporarily, then resumed trending.
There's nothing wrong with that system at all......it's a good robust system and anyone who implements it consistently will make money, providing he controls his losses and sticks with his winners as long as they keep trending.
The thing about the Starter Pack back then was that there were any number of books that taught a similar system, and these books only cost about one tenth of the Starter Pack price.
So it wasn't that the Starter Pack was a scam, it's just that it was a rip off.
It's even more of a rip off now that SITM has jacked up the price to four grand. Even if it includes the software, it's still overpriced to hell.

So SITM fleeced unsuspecting people by selling them a ridiculously overpriced system, and implying that trading is simple......you just do this and this and this and the money will roll in like waves on an ocean beach.
But the fleecing didn't stop there. Once they hooked a client by selling him the Starter Pack, they did their utmost to convince him that now it was time to take his trading and his education to the next level, and the way to do it was to buy their next course called 'The Number 1 Trading Plan', which from memory had a price tag of $495.
Next it was the video series at a cost of roughly $8000. The video series consisted of a number of trading videos (I think it was eight in total but I'm not 100% sure on that).
So far they had extracted approximately $9500 from unsuspecting clients who thought they were getting the key to untold riches. But it didn't stop there. The grand finale was when they extracted another several thousand dollars from their clients by selling them a 5 day trading congress at a swish hotel on Queenslands Sunshine Coast.
I'm not sure if that five day course had a price tag of almost 25 grand, or if the combined cost of all their courses came to almost 25 grand. Whatever, it was a colossal amount of money to pay for a system that supposedly would teach them how to use Gann analysis to forecast the markets with uncanny accuracy that would enable them to extract obscene amounts of trading profits.
I've spoken to at least ten people who went right through all SITM's courses and spent around the 25 grand mark, but they were unable to trade profitably. Some of it could have been their own fault.....the Starter Pack is definitely a workable system. But I think where they came unstuck was when they did the supposedly more advanced courses which convinced them that Gann analysis would enable them accurately forecast what a market was going to do.

My dentist was one who did all of SITM's courses. Every time I went to his surgery to get something done with my teeth, he'd haul me out to his back room where he had three massive tables set up, all butted up against each other to make one big table. He had hand drawn charts laid out on the table, in fact he had numerous charts stuck together with sticky tap to make one big chart. On this mega chart he was plotting the SPI. He had lines drawn everywhere, and he'd point to one of the lines and tell me that once the market reached that line, it would change direction, but if it went straight through that line without reacting, then it would probably reach this other line a bit higher up. And if it didn't react at that line, then it was likely to go even further up to this third line. And so on and so on.
Seemed to me that it was a bit like saying it'll rain on Monday, but if it doesn't then try Tuesday, and if not Tuesday, then maybe the rain will come on Friday.
To me it just seemed a ridiculous way to try and trade. I told my dentist he should just go back to the Starter Pack and buy dips during uptrends, and short rallies during downtrends, and that would likely be a far more profitable and simple system than all this forecasting business he was attempting to master.
The long and short of it was that he never did make any money from this forecasting style of trading.

Anyway, that's just a brief history of how SITM operated in the early days. I suspect that their present day operations are similar, with just a different and more expensive pricing structure.

What new traders should understand is...
1. You don't need to forecast markets to be able to trade profitably.
2. You don't need to spend thousands of dollars, or even hundreds, to get yourself a profitable trading system.

Back in the 1950's Nick Darvas developed a simple trading system that enabled him to amass tens of millions of dollars of trading profits in today's values.
I can tell you that his system still works today, and thanks to Frank Watkins, we can learn the system for less than $10.
If you try the Darvas system and find it's not for you, then there are other inexpensive courses you can do, such as Nick Radge's course.
But whatever you do, PLEASE don't go handing several thousand of your hard earned dollars over to unscrupulous people who charge obscene amounts of money and make grandiose claims about how profitable you're going to be.

Bunyip

 

[wayneL]

Great post by Bunyip.

Yep $4,000 is not the price of education, it's the cost of marketing plus markup.

You will get far more from Radges material, for a whole lot less.

I studied marketing in a previous life and there is a thing called "percieved" value. Basically if something is expensive it must be valuable.

Well, as the song goes.. "It ain't necessarily so"

Good Luck

 

[bunyip]

Great post by Bunyip.

Yep $4,000 is not the price of education, it's the cost of marketing plus markup.

You will get far more from Radges material, for a whole lot less.

I studied marketing in a previous life and there is a thing called "percieved" value. Basically if something is expensive it must be valuable.

Well, as the song goes.. "It ain't necessarily so"

Good Luck

Wayne

Talking of the power of marketing, here's a story that was told by the presenter at a small business workshop that I attended a few years back.

