Are Stock Trading Courses Scams?

In this video, I talk about trading courses and paid groups. I have no affiliation with any of the paid courses or groups mentioned in this video. Instead, I make money the old fashioned way: AdSense!

Intro

Are trading courses and signal groups all scams or are some well worth the money? In my opinion, the answer is… it depends. In this video, I’ll cover what to look out for.

So if you’re new to my channel, my name is Daniel, and I explore different ways to make money online and share my experience with you. And so today, let’s talk about trading courses and paid groups.

I think the overwhelming perception of trading courses is they are over-priced scams designed to sucker in amateur traders with the promise of trading riches, when in reality, it’s much more difficult to make a consistent profit when you’re new, and you’ll eventually blow up your account and throw in the towel. And the most common objection to these too-good-to-be-true claims is if you’re so good at trading or developed such a winning strategy, why would you go through the hassle of developing and marketing a course when you could just keep that knowledge to yourself and make as much money as you wanted?

And I can certainly agree with that. But let’s say you’re fairly content making $200,000 per year trading – about $800 per trading day. To increase your size would be putting on more risk than you are comfortable with. Or maybe you want to diversify your revenue. Maybe you don’t like the isolating nature of trading by yourself and want to start your own community. Or you do find a lot of personal satisfaction with teaching people. You could start a community or launch a course for free, but it’s a lot of work. My wife and I had our own paid group for photography a few years ago, and the responsibility and time commitment was a lot, and, eventually, we decided it wasn’t even worth the money to us to keep doing. So I can see why someone who is putting something together like that wants to get paid for their trouble, and I have zero issue with that.

But in all likelihood the most popular trading gurus make far more from their courses than they do from actually trading. Penny stock guru, Timothy Sykes, has admitted he makes 12 times more from teaching than trading. And I give him props for being open about that, and depending on what you trade and how you trade it, it can get harder with larger amounts of capital, so I can see why he would want to launch into teaching. He lists 10 reasons for it on his site… but to me the bottom line is he can make millions per year without putting a single trade on. From a purely business perspective, it’s a no-brainer to spend your time teaching. But I don’t like his personality or penny stocks, so I’m not buying his course.

The problem is because trading successfully is such an attractive proposition to so many people, it opens the door for charlatans and scammers to take advantage and it can be hard to tell the good apart from the bad.

And now, everyone and their frat brother has a trading discord, forex telegram group, or whatever. Is anyone providing worthwhile education and value to help you become a profitable trader, or is it all nonsense fluff purely designed to profit the owners? Let’s get into it.

What’s My Angle?

So I don’t care whether you are for or against buying courses or joining paid Discords or whatever. I don’t sell any trading courses and I don’t have any course affiliate links, so my goal isn’t to persuade you one way or the other. I’m just breaking down my thoughts on the subject.

Why Spend Money?

So first, with the wealth of information available for free online, why should you spend any money on a course? I would be surprised if any one course had incredibly proprietary information that couldn’t be found elsewhere for free. The truth is you could learn everything you need to learn about trading successfully without spending a dime on educational products. It would likely take quite some time to filter through the thousands of strategies, indicators, misleading information, and flat out bad ideas to harvest the gems and implement them in your trading.

In some ways, it’s similar to collegiate programs where a degree isn’t necessary to make a living in that industry. The college course gives you structure in the form of a syllabus, instruction by those who (hopefully) know what they’re talking about, the ability to get your questions answered, and work past problem areas you may have.

So that’s where something like a trading course may give you the direction and support you’ve been looking for. Here’s our strategy, here’s how you use it, and here’s a community of people also doing it that you can connect with. Now assuming it’s a good strategy that works well with your personality, trading style, and risk tolerance, then there is definitely some benefit to that and paying a modest fee is probably well worth it.

Like with most things worth doing, however, trading is not easy. You cannot bypass the hard work by spending money. It takes screen time to identify different setups, trade in different markets and conditions, and learn how you handle winning and losing money from an emotional level.

I have spent hundreds of hours watching and reading free trading content, and I could definitely put together a strategy, learn how to execute it, and get to work trading without giving a guru my hard-earned money. But I think I suffered a bit from information overload. One trader may say he only trades in the money stock options and another may only trade momentum small cap stocks and another may swing trade tech stocks. They all claim their strategy makes them an incredible living and I’m left to figure out which one works best for me. And that can take a good amount of time and cost a good amount of money in “market tuition.”

