zupcon

lets hope so...... :rofl:

The insanity continues :crap: :rofl:

Hopefully any half decent judge will throw this case stright out of court and award costs to "big mike". The management at AMP appear to be deluded half wits. How can they reach the conclusion that many of their customers are members of big mikes forum ? Was "big mike" actually mad enough to pop over to AMP with a list of his members names and adresses and allow AMP to check them against their customer list :rofl: Even if "big mike" was mad enough to help AMP establish this fact, how does "big mike" even know who his members are because apart form those mad enough to pay for premium membership, they are simple annonymous usernames on a forum. The reality of course is that AMP assume that their customers are members of "big mikes" forum, and that anyone actually gives a flying feck, and on that basis, they start throwing their weight around, and trying to claim 50K in damages, which to be honest is practically chump change. FFS havnt they got a business to be running, or is it "teh office junior" whose responsible for this action. It's not often you'll find me defending a forum owner, but in this case I hope "big mike" takes these clowns to the feckin cleaners, and if he does, I hope he'll have the gonads to expose every single prior communication between himself and AMP futures before they threw their toys out of the pram. If he doesnt, leak the info to me, and I will :rofl:

So whats the crack regarding the ongoing legal issues between Big Mike and AMP GLOBAL CLEARING ? Are AMP behaving like the typical cry baby brokerage company and trying to get negative reviews removed by throwing their weight about? Has "big mike" lived up to his name, and proved he's got a pair of brass balls and wont back down to threats ? I cant be arsed to sign up for an account over there, fill me in someone. Is this really a case of a forum owner with integrity ? whats the world coming too, they'll de discussing trading at the zoo next !

I dont think *upfront* is Kyle's style really ! I predict that fxfisherman will be the next to go, followed by the zoo

Just noticed the demise of the MoneyTec forum, their domain now points to a crappy binary options broker (a vast improvement) Dam, thats a hundred bucks I owe, I made a bet the zoo would fold first, even more reason to hate them :rofl: Still, one down, 20 to go !

Who did he insult ? He quite acurately points out thats there's a symbiotoc relationship between forum owners and vendors, and that the relationship is mutually beneficial to both parties. The forum owner gets free content of a quality thats reasonable enough to satisy the requirements of the majority of the readers of that material. The vendor get exposure to potential customers, and social verification that they are considered by the forum owner to be providing a legitimate, and valued product or service. He quite righly points out that anyone who questions the legitimacy of the vendors material, or posts a contradictory opinion is potentially acting in a way detrimental to the interests of the vendor, and the foum owner. I grant you, this is a complex issue, and situations can arise where the public crusifiction of a vendor may be in the forum owners interests (if for example a fradulent vendor goes into liquidation without paying his bill, and the public trashing of that vendor generates page hits a forum owner may wish to turn a blind eye) All of those points are fact, and its been openly admitted by the management of numerous forums that they act in their own commercial best interests. A forum owner who operates as an IB for FXLulz will not take kindly to posts pointing out FXLulz's appalling track record with regulators etc. The site owner will not take kindly to posts pointing out the astranomical stupidity of following methods advocated by that forum in a deliberate attempt to trick people into paying double FXLulz's spread. Oily talks about "dirty" and corrupt forum owners. He's being a little unfair in tarring all owners with the same brush, but it is a matter of public record that at least one forum owner has been investigated, tried, and jailed for their part in pump and dump schemes. I stronly suspect that a similar fate could await others if the regulatory authorates or law enforcement recieved enough complaints. Even the folks at the t2w zoo openly admit that there's a spectrum of corruption in the industry ranging from light grey, to jet black. The idea that all forum owners are whiter than white (or slightly grey) is ludicrous. I can give you numerous examples where NFA registered sites blatently breached rules and guidelines, simply because they can, and the gains exceed any slap on the wrist they may recieve if investigated and found wanting. His comment about appointing chimpanzees as moderators is a little unfair. Many moderators do a good job in difficult circumstances. However, lets be honest, moderators are generally the people who are manipulating content, and censoring posts that are critical of advertisers. They may only be following orders, or applying site guidelines imposed by those above them, but they are the people getting their hands dirty and implimenting these directives. Lets be honest, most of the constraints that apply to whistleblowers in regular employment, such as the loss of ones job/salary/financial security/career advancement does not apply to an unpaid moderators position. Im sure if moderator X at forum Y refused to censor posts, and ban members considered disruptive by the owner, he wouldnt be blacklisted in the industry, or able to provide financially for his family. There's no good reason why a moderator should act in the way they do, and they act in this way due to personal choice, not eternal presure. Whilst it is certainly derogatory calling a moderator a chimpanzee, I think he was right to draw attention to the role of moderators in these case, and I've seen people called far worse things without being banned Lets not forget that its generally moderators who ban members too (although in t2w's case it was their "CEO" who banned me although someone probably had to show the dimwitted oaf which button to press) I thought oilys post was quite thought provoking.

