Introduction:

Just a little background first about me.  I started out my working career as a financing and short term insurance  clerk for a local bank group and soon realized that working for a boss was not the way to go for me personally.  I'm just to much of a lateral thinking person and could not stand being told what to do when it was obvious that things could be optimized etc.  I started my first home based business, and had 5 accounting customers.  This lasted some time till I realized that the small town I was in, was putting limitations on my ambitions.  Not wanting to move to the bigger cities, I made a plan to start a new business that at the time could grow with demand in our small towns micro economy.  I wanted to start a small IT services and hardware enterprise.  I did not have enough money and being the proud person I am, I did not want to ask help from anyone, not even my parents.  I have always aspired to be a self made person.

I made a plan which included flying up to Israel and working under harsh conditions on a Moshav in the Negev Desert on a pepper farm.  I worked myself to a standstill and put in as much overtime etc as I could and just took one short 2 day trip to at least see the major attractions.  When my 6 months were over, I had enough money when converted back to our local currency to start my small enterprise which I did.

3 years later down the road I took an interest in trading the local stock exchange and started equipping myself with as many skills and as much knowledge as I could.  Being an impatient person ( I am Aries ), the markets soon became to "slow' for me, and I moved on to faster markets, warrants, CFD's and Spread trading….these two eventually bored me and I eventually settled down with the biggest market in the world, the Foreign Exchange market. 9 Years after starting my IT enterprise I sold it to continue trading full time on the FX market.  I moved to a farm far away from the town and it's distractions.   It has now been 3 years that I have been able to sustain myself and my fiancé and our small house holding from my consistent income generated from my trading skills.  I will not trade this for anything in the world EVER !

Motivation behind this blog:

Over time I was bound to run into some of the major online forum communities where thousands of apparently like minded people gather.  It was fun in the beginning to read about all the adventures these people were involved in.  Being in the possession of some years of live trading experience and even depending on trading to generate income, I was quite happy to start sharing some working ideas and tools I have collected and am able to program etc. for the major software packages we use.  Being a programmer it is easy for me to transform trading ideas into what we call indicators or even modules that can be back tested to review the viability etc of various systems.  I spent a great deal of time uploading answers patiently to questions and making graphical representations for all to see, freely sharing all I could.

 But I soon started to see a common undertone to it all.  This started upsetting and annoying me and I thought it best to refrain from posting on these forums at all for quite some time, or at least if I really did have to post something, keep it minimalistic.

There is a common accepted statistic that dictates that close to 95% of all people who start out trading fail and move on to some other means of earning an income.  If one sat down for a moment and contemplated the real qualities a successful trader needs to possess in order to make him/her successful and then compare that to the global visible and hidden perceptions on all the forums, it is clear as daylight why that statistic is VERY reasonable.

The thing is, for some crazy reason all newbie's and non-traders and people who think about trading and are just fooling around or whatever they want to call themselves, everyone but the professional trader who actually trades for a living, simply assumes that ALL forums on the internet are specially made just for them.  That there are professional traders and professional programmers servicing these forum with one sole purpose and that is to change the next batch of million newbie's into some big money making gazilionaires by providing them with complete systems, rule sets, all the intricate indicators all the psychological pep talk etc to support and grow them, what a lot of crap.

How do I know this, simply read the threads that's all, they are all the same, the same kind of people, the same dreams the same everything, 95%+ of them.  95%+ of them  reading posts and starting threads all enthusiastically right now, will not even be here next year reading Forex forums or trading etc...Unless they are just lonely and seeking some technical companionship. Another way I know this is because of something that is getting more common as the days go by and that is that some newbie's go straight out and get upset and ask why professional traders do not want to show them how to trade professionally, yeah you read that correct, thus they put it all out there and DEMAND to get something.

Well, let's see if I can answer that for them quickly using a metaphor or two to keep things at their newbie level.  Let's meet Robyn and Alex.

