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[fulcrum]

This guru seems to know what he is talking about. His book "Bird Watching in Lion Country" is a great read. Any comments on him or his approach to the market? Thanks.

[foroz]

Can you enlighten us as to what Dirk says....or maybe whether it is intra-day trading.....what indicators and time frames are used, etc?

It's a pretty broad statement you made.

Have you trialled his method?



Regards

[Ahoy]

Fulcrum
I have experience of Dirk du Toit and I found him to be a very worthwhile mentor.
He does not use indicators but has a system of "Zones" based on S & R where you can follow your trade.
Unlike many - he focuses on fundamentals and observes each market to give him clues on what to expect.

Certainly worth a read and a bit of effort to take his ideas on board.
I hope that helps.
Cheers
Ahoy

[FXMax]

"Bird watching in Lion Country" is a great read, very clear & understandable. I learned a great deal from it, even after 3 years following the forex market. I would recommend it to anyone.

I was mentored by Dirk (still on going with his daily briefings) and following his 4 x 1 stragtergy. The good thing is he does not make any promises and explains the FX market realistically.

[William_A]

Hi Folks,

I have done the full training course as offered by Dr Forex , Mr Dirk du Toit, nearly two years ago. After completing his course , I have been attending his morning mentor sessions (daily Briefings) at 06h15 GMT, where he gives a full analysis of the forex markets each day, and the possible trades to do, based on his "median trading" technique.

Dirk doesn't have a tip service. However, if you follow his program you have the same approach to the market what he have and intuitively understand how the shared "fundamental" insights may effect your positions or how you should think about new positions. Dirk does not call it "fundamentals", but "market dynamics" - and it is all about getting in tune with how the market discounts, which is IMPORTANT (and stuff the rest) information and how that shows up in prices.

You ask about methodology, time frames and so on. Taking the risk that I stand to be corrected by the Doc himself, I would say he is an (not very strict) intra week trader. But that doesn't mean you can't be a very successful intra day median trader. He believes in taking profits regularly off the table and there is no sin in taking a 30 - 40 pip profit, however a 100 pointer is also welcome and necessary from time to time, thank you. In his new book, " Bird Watching in Lion Country", he very convincingly argues that strict intra day trading is a basically random effort and most won't ever be successful with it. Realizing this his mentoring is geared towards helping one to see that a "manageable time frame", which can differ from individual to individual, is much more suitable.

The most important aspect I think where his approach differs from EVERY other retail forex trainer that I have come accross (except the real empathy and real concern inherent to his personal approach) is his MULTI ENTRY system. In other words, where most say, take the maximum you are prepared to trade with, wait for your signal, add your stop and limit and trade, he says, "just take a little bit of what you 're prepared to risk and enter in a identified "zone", and then add to that position, preferably at BETTER prices (not more expensive) and do so until you are fully "invested" and then wait for the profits, which you can pick off all at once or one by one."

This is an absolutely OTHER WORLD. Based on this approach, he placed in Bird Watching a real live managed account which shows a per trade (or entry) success rate of about 90% (and that includes some losses on the day Sadam was found) over about a two month period with a return of 78% during that period.

I mention all of this because you asked about systems and indicators and so on, but if you get involved with Dirk, or even just read the book, you will immediately realize that his approach is comprehensive and 100% in line with Piper's excellent "trading pyramid" in his "The way to Trade". If you want to be successful you must see trading as a business and your trade identifying methodology is only a small part of that business. If you focus all attention on that, you might be a brilliant technician but a bad businessman - and your forex business will fail.

I will stake my reputation on the following:

Get Part 1 of this e-book " Bird Watching in Lion Country- Retail forex trading Explained " for free

http://www.dayforex.com/df_home.asp?BoxList=bwilcfreepart1pass.ht m

After reading this first part, and you decide to buy the rest of the 238 page book, it will be the best and most profitable $ 50 spend on your forex training / trading career, irrespective if you are a pro, intermediate, struggler or absolute newbie!

I know many readers here are scared to act, because there are so many scamsters out there. For their sake I can mention:

I live in the same city (Pretoria), have visited Dirk at his house where he works from, and he is for real. He lives in a pretty smart, nicely furnished, house with a beautiful view in an affluent suburb of Pretoria, with newish (but not latest) model BMW and Merc in the garage, and he trades full time since 1998. So I believe, considering that he does not get $10 brokerage on each trade 5 times a day, (cause his clients mostly trade 10K lots, and not even once a day), do not charge $5,000 for training etc. he obviously has something going for him - and I don't think it is a big inheritance -

I can certainly recommend him as a person and forex mentor, and all that he has done over many years in the forex world.