I had to laugh.:rofl: Ive watched oily posting absolute drivel across a range of forums for well over a decade. Its rather ironic that he gets a ban now for writing something that is, in my experience at least, very close to the truth ! I think he has a very valid point when he talks about a vendor or site owner having an edge. If we cut to the chase, a commercial trading forum needs members with an interest in trading, and page views. If you have a mailing list of people interested in trading, that opens up the opportunity to sell them products and services. Page views opens up the oportunity of advertising revenue etc. In order to attract that membership and those page views, forums need content. Practically every trading forum out there tries to maintain a balance between user generated content, and articles from vendors. Vendors do not provide that content for altuistic reasons, they provide that content in order to market their products and services. If you dont believe me (and some forum owners and managers dont) try this simple experiment. The next time a vendor provides you with an article for publication, tell them you'll quite happily publish, BUT they have to publish under an annonymous name, and remove all links to their websites, or mention of any product or service that they supply, or financially benefit from. Then see how many accept or reject those terms. The fact that a trading forum will publish and proactively promote articles written by a vendor, providing credability and legitimacy by association, is part of the vendors edge. Ive discussed this in some detail with content editors on other sites (t2w for example) and even the most hypocritical charlatans such as Tim Wilcox at t2w has admitted quite publically that the quality of vendor submitted articles is variable, and that some on occassion fall short of the standard that they would ideally wish to achieve. That state of afairs, where a trading forum will knowingly accept material that it knows to be of no practical use or value to their membership, but which will lead to marketing exposure for the vendor has to be an edge. Im not saying all forums do that, but most certainly do. That relationship also works both ways for the reasons that Ive outlined below. If you look at the top 20-25 trading forums, and the people who own and operate them, then in some cases, you'll see that they are owned and operated by traders, who in some cases actually participate in the day to day running of the site, posting content, and generally getting involved. Some take a more hands off approach which is fine. I didnt look too hard, but I cant find a forum operated by anyone with a publically audited track record, but if you know different, I'd be interested to hear details. In other cases, the people who own and operate these forums also own and operate other non trading related forums. Their knowledge and expertese in internet marketing is equal or greater than their knowledge of trading. I think its a fair assumption to make that there are forum owners out there whose knowledge of trading is limited, and it wouldnt surprise me if some had never made a trade in their entire life. I also think its a fair assumption to make that there are forum owners out there with a genuine interest in trading, but who could not in all honesty claim any long term success, and whose principal incomes are derived not from their trading, but from the commercial operation of their forum businesses I also think its a reasonable assumption that there may be successful traders running forums, either because they are genuinely altuistic, or they run a forum to smooth out cash flow. I certainly have unprofitable months, even unprofitable quarters, and at times Ive even taken long periods of time away from trading, so I understand why someone might want to establish a secondary source of income The problem of course is that the people running forums who either do not trade, or trade unsuccessfully for a punt, cannot differentiate between "good" advice or vendor generated articles, and "bad" advice. Ive been doing this stuff for over a decade now, and whilst I may be able to spot complete nonsense, and "intelligent nonsense" I am certainly NOT qualified to assess the quality or legitimacy of many vendor submitted articles. I know very little about fundementals, I know very little about psychology, I know very little about various financial instruments other than those I trade, my knowledge of options theory is sketchy, and I think its reasonable to assume that this also applies to the small minority of genuine traders who also run forums as a side line. In summary, almost noone who runs a