First of all, at any time in a person's life, you are always one step away from the next step – easy enough to understand, so let's continue.  Let's always refer to this as Point A in your life. Now depending on what type of person you are, either a person who is more than content by just being "enabled" (Robyn) or a person who aspires to be "empowered" (Alex), you will take one of two courses to get to the Point B in your life, lets call this your destination or perhaps more correct, your GOAL with regards to a specific aspiration, in this case becoming a kick-ass trader.

Say Hi to Alex:

The person who aspires to be empowered, Alex,  plots a course from point A to B and starts to walk the road, on this road he collects all sorts of new information, he is exposed to all sorts of conditions that forces him to alter his perceptions perhaps, teaches him to think one way and not the other way, teaches him to be even more observant and aware than ever before, teaches him to analyze with greater precision, teaches him skills to use that analysis and make instant deductions and plot even further plans to prepare for various scenarios outcomes, the list is endless as he moves along his path towards point B.

On this road he will also be tested over and over, tested to measure his level of commitment to the goal amongst other things, if this basic test is failed, obviously he will become deterred and cancel the mission, moving on to find new goals and other aspirations…this is not failure necessarily, but a simple way how life keeps us on track with what really is meant for us and keeps us from what's not.

Everything put on his road is there to hone his skills and to prepare him for one ultimate thing – How to handle Point B when he gets there…

Say Hi to Robyn:

On the other hand you have Robyn, the person who is ever so content by just being "enabled".  She, just like Alex, is at point A in her life and so badly wishes to get to point B, which is, to also become a kick-ass trader.  The only difference is, she wants to get to point B at the earliest possible time and preferably without plotting any course or at least NOT walking the hard road to gain the experience and skills necessary to handle what it is she is aspiring to.  

She would much rather prefer someone else, who has walked this long road to success, who has spend a lot of money and time on honing skills, who took big risks on the markets to learn the proper ways of success, who put their financial well being at risk to pursue their goals with 100% commitment, to simply expose to her in a simple 101 for Newbie's thread on some forex forum, all the experience and knowledge they have come to posses in a very expensive and time consuming manor.  

She wishes, uhm sorry, demands in public even sometimes to be handed the exact trading system, when to buy, when to sell, how much risk to allow for each trade, which broker she should use even, "…oh what is there web site,  I do not know how to use Google yet…".  Then she will also need ALL the indicators necessary to apply this system, a very detailed description of exactly how each one should be set up and used. If they do not exist and the person she is demanding this from, has gone through great lengths and cost to have them programmed, she simply does not care, cause when everything is done in the "spirit of freely sharing" who wants to talk shop?  

After taking possession of all these goodies, she will need this person who is submitting to the demands, to also stick around to answer many more trade related questions like why the trades do not work out or why it is that she is not making money with it and the original owner is etc…

When that phase passes she will start to think that the system is flawed and will then team up with other "fellow pilgrims" to add more "sophistication" to the system to get it to work better and make more money etc.  This is all done in a brand new forum thread where she now is the guru handing out information and working in a team and some poor sucker further down the market food chain is embracing her with comments like:  "Oooh You Rock", "Well done', "You are a beacon of light to us all', " Thank you for so generously sharing your system and experience with us', 'Great thread, was waiting for something like this for a long time'  

They will add many more indicators, take others away, change the settings etc…put in short, they are having a ball as they are now hot-shot traders, only trouble is they would not even be able to sustain income for 1 week let alone a lifetime….on the bright side, they have reached Point B in no time though !

The problems they are experiencing are all simply due to the fact that they are not intellectually and psychologically prepared to handle it.  They had no road; they had no experience, nothing!  It's like stealing a fighter jet plane because you loved the movie Top Gun and how sexy Tom Cruise looked in a F16 or whatever and you want to fly too, only crap is, you now have the plane in your backyard, but does that make you a pilot?  I think not!  At best you are just a common thief!  You have stolen from someone else and even worse, you have cheated yourself!

A few weeks later Robyn has wiped her account clean or took some nice fat losses already etc. and in a state of shock almost.  You see the market has a nasty habit to quickly humble the "enabled traders", how else are the rest of us professional "empowered traders" going to survive? Whahahaha Usually at this point she would find the next apparent pro who is moving along steadily up the ladder of success in an attempt to leach their experience and get to success herself, this process goes on and on until either the humiliation the market hands out becomes too unbarring or she runs out of money and calls it quits, like the rest of the 95% new traders does sooner or later.