[fulcrum]

Any idea who Dirk uses as his trading firm?

[nzbryant]

Dirk's book is awesome - I learnt a lot from it. If you are there Dirk - thanks again.

His book will give you some paradigm shifts - so you think differently. The long post above gives some hints as to what is in it.

[foroz]

Many thanks William

It was just what I was looking for.

I agree there are many "dubious" e-books and pretenders out there in forex land where the objective is to not trade forex or educate you, but to take money from the forex community.

I'd like the believe that wasn't the case, but then I'd be kidding myself.

I am sure Dirk will report an increased interest in the sale of his book from your posting.



Regards

[William_A]

Fulcrum,

Dirk is an IB under the name DayForex www.dayforex.com and as far as I know he deals with several of the well-know US brokers like FXCM, CMS, FX Solutions, FXDD and also Saxobank. There may be others

Thanks for the comments about my long post, hope it can help a lot of traders

[forex777]

I don't know if any of you know this, but if you mentor with him he takes a PIP off of every trade you make in addition to mentoring fees, etc....

I have never heard of this. I find it fascinating. I don't know what to make of it. Bad, good, crazy, greedy, insane. I have know idea how to read that.

I'm not knocking this man in any way. I don' t know anything about him, and actually all I have heard are really good and glowing things about to this point.

But, I was really surprised to see him be taking a "cut" of your profits!

[bobnat]

Originally posted by forex777
I don't know if any of you know this, but if you mentor with him he takes a PIP off of every trade you make in addition to mentoring fees, etc....

MTI in the US also gets a pip per trade if you open an account with FXCM. So, I'm willing to guess it's not that uncommon.

Nat

[email]

Hi to all in this tread,

when a mentor takes a cut of what ever you do it is to reduce what ever fee he is charging you. Also they may feel that they are doing you a great service for showing you the way so they want to get rewarded. If he is this good and you do learn something from him one pip for a period of time is nothing.
Cheers Email

Nat , this little note is for you ; please no funny stories this weekend, I have company and can not laugh out laud as hard as last weekned, just keep it mind for my sake.
Cheers

[DrForex]

Forex 777 et al

I respond because your post may leave the impression that I am a money shark, possibly over-charging for my services. I feel this would be a huge injustice to me, to leave such an impression here.

If you mentor with me I will show you the importance of the Cost of trading which is a part of the cost of your forex trading business.

I.e. you have to look at the total cost of this venture and then as a sub-cost there is the cost of trading.

If you look at pricing structures of the services rendered in the financial services industry and more to the point in the retail forex trading industry there are several models.

They basically revolve around (1) fixed upfront fees OR the volume of trading (consisting of the number of trades and the size of trades). I think most of you will be agreeable (irrespective if you agree with the fact that I charge the ridiculous amount of 1 pip for my services) with the following: Your broker wants you to do more trades at larger trade sizes. That's good for them. But that doesn't mean its good for you. You're not a market maker, you are a trader. The only way you are going to be successful is by concluding profitable trades, and preferably at a low cost to profit ratio.

If, Forex777, like some others who wrote here, you have read BWILC you would have realized that I mentor my clients to do less trades and at smaller volumes. I.e. the best "cost to profit" ratio is what they should work towards.

That makes this indeed fascinating from my point of view. The better my client performs the worse my business (as a service provider) perform (with respect to that client)! But in the long run obviously both my clients and myself are better off. Read on to understand why.

"PIP FOOLISH"

In general: If your trading is in any way whatsoever being affected in a measuarable manner by a mere pip (and you are a beginner or intermediate retail forex trader, not operating a scalping automated programme), you are going to be hugely dissapointed, unbelievably disillusioned and you are also going to lose money in this venture. So rather stop now if it is indeed so, or allow me to show you and assist you to change all of that by becoming pip foolish and pound wise.

The "GLOBAL SPREAD"

I may have mentioned this somewhere else on this forum, but it is approriate here, so I'll explain again:

The whole market depends on informational prices (which are prices of deals just concluded in source dealing rooms across the globe) to adjust their own pricing inline with the market. There are hundreds of source dealing rooms and these prices received by the price vendors are then averaged and broadcasted (in "real time") to the buyers of the information, including the same dealing rooms where they source it from.

At any given moment the worst buy and the worst sell price for an instrument, say eurusd, is what I call the "global spread". The global spread is obviously larger than the narrow spreads of one dealing room, but the global spread includes the trades done at very big volumes in the interbank market - i.e. the trades that move the prices in a certain direction in the very very short term based on volumous demand or supply at any stage during a day.

