There are three models of education that dominate the Forex Market today. They all claim to have the magic formula, exclusive knowledge about the market, or some hyped up set of proprietary indicators. Their promise to the ever re-generating gaggle of hopeful FX traders is the easiest road possible to the promised land of Forex Enlightenment.
Understanding the realities of what's out there on the market as far as education is an important thing for someone who is out there trying to become a Forex trader. This article addresses some of the more common paradigms of the current Forex Education Market.
The Seminar
This is, perhaps, the most common form taken in the FX Education Market, because it usually leverages the notoriety or charisma of a supposed master trader to convince their potential devotees to plunk down anywhere from $3,000 to $8,000 for the privilege of spending a short weekend "learning how to trade".
Starting at nine in the morning, usually a 9:00 AM, the host of the seminar will begin. After a lunch and several breaks you might get a total of 6 hours per day a Forex education.
This type of education is marginal at best because you are only exposed to the information for a short and inefficient weekend - after that you're on your own. If you're lucky, you were able to take notes and make scattered "next level" observations that might carry you through until you're able to retake the course - if they allow that!
You're only one of maybe 100 people in the room who are all vying for the attention of the supposed master trader or trading celebrity who is running room. So, you have to wait in line in the chat to get your questions answered, and what's worse, you have to wait behind the questions of the slowest people in the room who, no matter how many times the material is explained still have questions that are very basic, and range from repetitive to astoundingly pedestrian, As a result, the presenter must spend enormous amounts of time trying to remedially educate the slower members of the room while you wait, minute after minute watching your very expensive Forex education be wasted.
So the bottom line is that it's a very expensive way to obtain what is usually only a rudimentary Forex education, simply because there's not enough time to train the group in the basics of trading, much less the advanced topics that are necessary in order to profit in the Forex market.
The Chat Room
The other type of education that is very popular among the online Forex education web sites is the ubiquitous chat room. This is where a group of moderators spend the morning or just a part of the morning attempting to disseminate educational tidbits to a large group of hundreds of people. If your lucky enough not to be completely annoyed by the voices that are coming through your computer speakers, you may be able to collect enough information over the course of the next few months to construct some semblance of a proper education. There is never an organized lesson or consistent pre-scheduled teaching, and the moderators, because they are distracted from trading by the continuous questions from novice traders, become less effective as traders themselves.
Any nuggets of trading wisdom that are doled out in these chat rooms comes in sporadic bursts that are unpredictable and varying in quality. So the trader that hopes to receive a proper Forex education by participating in one of these chat rooms must do several things in order to succeed #1. He must be able to spend every available hour in the chat room to avoid missing valuable information as it is discussed, and #2 He must be able to efficiently and effectively collect all of these various data points into one organized structure, which clearly presents even the most precise thinkers a difficult challenge.
Another issue associated with chat rooms is that novice traders often use them as a crutch to avoid the difficult work of writing a trading plan, testing a training plan, and learning to read the market on their own. They often blindly follow the trades and advise of the moderators or other senior members of the room, who post loudly of their numerous winning trades (this assumes that they are honest, wink wink). And so the trader's development is slowed for years as they just limp along, trying to follow trades of other people, trying to figure out who in the room is the best trader, so that they can mimic their style. This process retards the development of the trader for years and sometimes forever if the trader never figure is out the cause of their desperate gyrations.
The social aspect of the chat room paradigm is tempting, but there are a great many successful traders out there today who will tell you that their true success in the markets did not begin until they turned all the chat rooms off.
The PDF Course
The third main category of Forex education comes in the form of the downloadable course. Almost always delivered in PDF format these courses promise to show you proven strategies that let you easily take profits out of the Forex market.
The worst offenders out there are those who simply copy and paste volumes of information from all over the web that the unsuspecting buyer could have easily found on his own. Many a trader has been disappointed by this newly downloaded Forex course, when he or she realizes that the sum total of unique information in the course consists of nine or 10 pages, while the other 99 or so pages contain standard definitions of Forex trading and explanations that answer the eternal question " what is a pip"?
Slightly more honest but equally ineffective are the outfits who tout their unbelievably reliable, proprietary setups which usually consist of a collection of bar patterns or moving average crosses that are corroborated by chart after chart that the authors handpicked from the market. They fail to tell you that in a sideways market, that these types of setups often lead to a series of damaging losses and a devastated psychological profile. As a result, the trader gives up on these newly learned methods, and continues his search for the next Holy Grail.
Conclusions
The common thread that runs through each of these educational methods, is that they're quite expensive and leave the blossoming Forex trader with much less of the one commodity that he must value the most, trading capital. While it's difficult to argue that a Forex trader would be better off entering the market with no education at all, it's quite possible that there is a better paradigm out there at a fraction of the cost.
Academic knowledge of how the market moves and how technical analysis works is something that must be taught over an extended period. The concepts, in many cases are counter-intuitive, and therefore require a continuing education that allows the apprentice trader the opportunity to repetitively access the educational material, and be able to post questions and receive answers about its content.
As the technical side of trading is being developed under this educational model, the aspiring trader also needs some method of psychological support. We've already established that the moderated chat room model is an impediment to true trading mastery but surely there is another way for traders to interact, while still retaining their integrity of mind.
The current belief by our team of professionals, is that a Forex course consisting of dynamically illustrated and logically explained high quality videos is the best and most efficient way to train a novice or intermediate trader. This allows the student to repetitively access the information as many times as they deem necessary, and eliminates the negative issues associated with the other types of education mentioned above.
The trader that is able to learn with the assistance of professionally taught high definition videos has an edge, and if that trader is then supported with the latest in continuing education, then that trader has the best possible chance of success.
Price, of course, is another issue. If the trader is able to spend far less money to acquire a top quality Forex education, then that trader would be in the best possible position for success when first entering the market.