And that, dear wannabe traders, is the reason most of you will fail, because you are not meant to trade and you do not wish to make the effort to take the long road to experience and success yourself, a road that would otherwise quickly make you realize if this is really for you or not without being humiliated by the market or led to financial ruin etc.  But no, it is easier to assume there are thousands of pro's out here on the forums who can't wait to help you become the next Warren Buffet or George Sorros.  And when you do not get your way, you ask dumb questions like: "How come nobody likes to share?"  

Hopefully by now you realize that the answer simply is that - there is nothing to share, each successful pro out there has walked the long road to point B, which usually means he/she made sacrifices in the name of commitment, made financial contributions, took on risk, made losses etc. and in the process have developed a unique custom approach to the market that is signed by his/her own unique psychological profile signature with all its limitations and characteristics.  This is NOT TRANSFEREABLE – get it into your freaking heads!  It is not captured in the indicators he/she uses or even the way they use it, it is only in their minds.  And those who promote they are using some black box system, well, I'm sure they did not leech it from someone else either and took a similar road to point B as any other pro trader would have done– you have no right to demand anything from anyone!  WALK THE ROAD YOURSELF – or quit now, while you are still ahead!

Another road often taken by some wannabes is that of collecting indicators, I like to call them the "Indicator Hunters".  They are newbie's who believe the Holy Grail of trading success lies in some mystical indicator, the weirder the name they give it the better chance it has on being the Real McCoy.  They just hop from thread to thread leeching whatever comes their way – that about sums up their trading career in a nut shell – pitiful at the very least.

Then you get what I call the "Wolves"  These are the newbie's who rock up on a thread which at that point still had potential, and start questioning the rule sets, questioning the indicators, questioning the settings, changing the rules sets here and there, changing the settings here and there adding new indicators, take others away, in the end they tore the original system apart like a pack of hungry wolves, hence my reference and move on to demolish the next thread after this one's bones are picked clean by the "Indicator Hunters" who swoop in and leach all the "new toys" that became available during the demolition. 

What really puts a smile on my face is how these self confessed newbie's with absolutely NO experience and technical knowledge see chance to question and "evaluate" new indicators and systems.  Exactly how they manage to test and determine the quality and validity of stuff they have never even heard of or do not understand the math's, science or statistics driving it all, is really a mind bender to me.

Now and then, you get a few good hearted pro traders and or coders who decide to try and help a few people now and then.  The pro coders and traders usually put a lot of time, money and effort into creating these tools and systems and have the full right to protect their efforts without the need to explain them.  This is however unacceptable to a small minority of wannabe's who demands full disclosure of the source codes etc. as well  They will go to certain extents like have people decompile and reverse engineer the information just so they can see how it was done.  Once more, all you have done is steal a fighter jet plane, you are no pilot, just a common thief, and not even a good one.  You can not even pride yourself on your hacking skills, if you were such a hot shot coder, you would not need to decompile/reverse engineer other people's work  and steal their methodologies, you would be able to figure out your own methods, I can only pity you lot.

If psychology and psychiatry students ever wanted a place to do free research on human behavior, foreign exchange forums are the place to go, you'll have lifetime supply of great study material!

I have come to the final decision not to post to any trading forum ever in my life again.  I will not reply to any PM's anyone sends me anymore.  You people do not deserve a fraction of the efforts people like me have to offer.  Go ahead, steal my methodologies, rape my indicators, mess it all up like you always do, my concern from now on, is with myself and the people around me who depend on me.

This blog will not change you, this blog will not even put a dent in the intellect of the person who is content with being 'enabled" and it will not shield them from their inevitable demise as so called traders, at best I just hope that someone will perhaps start a nice private group where likeminded professionals can interact in peace and quiet without the newbie's falling in through the door simply assuming it is all for them!

Best wishes and happy hunting

FX Sniper