Due Diligence

There are very few people to who $5,000 or $6,000 is not a lot of money. If you were buying a car for that amount then how much time and money would you spend checking it out?

Please, please, please, before you sign up for a course, chat-room, software, books, mentors, coaches etc. do some due diligence and make sure that they are telling the truth.

If a person is making claims that they are getting a $ value return or a percentage return then they should have no problem giving you their broker's number to confirm that. If they have already revealed their returns then the broker is not giving away any confidential information but just substantiating the claims made by the vendor.

A broker should not have a problem doing this because it gives the broker a chance to talk to a trader and find out if he can make the trader a better deal with commissions and win his business.

If you don't want to call the broker yourself then send me an email with the broker's numbers and I will call and confirm for you.

pt, you have done everyone a service by posting those links.

In that regard, I'm pleased to report that the statements people receive directly from my broker will be actual, not hypothetical, trades that I took in real time.

High 5 for the good guys!

Thanks for this. A few months ago, when I started to study futures trading, I was tempted to buy into one of the many so-called sure thing systems. I just figured that it would help me with my learning curve and speed up the time it took to become a good trader. Thankfully I am the type that researches everything to death and what I discovered is that there really is no need for these expensive courses and advisories. There are so many excellent free forums, like MyPivots of course, that have great members that share freely and help each other out.

For anyone considering buying an expensive course, first find a decent setup or strategy on a forum and take the time and effort to see if you can make it profitable. You'll save yourself a lot of money and probably make some good friends on the forum that can help you become a better trader.

I suspect that many of the setups and strategies for sale on hyped up marketing sites were probably taken from people that posted their strategies for free in forums.

Thanks for all the info everyone.

I defintely agree with everyone to defintely research to the best extent possible before you sign on with any course, mentor, broker, educator, etc.

I've seen a lot of crap and some good. After you've done your due diligence, don't hesitate to go with your gut feeling. If you think a certain trading education will aid you in learning, then give it a try if it's in your budget. From everything that I've tried, probably only about 30% really taught me something.

And I don't think that any one product or company or educator will turn you into a 100% winner or will change your life dramatically, but I think we learn a little from each as we go along our learning path. As people and traders we are each so different from each other so obviously every person will have something different to take from it.

I think the whole point of letting LEGITIMATE educational tools to assist us is to cut our learning curve as much as possible, which ultimately will cut our losses too.

Great posts, glad to be part of everyone's input here.

I agree with catpurley. Research before you buy any program as probably 75% of available programs are junk. To make sure that I never buy on impulse, I always wait a week if I find something that seems interesting. In the week time I either find out it's junk or reconsider and most times I filter the bad out. A few programs that I have tried did turned out to be legitimate and beneficial to my trading though, so sort out the bad to find the good.