In any case, lets say the global spread averages somewhere between 5 and 10 pips (currency prices have been measured to change up to 18,000 times a day), who is going to tell me that if I buy eur at 1.3050, at that specific moment 1.3051 or 1.3049 would have been a better buy, and the same at the sell point. (This pre-supposes market orders.) If you consider the effect of the global spread it shouldn't bother you one iota that you adjust your entry order or limit order with one pip in order to compensate for this cost, if it bothers you at all, which it luckily doesn't do my clients. In terms of the global spread at that specific moment, and how it pans out, you coud have been 1 pip or two pips lucky or not so when your entry / limit / stop order was executed. To see the effect of the global spread you should compare prices of three or four brokers at specific intervals, say end of every hour or so.

A pip here a pip there - we really don't care.

Finally a true story: (I will include this sory in the next edition of BWILC):

Two clients of mine. The one a very succsessful businessman the other a youngster started trading approximately the same time in September 2004.

The businessman started again, actually. There is a story. When he enrolled two years earlier I had a special going. He didn't have to pay the $1-00 (my clients use 10K lots) up to the amount of the enrolment fee. That is a pretty long time that you don't have to pay the commisions on say a average retail account, if you trade remotely along the lines I suggest. He, however, is a scalper - not at all what I teach. He quickly worked through a few thousand dollars, and just more than the enrolment fee value in terms of commissions (which i didn't charge).

So, when he started again about a year later, after a week or two (same scalping, same negative result) I contacted him with a double message: (1) stop scalping, it didn't work last time, its not working this time its not going to work next time, let me help you to get some perspective on how to recover your earlier losses and then make money (2) I want my $1.00 per trade as the whole enrolment fee has actually been rebated (even before the end of his first experiment). You see, I knew, if he had to pay that, he will immediately do smaller and fewer trades and be on the road to recovery. He didn't oblige. (But I did continue sending him the Daily Briefings.) In any case he is wiped out again. By end of November he was all but wiped out and I have received in IB rebates $560.00

The youngster started trading in mid September on $10,000 and by the end of October he did 48 10K lots (i.e. I have received $48.00) and he was up about 1500 pips ($1500).

His last two months including a vacation of five weeks - no trades from Dec 3 to Jan 9th, rendered $991, to be exact, for him and I got the staggering amount of $32.00 in commissions. (His equity is now $12,500 (up 25%) (largest single position taken 20K gbp (once)).

Now for the happy ending .. for me! Our youngster, now busy one year with forex and DayForex will increase his account immanently with a much larger amount and my investment start paying of because HE CAN TRADE... (and I can take some of the glory)

... fascinating indeed.

In other words, Forex777 et al, this compensation model means that if my mentoring does not lead to a longstanding profit making customer I gain ZERO in the long run. I don't think our businessman will be back. But if it is successful, my client and I gain much. And you know what, there also comes a time that my client doesn't need the mentoring or the Daily Briefings and doesn't have to pay the fees, but for some reason they do. And I am thankful.

It also means I am not lured into the hard selling client churning efforts of so many other operators.

Somewhere between the clients that I develop there are the 20% that renders and will render the 80% revenue. My business model entails also developing traders to the point where I will be prepared to use them in a managed account trading team.

The other 80% will not (and does not) go broke like our businessman above if they adapt their business plan and trading to the way I mentor them.

Dirk du Toit

PS 1: - It's not a profitshare. Its a fee based on the trade size and its charged irrespective if the trader concludes that trade with a profit or loss. AND, its also set off against pre-paid subscriptions fees. I.e. if the value of commission this quarter equals the value of the subscription, next quarter you don't pay the subscription, fee. It is therefore not a "double charge" and I do count he IB rebates in, by asking only 1/2 the subscription fee if you use me as IB.

PS 2: - It would also have been possible to arrange for "price shifts" and other ways to in anycase get 1 PIP in and out additional without the clients knowing it. As you can see from earlier in this spread I know most prominent IB's and all of them have this functionality. So, who knows, your friendly broker may be taking one pip of your profit in any case (and also add a pip to your losses also) ...

PS 3: - My take on IB rebates is that I do not trade it for services as they (the brokers) must pay me that because i refered the client to them and not to the just as good (or no good - ) one across the street.

Furthermore I, like any other business person, charge a fee for the services I render and I price the fee in order to attract the type of client I want in my shop (amongst other considerations)!

[fxwiz]

http://www.fxstreet.com/chat/transcripts/20050120chatsession.asp

Thanks in advance.

[email]

Hi Dirk,
many thanks for the great post, it was very educational. hey guys if half the mentors were as has as decent as this guy, there would be many better traders out there (with money in their accounts)
My regards to you sir.