The allure of day trading chatrooms

Many people dream about becoming day traders. Many have tried to make money this way trading individual stocks or e-mini futures. Most have failed or will fail. The success rate among day traders is a mediocre 5-10%, but then again, the success rate among start-ups in many other businesses is hardly any better, if at all.

Launching a day trading career is as risky as starting a new business. It's hard work, many challenges and frustrations to overcome and a lot of perseverance. That is, if you want to succeed.

When the things get tough and the clear progress is yet to be seen, it's quite tempting to look for shortcuts, for someone who would shorten your learning curve, for a mentor of sorts.

And it's very easy to find it. There are plenty of mentors out there, running Internet day trading chatrooms for a fee that hardly ever is commensurate with the benefits gained, not to mention, profits made by participating in their chatrooms.

This should not come as a surprise. The majority of such rooms are run by people who never made it as day traders yet were shrewd enough to capitalize on their "expert" advice by offering it to others instead of perpetuating the misery of putting it to use in their own accounts.

Some of such experts would like you to believe that they trade dozens of emini contracts in their own accounts, yet never allow the public at large to examine their trading records in a comprehensive manner. Sure, from time to time, on a really good day, they post their results for others to view (and admire), but that is not enough to know if they really are consistently profitable as day traders.

And if they are not, why would you want to learn from them? What they truly excel at is selling their services and not making money applying what they preach to their own accounts.

Mastering day trading takes time and effort just as does mastering brain surgery. But if you wanted to master the latter would you rather choose as your mentor an experienced brain surgeon or a guy selling tools for brain surgeons?

There is only one way to separate true day trading experts from bogus ones. By insisting that they take trades they call in the chatroom and prove it by disclosing their trading records. It does not matter how many contracts they trade. One is enough and already too many for most of them.

At the very least, the operators of such rooms ought to take all the trades they call in real time on a good simulator and keep a track record of all of them. But that already is often too much to ask for.

How many truly credible trading experts can you find out there? Those with a longer track record of some sort be it of real or even simulated trades. When it comes to day trading e-mini futures, I am not quite sure if I know even one! Out of dozens of such operators that I have seen online over the last several years. Think about it next next time you decide to seek help from one of them.