Online Trading Academy - my experience
As I promised from the other big thread: Questrade, I registered and completed the 7-day course at Online Trading Academy. I kept my word.
Here's my experience: http://www.tradingacademy.com/
I took the 7-day "Professional Trader Course": http://www.tradingacademy.com/courses/P ... rader.aspx and yes, the cost is as advertised on the website. More on the cost and value later. This is a school, they teach you the skills and tools. They don’t promise you to get rich or earn 110%.
Instructor: I'll call him Mr. R. It is hard to summarize a person, but simply put, he was amazing. He's one of those quick, witty, fast, smart, nice guys that you may know of. He used to work at trading companies (more than 10), thanks to his awesome personality, smartness, he met lots of high up people, CEO's of banks, trading firms, etc. Mr. R would answer all questions, good and stupid questions. One of the students was clearly not there to listen, yet Mr. R still answered his questions (I certainly wouldn't have). Instead of writing financial formula's down on the board (eg. GDP, ATR, ...) he would DERIVE them from scratch !! OMG. Its like when I was at University, some smart kid doesn't memorize physics equations, but derives them from nothing ! Geezz....
Mr. R told us over 40 real life stories, which really drove the point to each thing he was talking about. Esp. ones where people made mistakes, his clients that had millions of $ with him at his old job. He also showed us his own personal trades, and WHY he did it, and man, he must be a millionaire by now, with his GOOG, AAPL, and BIDU trades alone. But he plays everything, currency, options, etc. He was telling us how the Japanese Yen was way too high, he's been shorting it for weeks, showed us graphs for proof, then on the Wed/Thurs night, Bank of Japan announced they purposesly pushed DOWN the Yen (I'm sure you guys heard about this). Holy profit Batman. His teachings came true 100%. But given all the proofs that he showed us, I shouldn't be surprised, but still. Seeing it in action is impressive. I'm sure he made a nice bundle there again.
Hence, Mr. R is simply an amazing guy. He cares about the students, and he's friendly too. No wonder he has so many friends. He promises to respond to all our emails, maybe late, but he will. And he is true to that word. i emailed him like 3 weeks ago, never heard from him, then suddenly a few days ago, I get his reply. Thanks!!! Of course, I gave him top marks at the evaluation at the end, I think everyone in my class did as well.
Class
Class started on a Saturday, 9am. Basically, they teach you how to day trade stocks by teaching you technical trading skills. They also built many other skills, concepts so you can do this full time to earn a living. Starting on Monday, using the info we were taught on Sat and Sun, everyone trades for real with real money for 2 sessions each day. Each session was I think 2 hour? But when you are trading, you get excited or nervous or mess up by clicking the wrong button, the time flew by so fast, it seemed like 10 minutes. As advertised on their website, you trade with the school's money.
The instructor sets us up by going through a list of MUST DO's each day before you trade. Showing us what info we need to pay attention to, who's up/down graded, sector analysis, etc..... so we can get a feel of what the market will be like today for trading.
You may go long or short on 10 stocks they give you. You may only buy 10 shares max, and keep 1 stock max at a time. Your stop is 10 cents. So things are pretty tight and it was hard to make money. Your goal was to get $0.10 profit and get out. Repeat. It is harder than it looks. My first day, I total gain was like $0.60. Then the rest of the week, I lost like $6.00 total. Due to not being able to use and understand all the things I've learned to clicking on the WRONG button by shorting vs. not shorting. One time I forgot to put in a stop limit (I was busy chatting with my neighbour), the stock I was in dropped 70 cents, the big boss that's monitoring us ran in and yelled at Station #__ for stop limit !!! (Which was my station). So, I am glad I'm able to make this mistake in class and not at home with my own money. There are lots of things you can learn from trading it for real.
Content: http://www.tradingacademy.com/courses/P ... culum.aspx
Click on the above link to see the 7-day. Basically it is all technical trading tools and skills. Yes, you can read books to get all this, but you'd have to read maybe 20 books and somehow know to pick out important ones to get the same info. The most important difference is that an Instructor is there to teach it to you. Explain things when you don't understand, and explain WHY that tool is important. And you CANNOT ask a book a question. It won't answer ya.
After introducing a tool, eg. RSI, Mr. R would tell us his opinion on using this. If it was a good indicator or not (from his many years of trading experiences). His experiences alone was worth a lot IMO. Like having someone there to tell me this indicator is lagging so don't use it to make your buy/sell decisions.
The amount of info they taught us was enormous. My head actually hurt when 3pm comes along. It felt like someone stuck a needle full of info and injected it into my brain. I have two big bound paper full of handouts (2 inches thick), and I took so much notes each day, my hands hurt after each day. Reminded me of my University years. At 4pm, everyone in the class was basically spent. But the amazing Mr. R. kept going like the Energizer Bunny. No, actually I bet he'd beat the E Bunny hands down. When I went home every day at 4:30pm, I had to simply rest, soooo much info crammed into my head. I almost dreaded going to the next morning sometimes. Reminded me of my H&R block tax course. So you certainly get your money's worth there in content.