So that’s why I’ve wanted to check out some trading courses to see if I can find someone whose teaching style I like, strategy that I like, and the knowledge I need to execute it profitably. You may or may not feel similarly and that’s totally fine either way.

I was watching Trade By Matt’s stream the other day, and he was talking about courses, and I like the way he framed it. See the video for his clip. I think he has a pretty good way to look at things, so I’m not going to paint with a broad brush and say all courses are scams or all courses are great. Just like most things, there are some good and, well, a lot bad.

My First Trading Course

Do you remember the ads that used to play in front of practically every YouTube video?

Back in the summer of 2020, I was maybe 6 months into my trading journey and decided to check out True Trader. Not because I actually thought it was going to be a worthwhile investment, but because I was tired of seeing their ads playing on YouTube all day and thought I’d do a video about my experience.

Well, I never made that video. After I spent $695 on three-month access, I checked out their course, which I found a little confusing at the time since I was so early in my trading journey. The education section was quite short, outlining their setups. The emphasis seemed to be on the online community itself. A watchlist is sent out in the morning, and the focus is on the first 30 minutes of the trading day. In the chat, a pro trader is usually livestreaming and calling out plays as he enters and exits.

I didn’t even realize it at the time, but I had recently withdrawn money from my brokerage and wasn’t over the $25,000 limit for day trading, so I couldn’t really even follow along with their trades… but it all is very fast-paced and the way they bounce between tickers and trades left me in the dust. It felt kind of like being thrown in the deep end of a pool without knowing how to swim.

Regardless, the strategy didn’t really resonate with me nor did the online community and overall trading style. It didn’t even feel like a place you could ask questions without feeling like a moron.

That whole experience definitely felt like money wasted. And that’s not to say it’s a horrible group… some people may like it and find success with it, but there’s a few things that don’t give me the best feeling about it as a whole which I will cover in a few minutes.

Signal Groups

Next, I checked out some Discord communities that had trading alerts. As a noobie, I thought it’d be best to take the same trades more experienced traders were making. I think I found a post on Reddit with an incredible trade which took me to the OP’s Twitter and eventually to his Discord server. And here, I was actually pleasantly surprised. Sure, I definitely blindly followed alerts as they were called out fairly often. I made some money, and I lost some money.

I have joined maybe 8 other paid Discord servers over the past two years, and I would say about half of them were pretty disappointing, a quarter of them weren’t horrible but not really worth the money, and another quarter I actually liked and found helpful.

And let me just point out the obvious: if you are joining signal groups, you are relying on someone else to tell you what to do. With trading, that just doesn’t really work. Everyone has their own account size, risk tolerance, emotional capacity, ability to execute, and preferred style. If you are blindly following other people, you won’t have any longevity whatsoever and are far more likely to crash and burn.

So to me, groups that emphasize alerts are not ideal. If you rely on them for trades, you are tying yourself to a monthly fee, tying your success to someone else, and a more seasoned trader is usually going to get filled at a better price, exit at a better time, and you may be stuck holding the bags if you are late. And then you’re pissed at someone else for causing you to lose money, and that’s just a recipe for disaster. You need to learn to be self-reliant with your trading. If you lose money, it’s not another trader’s fault, it’s not Jim Cramer’s fault, it’s not the market’s fault. It’s yours alone.

Now here’s where these groups can be beneficial: you learn what another trader looks for in his or her setups. If it makes sense for you, you can add that to your toolbox of setups you like to trade. You can combine that strategy with parameters you’ve already established for yourself. When someone calls out a trade they’re taking, you can pull up the ticker, see if it fits your criteria for a trade, and then make the decision for yourself on if or when to enter, what your stop-loss is, and what your take profit will be. In this instance, a group like this is just like a scanner finding potential plays for you. Ideally, you have a supportive community that you can also bounce trade ideas off of. It can be really beneficial to get someone else’s input on a trade setup when you’re a newer trader, because they will likely see something that you may have missed, which can help keep you out of trouble.

What To Watch Out For

I want to cover some things I personally look out for when checking out courses and paid groups.

Too Good To Be True

Are they selling a lifestyle of luxury houses and cars and making millions poolside in the Caribbean if you just follow their super secret system? That’s a red flag! Are they saying it’s super easy to make thousands of dollars a week trading if you knew what they knew? Also a red flag! Trading is incredibly difficult and there is no bullet-proof system or magical indicator.

Hard Selling

I hate over-the-top marketing and high-pressure sales tactics. That screams scam to me. Or at the very least, an overpriced product that will almost assuredly let you down. If there’s a long sales page filled with emotional cues, testimonials, answers to virtually every objection you may have, and outrageous prices marked down to… less, but still outrageous prices with a countdown clock ticking away the time until the deal goes away… ALL RED FLAGS! I hate that crap.

