Trading course

Over the last few weeks I’ve received quite a few e-mails with questions regarding trading courses in South Africa - which one should attend and what course is the best one?

I’ve tried to answer everyone’s questions, but then I’ve realized that I can type post that is going to address that subject.

I would like to start by sharing my experience from years back, when I started with trading. At that stage there were no blogs, tweets and other modern ways of sharing information about trading - one could buy a book or attend a course. So, I started to read and buy books and as I was reading them I would go over some of them a few times. At the same time, my first course that I attended was SA Warrants and that’s when Simon and Manfred explained warrants and how they work and who makes the market. They also used all funny Greek letters. Some time later, my second course was about Technical Analysis and it was presented by the same guys. Also, some time later Larry Williams came to SA and I was attending his course as well, and I must say that I can not recall ever having spent money on as bad a thing in my life. Finally, at that stage trading blogosphere was emerging and I would read all that I found interesting.

After several years I’ve decided to go for another course, named “ALSI trading” presented by Dr. David Paul and followed the following year with another of his courses which was a two day course. Those two were good ones and really enjoyable.

So, let’s go back to the topic – Which course is the best in South Africa and which courses should one attend?

I guess my answer is going to steer a lot of unhappiness among course organisers, as my answer is: simply NONE!

Reasoning behind this opinion:

Course that you choose to attend is, probably, going to be overpriced. You will have to pay approximately R10.000 for some lousy lunch, where somebody with very little or no experience in trading will teach you two or three shady setups that you will most probably forget before you get home or maybe even earlier. They will, for sure, try to sell you the next course that will teach you all that you need to know to become ultra rich before you are 25 years old and/or they will probably try to sell you software that have all indicators which are optimised for making exactly a million a month.

So, how should one learn about trading?

There is lots of free and quality info available on various blogs related to trading – go and read them! Find ones that you enjoy the most, read them every day or week, read comments published on them, read all that you like and all that you don’t like. Then practice, practice some more and practice every day and every weekend and print daily your charts of instruments you trade, with marked entries and exits and when market is closed dedicate some time and energy to review them. I do that on early mornings of every Saturday and I would suggest you to take approach of printing your charts as you make trades, write your comments regarding entry, target, thinking behind trade, etc. Then, again when market is closed, review and find out if you have done correct thing. And do this over and over again as trading is about practice, like anything else in life. Simply, it is not about perfect indicator or set-up. The more you trade, the more experience you will gather and it is going to become easier for you to see proper set-ups. But, to reach that level you will need to analyze thousands and thousands of charts.

Finally, with all the blogs, books and trading forums - One has no need to go to trading courses, as one can teach oneself all that is needed for trading.

However, if you want to attend a course here in SA, I recommend only courses held by Dr. David Paul.

Trade with trend!

Disclaimer: I am not compensated in any manner by Dr. David Paul and this positive review was not solicited in any way and Dr. Paul was, actually, not aware of this public and positive feedback from me.