Here's my experience: http://www.tradingacademy.com/
I took the 7-day "Professional Trader Course": http://www.tradingacademy.com/courses/P ... rader.aspx and yes, the cost is as advertised on the website. More on the cost and value later. This is a school, they teach you the skills and tools. They don’t promise you to get rich or earn 110%.
Instructor: I'll call him Mr. R. It is hard to summarize a person, but simply put, he was amazing. He's one of those quick, witty, fast, smart, nice guys that you may know of. He used to work at trading companies (more than 10), thanks to his awesome personality, smartness, he met lots of high up people, CEO's of banks, trading firms, etc. Mr. R would answer all questions, good and stupid questions. One of the students was clearly not there to listen, yet Mr. R still answered his questions (I certainly wouldn't have). Instead of writing financial formula's down on the board (eg. GDP, ATR, ...) he would DERIVE them from scratch !! OMG. Its like when I was at University, some smart kid doesn't memorize physics equations, but derives them from nothing ! Geezz....
Mr. R told us over 40 real life stories, which really drove the point to each thing he was talking about. Esp. ones where people made mistakes, his clients that had millions of $ with him at his old job. He also showed us his own personal trades, and WHY he did it, and man, he must be a millionaire by now, with his GOOG, AAPL, and BIDU trades alone. But he plays everything, currency, options, etc. He was telling us how the Japanese Yen was way too high, he's been shorting it for weeks, showed us graphs for proof, then on the Wed/Thurs night, Bank of Japan announced they purposesly pushed DOWN the Yen (I'm sure you guys heard about this). Holy profit Batman. His teachings came true 100%. But given all the proofs that he showed us, I shouldn't be surprised, but still. Seeing it in action is impressive. I'm sure he made a nice bundle there again.
Hence, Mr. R is simply an amazing guy. He cares about the students, and he's friendly too. No wonder he has so many friends. He promises to respond to all our emails, maybe late, but he will. And he is true to that word. i emailed him like 3 weeks ago, never heard from him, then suddenly a few days ago, I get his reply. Thanks!!! Of course, I gave him top marks at the evaluation at the end, I think everyone in my class did as well.
Class
Class started on a Saturday, 9am. Basically, they teach you how to day trade stocks by teaching you technical trading skills. They also built many other skills, concepts so you can do this full time to earn a living. Starting on Monday, using the info we were taught on Sat and Sun, everyone trades for real with real money for 2 sessions each day. Each session was I think 2 hour? But when you are trading, you get excited or nervous or mess up by clicking the wrong button, the time flew by so fast, it seemed like 10 minutes. As advertised on their website, you trade with the school's money.
The instructor sets us up by going through a list of MUST DO's each day before you trade. Showing us what info we need to pay attention to, who's up/down graded, sector analysis, etc..... so we can get a feel of what the market will be like today for trading.
You may go long or short on 10 stocks they give you. You may only buy 10 shares max, and keep 1 stock max at a time. Your stop is 10 cents. So things are pretty tight and it was hard to make money. Your goal was to get $0.10 profit and get out. Repeat. It is harder than it looks. My first day, I total gain was like $0.60. Then the rest of the week, I lost like $6.00 total. Due to not being able to use and understand all the things I've learned to clicking on the WRONG button by shorting vs. not shorting. One time I forgot to put in a stop limit (I was busy chatting with my neighbour), the stock I was in dropped 70 cents, the big boss that's monitoring us ran in and yelled at Station #__ for stop limit !!! (Which was my station). So, I am glad I'm able to make this mistake in class and not at home with my own money. There are lots of things you can learn from trading it for real.
Content: http://www.tradingacademy.com/courses/P ... culum.aspx
Click on the above link to see the 7-day. Basically it is all technical trading tools and skills. Yes, you can read books to get all this, but you'd have to read maybe 20 books and somehow know to pick out important ones to get the same info. The most important difference is that an Instructor is there to teach it to you. Explain things when you don't understand, and explain WHY that tool is important. And you CANNOT ask a book a question. It won't answer ya.
After introducing a tool, eg. RSI, Mr. R would tell us his opinion on using this. If it was a good indicator or not (from his many years of trading experiences). His experiences alone was worth a lot IMO. Like having someone there to tell me this indicator is lagging so don't use it to make your buy/sell decisions.
The amount of info they taught us was enormous. My head actually hurt when 3pm comes along. It felt like someone stuck a needle full of info and injected it into my brain. I have two big bound paper full of handouts (2 inches thick), and I took so much notes each day, my hands hurt after each day. Reminded me of my University years. At 4pm, everyone in the class was basically spent. But the amazing Mr. R. kept going like the Energizer Bunny. No, actually I bet he'd beat the E Bunny hands down. When I went home every day at 4:30pm, I had to simply rest, soooo much info crammed into my head. I almost dreaded going to the next morning sometimes. Reminded me of my H&R block tax course. So you certainly get your money's worth there in content.