High Prices

So speaking of outrageous prices, I don’t think price is equivalent to quality in this world. If you’re selling someone the key to unlocking a six-figure trading system, well, you can rationalize charging A LOT for this information. But more often than not, these are absolute rip-offs and have no proprietary information. No secrets. Nothing that will make you more successful than just dropping that money into your brokerage account and figuring it out for yourself. I don’t think I’d ever want to pay more than $500 for any course. The course that has had the biggest impact on my trading was $350 and well worth it.

All Winners, No Losers

Every single trader loses. That’s a fact. If you’re being sold only the rosiest of pictures… only the big wins and none of the missteps and losses, well they aren’t being genuine with you. A pro trader will be able to admit when they’re wrong. When a trade went bad. If you’re not seeing losses, you’re not seeing the full picture.

What to Look For

Generally speaking, whether it’s courses or paid rooms, the emphasis should be on education. Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. Right? Often-quoted, but for a good reason. If you’re a new trader, you don’t want to be blindly following others. You want to learn how successful traders identify setups, how they know when to enter and when to exit. They should want to teach you to be successful on your own.

There are a few places I have found a lot of value and think you may as well… and I’m hesitant to mention paid things because people often think if someone recommends something that costs money that they must be getting paid for it or something, and that’s not the case here. I have no affiliation with anything I’ll mention. I won’t even link them below – you can just Google it or whatever.

First, my favorite trading course is the Supply and Demand Course from Investitrade. If you’ve ever seen a trading video from Carmine Rosato here on YouTube, this is his course. I paid $350 for it, and there are a lot of really valuable videos that really gave me a breakthrough with my trading. The other aspect I like is you also get to join his Discord community without any additional cost. No recurring monthly fees. He’s transparent about his trades – winners or losers – and he isn’t flashing his P&L daily trying to show off. So for me, that was probably the best $350 I ever spent. He has a ton of YouTube videos, so if you like his teaching style, you will probably find a lot of value in his course.

Another course I liked was the How I Day Trade Course by Michigandolf on Twitter. He is a futures trader, mostly trading ES. The course is very no-nonsense, no fluff, and just cuts straight into different strategies he implements. I think this was a solid course and reasonably priced.

For paid rooms, one of my favorites is OneOption… and this one is really more of a platform with a chat. There are well-established pro traders – I believe they skew on the older side, which is honestly a good thing because they have been trading these markets for a lot longer than most Twitter and YouTube FURUs. The platform has really extensive scanning software and proprietary indicators that are actually really useful. Maybe the two downsides are a lot of different tickers are traded on a daily basis based off what’s moving that day, so it can be hard to keep up with what other traders are doing, so I found it best to narrow my focus and just trade setups I’m comfortable with. The other downside may be the price. There are a few different pricing models, but it’s $159 per month for the fully-formed platform and chat. And that’s not really that bad if you are making money trading. It’s a good value for what you get and there’s a two week free trial for both the software and the chat, so I would recommend trying that out first before spending money.

A Discord server I like is called Large Cap Day Trader. I stumbled across the founder from his Reddit posts of his trade breakdowns. He started a YouTube channel which had a lot of good information and then finally launched a Discord room, and he kept the price really affordable at $35 per month. He live-streams every morning for several hours, so I usually have him on in the background as I trade. I also like trading large cap tech stocks, so I like hearing his insight as I look at the same tickers.

If you’re looking for a free resource, I would recommend checking out the RealDayTrading sub on Reddit. This is actually how I found the OneOption platform I mentioned earlier. But here, you’ll find lots of extremely valuable posts from veteran traders. There’s an extensive wiki covering strategy, jargon, resources, etc. The founder has done small account trading challenges, posting his trades live, and he is truly an incredible trader. A lot of the value here can be found in reviewing his past trades to identify what he saw on the chart and how he managed the trade and utilized different strategies like spreads to make the most of a small account.

Final Thoughts

So I hope this kind of breakdown was useful to you. I think it can be hard to navigate the trading world that’s so full of scammers and snake oil salesman, and as someone who has spent a good amount of money exploring different avenues, my goal with this video is to help you avoid blowing money on an overpriced course or fall into a signal group that doesn’t actually help you improve as a trader. If you have any trading resources that you’ve found to be helpful, leave me a comment and let me know. And if there’s any course or room you want me to check out, let me know.