Every tom, dick and harry seems to be selling a course or a ‘proprietary trading algo’ or a ‘trading strategy’. They usually fall in one of two categories. The ‘cheat’ and the ‘mediocre’.
The cheat is someone who has never made a penny but claim to teach you methods or sell you an algo/strategy which can double you money every month. This is an obvious scam and there isn’t much else to be said.
The mediocre is someone who has learnt a trick or two on how the market works but has never truly achieved any remarkable returns. The person will claim to teach you or sell you their algo /strategy which will make you 15-30% percent per annum. These people will say things like, “even warren buffet only make 20%/annum” or “jim simmons, the best trader in the world only makes 60%/annum… so, how can you expect to make anything higher?”
Even the roadside vendors of india easily beat the returns of warren buffet or jim simmons. Well, jokes apart… this is the nature of scale. If you only have a small capital you can expect your returns to be high. As you grow this capital, you returns will inevitably reduce as the opportunity to deploy your capital reduce.
Even jim simmons openly talks about this. His medallion fund was gaining so much attention and new investors. This lead to the capital being so large that the algos that he deployed could no longer be absorbed by the market. Leading him to close the fund to any new investors and putting a cap on the fund’s working capital.
Even the mighty berkshire hathaway has grown so big that it now very closely resembles the returns of the index.
If you buy/learn from the mediocre, you are inevitably going to stunt your growth and learning curve. Everything i’ve ever learnt was for free and I’ve never paid a penny to anyone to learn or buy their algo/strategy. The only way is to explore all the opportunities in the market and see for yourself what is possible.
To conclude this long winded post, don’t buy into people selling you obvious scams or be put into a box by people telling you that returns of over 15-30% are impossible. Go out there and do your own research and look for opportunity because there is plenty of it out there. Best wishes!
