Following up from this post where I talked about learning to daytrade and trying to break into finance.
The trading has been going well for the most part. My scalping/quick option flipping strategy works and I've had a good number of +250, +500, and even a couple $1000+ days. I have some things to work on, namely keeping myself from reverting to my older self (re: gambler) and managing my risk. I gotta let my losers go faster! Because of one trade that immediately went wrong, and I screwed up handling it, last Friday was one of the worst trading days of my life.
As part of my journey I've been reading some books, looking at online posts, and enrolling in a class with a company called Trade With The Pros
I found them from an ad that promised a "Free In-Person Trading Workshop" in my area. I figured that's a low risk to take, let's hear them out. So I went to the free 2-hour class, learned some things about risk management and other issues I had to get over. At the end I was invited to the next level course: a 3-day training "Premier" at one of the campuses for $200. I liked what I learned from the free class and decided "sure, I'll take some profits from today's trading to pay for this." and paid for the next course.
I can go into more detail about the 3-day training in a comment, but what made me want to write this is what happened on day 2.
Day 1 went well enough. Still learning a lot, but a lot of the comments from the instructor were talking about "we don't have enough time in 3 days to teach you everything" (true) and "we're not sharing our trading system unless you sign up for the full education." What's the "full education"? That's apparently much longer multi-week classes that includes live trading sessions, student/community portal, trade webinars, and potentially a spot on the company's "prop desk" (Basically you trade with their money and system and split the profits 90/10. You get more leverage in exchange for 10% of your earnings.)
Sounds cool except for one thing: The course starts at $8500 for the "Market Structure" module, and then an extra $8500 for each module after that. So if I signed up for this and wanted to deep dive into say Options and Forex... good bye $25k!
I had a one on one with one of the instructors. We'll call him Steve. On Saturday Steve and I talked about how the class was going so far, how I was doing with my trading overall, stuff like that. I showed him my Profit-and-Loss and talked about what I hoped to improve on. He pitched the full class to me. I told him very clearly I can't afford it but will consider it in the future when I'm in a better spot financially. I thought that was the end of it.
I came in to start day 2 of this 3-day class, and as I walked in the door to take my seat Steve pulled me aside for another 1:1. I joked "Am I in trouble?"
"No, not yet!"
I wasn't ready for a hard sell.
It started with "you're too advanced to finish this three-day event".
I bet they tell everyone who's traded before that! My PnL doesn't match this claim. Maybe Steve said this because I was the only person out of the ten-or-so of us that had done any trading.
"We didn't want you to talk to other students"
That was a weird thing to say. In the class I was asked if I traded before, gave my honest answer that this was year #4, made jokes about the Friday market action, but thought I was being humble and doing the self-deprecating humor thing. "Don't listen to me! I lost a lot of money yesterday" type stuff. So people came up to me during a break and asked about what I was doing. I showed a PnL and was talking about how I screwed up this trade, just being friendly.
"The instructor said he didn't think you would be coachable."
Another weird one. I thought I was super clear with everyone that I am trading, yes, but I'd like to learn how to trade assets beyond Options and I'm making costly mistakes. I thought I was in the right place to be around people to keep me accountable and help me get over my issues?
"You're obviously very passionate about this and more advanced than a lot of people here. You should do this and get to that consistent profits."
Sounds great... and I'd probably say yeah teach me your system IF it wasn't 17 THOUSAND dollars!
"Here's the deal. We only want people to complete the 3-day if they're going to sign up for the full class. We already called some students and that's why they're not here."
"If you complete this class and don't sign up the price goes up as soon as you walk out the door. It will be $25k instead of $17k to do Market Structure and Options with us" I hate this pressure tactic.
"Or you can choose to leave us now, we'll give you your $200 back, and then you can do another 3-day when you're ready to buy in."
Steve talked about how one of the students worked Uber part-time to pay for tuition. The instructor talked about students borrowing against their 401ks to pay for tuition. And all I was thinking was just keep my money and let me finish what I signed up for.
But then I understood what was going on. The free workshop weeds out people who won't pay anything. You get sold on the $200 class right there (It's $300 normally yada yada). Then the next "step" is to get the people who paid a little and weed out most of them. Catch the few who are going to spend more than I spent on my car for the actual product.
Maybe the full course is worth it? There's not a lot of reviews for this company so it's hard to say. I wasn't going to spend a ton of money to find out the hard way.
I took the refund and left. It felt like shit and I'm writing this partly to work through these feelings.
I'm feeling a lot of things right now. Part of me is really just struggling to get this part of life figured out so I can work on other things that are also going on. Part of me wants this to go so well I can start becoming the modern Engels and fund some mutual aid work, feed people near me, etc. Maybe even run some pro-China ads, fund true left-wing candidates, stuff like that. A comrade can dream...
That party trick is shipping code and is good enough to replace thousands of developers at Microsoft and other companies. Maybe that says something about how common production programming problems are. A lot of business code boils down to putting things in and pulling things out of databases or moving data around via API calls and other communication methods. This tool handles that kind of work with ease.