The trading world the neophyte faces is rife with every imaginable variety of scam, ruse, fraud, and plain rip off. As are reminded from time to time by analysts, CEOs, bankers, and the Madoffs, Thains, and Fulds of the trading world, there’s only one rule out here, and it applies to the buyer, not the seller: Caveat Emptor.

For Christ’s sake the government’s even in on the act. The major banks are all bankrupt and beyond resurrection. They don’t even have a business model anymore because securitization is dead.

Well, I may be rushing to an unjustified conclusion there, given the only reliable trend in the markets it is always possible that the government might decide to guarantee not just the existing toxic waste, but any future plutonium the banks are able to cook up. That might get lending going again.

I probably ought to send that idea to Geithner, it’ll work as well as anything else they’ve come up with.

Now that I’ve blown off a little steam I’ll resume. There is a significant contingent of the aspirant crowd who are searching for the black box secret that’s going to make them wildly successful, with little or no effort on their part.

It’s precisely that belief in some secret requiring no further effort that drives them to try to acquire it, and acquire it as cheaply as possible – free is the best price of all.

But there are others who would gladly pay a reasonable fee to learn, and who are capable and willing to put in the time required to learn. They know there’s no magic black box, and even if there were they would rather pay to find out what’s inside the box and how it works, because boxes break, or don’t work as advertised.

The cost of an investment in one’s trading education or tools is more than the price of the item. There are also the trading losses that would be incurred for something that doesn’t work, and worst of all there’s the time, the time learning, backtesting, then deploying bit by bit.

The only way to survive in this jungle is to assume everyone’s a charlatan, until proven otherwise.

I haven’t had a chance to look over your site much yet, but I think that your approach is the only way to build the minimum degree of trust required to get people who understand the value of information and are willing to pay the price, provided there’s a value for value exchange.

You’ve pretty much got to spread your wares out and let the customers handle the goods. If there’s quality there, and the customer’s got the motivation to do the work, a beautiful thing happens.

Commerce.

I happen to read on one of your blogs that trading for a living is different from trading for capital growth.

Would you kindly elaborate more on this remark, i.e. strategies, psychology , money management…

… and thanks for producing such a great blog!

Regards
Bryan