The Best Way on Forex

[BoraPhoenix]

I voted Study by Yourself and get Experience....

I must agree with others who pinted out that some of the answers are pretty much teh same and/or are understood to be taken in consideration together

Developing your own susteem naturally includes Study by Yourself and get Experience....

i can say that this poll is mostly on the topic of:

mentor or no mentor?

Me, i vote no mentor.... but learn and comprehead on my own... sometimes other people can tighten your views instead of opening your mind to as many solutions as there are out there....

and also, gotta agree with the opinion that a man doesn't have to invent everything in his system from scratch....

use other people's knowledge as much as you can.....

and be brave! try everything - question everything..

[Ugly_Dog]

DB
I agree wholeheartedly! Ideally, I'm hoping for some help in avoiding the pitalls that seem to trap most would be traders. Along the lines of the old adage "Teach me to fish"!

[mishak]

Wow ! One month after the Poll was started we have 138 votes, 2350 views and 5-stars rating.
Recent voters for Self_Studying took hand over Own_System_Developpers.

• Study by Yourself and get Experience 43%
• Develop your Own System 34%
• Learn from a Mentor 14%

and we have follow-up discussion in The Ideal Forex Trading System and The Ideal Forex Mentor threads of MoneyTec Forums™

The next discussion should be (I guess) about Experience vs System Development - please share your views at this new thread.

Cheers

[gendalf]

i voted for developing your own system and i think it includes in itself many things: studying, self-experience in the field, mentoring won't hurt if it is genuine and it can help to speed up the process and to avoid bumps. i disagree with BoraPhoenix on the account that mentor can be harmful in any way, if you have a good common sense you will recognize what is the valuable knowledge and will keep it for good. the problem we humans have is that we are too lazy to think on our own and we inadvertently look for the path of less resistance - e.g. easy way; it is a known fact that thinking is the most tiring form of activity, did you ever feel drained after some serious brainstorming session but relieved in a way especially if you got a solution? i am getting of topic here, all i am trying to say if don't learn how to think intelligently on your own you will not get far anywhere...

[DB]

As much as I've talked about mentoring the fact is that it is always -- do it yourself -- whether you have a mentor or you get your ideas from books, the internet, watching lizards walk up and down walls, from the bottom of a bottle of Jack Daniels, or from funny looking mushrooms.

Who has to test and validate those ideas? Who chooses to implement them? Who chooses to violate them? Who do you blame for your losses? Who do you congratulate for your successes? It does not matter where your ideas come from. Give the same trading ideas to 50 different people and you'll have 50 different results and probably 50 different trading systems. It is always do it yourself.

It takes a lot more than thinking to trade well. In fact according to Richard Dennis one of the top traders of all time who was responsible for mentoring the Turtle Traders... intelligence (creative use of thought) was not the key factor for success.... not even a close second... turns out discipline and emotional control are by far the most important factors. There are several personal and system related factors that promote discipline and emotional control but intelligence is not a big factor for successful trading. In fact in Dennis' experience the really high IQ thinkers were typically the worst traders.

My point is that you need every edge you can get. Why be narrow in your thinking about what is the best way to get there? Why restrict your options to a "best way"? You may need one of those other options some time. Why build walls of support and resistance in your mind and emotions -- towards "methods" when you have enough support and resistance issues to contend with in the markets?

Why let such general alternatives as are on the voting list of this thread restrict your thinking that there is such a thing as the best way. I think the ONLY best way is the one that works for the person at the time. Since I've known all of the methods that have been discussed to have worked for some people some of the time and none of them to work all the time for everyone it makes a pretty good case for keeping an open mind.

How can any of us know a method won't work just because it failed once or twice for us before? I went through a lot of music teachers just to learn what a good teacher was. I took keyboard, vocals, guitar, bass, drums, from a variety of teachers and often blamed myself for slow progress until I found teachers I could relate to and saw the difference it could make. You could say that having a teacher failed for me over 90 percent of the time. However I'd never have recognised a really great teacher without having had the mediocre ones.

I'm in no way suggesting anyone jump all over the place but if you ever get into a major slump and your chosen "best" method isn't doing it for you at a time when you or the markets change imperceptibly enough to get you in trouble -- I hope you have maintained the elasticity of thinking necessary to make choices that move you onward.

DB

[mishak]

Yes, the Dennis's test was a good idea.
However I'm not sure if he had proved smth. He ended with 20 hand-picked "students" of 1000 applicants plus 3 guys by recommendation. It is only 2% of people who applied. I wonder how Dennis distributed his advertisement about his program, had everybody in the USA chance to read it and apply? Anyhow, these 2% is much less than percenate of successful traders on forex which is widely considered to be 10%.
The "Trading Places" movie looks more "pure" experiment for me

[DB]

Originally posted by mishak
Yes, the Dennis's test was a good idea.
However I'm not sure if he had proved smth. He ended with 20 hand-picked "students" of 1000 applicants plus 3 guys by recommendation. It is only 2% of people who applied. I wonder how Dennis distributed his advertisement about his program, had everybody in the USA chance to read it and apply? Anyhow, these 2% is much less than percenate of successful traders on forex which is widely considered to be 10%.
The "Trading Places" movie looks more "pure" experiment for me

Mishak,

Surely you are joking. I think your comment about trading places was the tip off. Nonetheless if you are serious here are my comments:

Dennis only interviewed 80 of the 1000 applicants and chose to train only 20 percent of the ones he interviewed. That in no way implies that the non-selected 980 would all have failed. To imply that the 980 failed is to imply that the entire rest of the world of non-successful traders also failed for they too were not selected having been filtered out by time, space, availablity, and a host of factors to incredible to document. So really if we were to use your argument Dennis' group were only .0000000005 percent of the population. What then is the point? Also what is the point of your comment about it representing only 2 percent of forex traders? By far the majority of the Turtles were not traders.

No mentor could train all applicants. There had to be a selection process and Eckhardt who took the other side of the bet had no problem with Dennis' selection procedure in the context of the bet. Dennis bet was to prove that trading could be taught and that it wasn't genetic. William Eckhardt agreed he won the bet because he was able to train a less than random percentage of the people he selected. He had no genetic isolation techniques in his selection process nor did he have any basis to determine genetic predisposition to trading. Also the bet was not to determine whether ANYONE could be taught trading as was the bet in the move trading places. The bet was simply to determine if trading could be taught.

Getting back to the thread however, you responded with a point that I don't really think was related to my point and that of this thread which was to discuss the ideal mentor. I think it was pretty clear that from a learners point of view Dennis built some pretty compelling motivational factors into his trading/mentoring plan. The turtles themselves testifiy to the fact that they had it easy because Dennis actually made it a lot harder to break the rules than to obey. Again my question would be:

Who here would turn down an opportunity like that if it was offered?

[BoraPhoenix]

To Gendalf and anyone else interested

The reason for my vote against mentor is simple > The mentor can have too much influence on how a trader forms his opinion .....

I will draw an analogy here:

read a book - see a movie

after you saw a movie, do you still can picture all the characters and the plot in a same way, after the director made a movie based on his beliefs, and his view on characters and the plot, and what would you miss if you haven't read the book at all

i want my mind as much opened and as much free as it can possibly be, and it is my opinion that mentoring and learning someone elses way can harm a trader more that he can benefit from it

To be a trader - u gotta do it Your Own Way!

and that's all i gotta say

javascript:smilie('') a little rhyme here just for fun