TraderPro said:
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