This was an experiment designed specifically to show the effectiveness of good marketing.
One of the very well known perfume businesses like Estee Lauder or Elisabeth Arden, put out a new perfume, but didn't put their company name to it.
They put it in a very plain looking bottle, gave it an uninspiring name, put a very cheap price tag on it, then gave out free samples in an upmarket women's clothing store.
The shop assistant sprayed a small sample on the arm of any woman who wanted to try it. She reported that most of them looked at the plain bottle with disdain, had a sniff, turned up their noses in distaste and said something along the lines of "Oohhhhhh....I don't like the smell of that"!

Next, the same company put the same perfume in an expensive crystal decanter, put their company name to it, gave it an exotic name and an outlandishly expensive price tag.
They gave out free samples of it in the same women's clothing store, and it sold like hot cakes!

Such is the power of marketing.

Another story.
A friend of mine has a cousin who owns an exclusive women's clothing boutique on Sydney's north shore. Some of her dresses carry price tags of $6,000.
He asked his cousin "How can you justify charging six grand for a dress".
Her reply was "If I charged six hundred instead of six thousand, nobody would buy them".

I guess this illustrates the mentality that so many people have......."If it's expensive it must be good".
SITM are experts at exploiting this mentality.

Bunyip

 

[wayneL]

Wayne

Talking of the power of marketing, here's a story that was told by the presenter at a small business workshop that I attended a few years back.

This was an experiment designed specifically to show the effectiveness of good marketing.
One of the very well known perfume businesses like Estee Lauder or Elisabeth Arden, put out a new perfume, but didn't put their company name to it.
They put it in a very plain looking bottle, gave it an uninspiring name, put a very cheap price tag on it, then gave out free samples in an upmarket women's clothing store.
The shop assistant sprayed a small sample on the arm of any woman who wanted to try it. She reported that most of them looked at the plain bottle with disdain, had a sniff, turned up their noses in distaste and said something along the lines of "Oohhhhhh....I don't like the smell of that"!

Next, the same company put the same perfume in an expensive crystal decanter, put their company name to it, gave it an exotic name and an outlandishly expensive price tag.
They gave out free samples of it in the same women's clothing store, and it sold like hot cakes!

Such is the power of marketing.

Another story.
A friend of mine has a cousin who owns an exclusive women's clothing boutique on Sydney's north shore. Some of her dresses carry price tags of $6,000.
He asked his cousin "How can you justify charging six grand for a dress".
Her reply was "If I charged six hundred instead of six thousand, nobody would buy them".

I guess this illustrates the mentality that so many people have......."If it's expensive it must be good".
SITM are experts at exploiting this mentality.

Bunyip

Amazing! Yet similar examples are literally everywhere around us.

 

[wayneL]

My mind is whirring!

Do you think I could get away with charging $50,000 for a few trading cliche's scratched out on the back of an envelope if I made a flash website to market it?

 

[dubiousinfo]

My mind is whirring!

Do you think I could get away with charging $50,000 for a few trading cliche's scratched out on the back of an envelope if I made a flash website to market it?

Where do I send the cheque? :

 

[bunyip]

My mind is whirring!

Do you think I could get away with charging $50,000 for a few trading cliche's scratched out on the back of an envelope if I made a flash website to market it?

It wouldn't be beyond the realms of possibility if your marketing skills were good enough, you sunk enough money into promotion and advertising, and you developed proficiency in lying.

Bunyip

 

[smoothsatin]

Gday,
If you are only betting on price rises (ie not short selling), then it my be more realistic to achieve a market result + X%?
Also remember brokerage and tax when working out actual $$ returns.
Good luck with it,
Cheers

 

[Pager]

Good luck damok.

If you still have your $5K after 12 months IMHO that is a fantastic result for a newbie.

As others have already pointed out the SITM course is a complete rip off, if you want a good education, spend some time doing searches on this site and the Reefcap forum, some great stuff and all for free.

If you do outlay for some course’s and education then Nick Radges (Runs the Reefcap forum) are by all accounts very good value and a fraction the cost of SITM.

Remember trading may sound like its just a matter of a bit of education and understanding of entries and exits but believe me this is only the tip of the iceberg.

 

[wayneL]

and you developed proficiency in lying.

Bunyip

ROFL

 

[Crazy Shark]

Isn't the whole reason why SITM are "educators" is because they cannot hack it in the real world!

 

[Milk Man]

Isn't the whole reason why SITM are "educators" is because they cannot hack it in the real world!

Hahaha, "those who cannot do can teach" huh? My oldies paid for my education and got crap results too (OP15). :

 

[nioka]

Damok

I feel you have probably wasted at least 75% of the fee payed to date. I had a very rich uncle many years ago. He was a bookmaker. He would only give me one hot tip, it was don't bet. He believed that most gamblers eventually went broke unless they could afford to lose regularly or unless they only bet on something they knew what was going to happen . On the share market
that is called insider trading.

Any one can make money on a rising market. At other times there are winners and losers.To be awinner you have to do your own homework.

Enjoy the exercise.