forum, and accepts vendor sumbitted marketing fluff is qualified to determine if those articles are beneficial, or detrimental to their membership, and yet, they accept and promote them. I acknowledge that complete nonsense can be screened out, and probably is by the better websites. Furthermore, If you take any objective measure of retail trader performance, lets say the quartery CTFC data releases, or even performance from various audit sites or social media type platforms, then its beyond all reasonable doubt that the number of successful traders in percentage terms is fairly low, certainly far less than the fabled 5% nonsense that gets discussed ad nauseum. Therefore you have a readership that are simply not qualified to tell fact from fiction either. This really is a perfect storm, in the best case we have publishers who cant differentiate good material from bad (even if they are 100% sincere in their wish to help others) providing educational material to an audience who cant differentiate fact from fiction. In 80% of case we have the blind leading the blind In the worst cases, we have internet marketers with no knowledge, or interest in trading, misleading and exploiting a mainly inexperienced readership who know less than zero There's an edge there for the forum owner. They have a an army of vendors willing to provide free content, and a membership who wants that content, but cant really differentiate good from bad. Some forum owners choose to exploit that edge. I'll give you an example. One forum owner proactively promoted a particular broker as their "preferred broker". This possibly involved falsifying membership polls, but definately involved censoring posts that where critical of the broker. The spreads offered by this particular broker where not particularly competative, the broker was illegally operating a policy on slippage that was detrimental to their clients (for which they later recieved record fines). To make matters worse, their own staff members where proactively advocating a trading method which involved opening simultneous long and short positions, and therefore paying double the spread (from which they recieved a juicy IB kickback) The forum owners edge in that case is the ignorance of a certain section of their membership, who are perhaps unaware of the typical range of spreads on offer from different brokers, or the rather significant effect of that spread. When a forum owner censors or deletes posts that are critical of an advertiser or strategic partner thats exploiting an edge. The forum owner has the power to create a false impression of reality. I'll give you an example. A couple of years ago, a large financial fraud was committed in Australia. Another known criminal decided that they'd replicate a similar fraud, and paid a particular trading forum to email an offer of a fraudulent ponzi scheme (already closed down in various countries) to their Australian members. IIRC the forum recieved about $1.60 for each email sent to their membership list. Every single post by membership pointing out that they where promoting a fraudulant and illegal scheme was deleted. The same forum deleted links to official state regulators including FSA, CTFC etc. That particular forum deleted links to the New York courts website, because the links provided documentation that one of their official partners and advertisers, who claimed to be a successful hedge fund manager and trader was in reality a multiple discharged bankrupt due in each case to trading losses, and had actually been charged and found guilty of common law fraud. However, the illusion to the sites membership simply had to be maintained, and this was achieved through censorship. Are you serously trying to tell me that the ability to act in that way isnt an edge for an unscrupulous forum owner ? Obviously some forum owners have a little more integrity and choose to exercise a little more restraint, but the fact remains, there is an edge that can be exploited, and is exploited if the forum operates commercially. There's nothing wrong with that, its not illegal, but it is most certainly an edge. Lets take a hypothetical situation. Lets assume that a brand new member with one post start a thread at your forum, and posts unsubstantiated claims that your main advertiser FXLulz have cheated them in some way. A bunch of other people join in slagging off FXLulz reporting problems. You have no idea these claims are true. The other members slagging off FXLulz are probably: a) unhappy traders who dont actually trade with FXLulz but hate all brokers and grabbing the opportunity to stick the boot in b) Just posting for lulz c) Sock puppet accounts paid by FXLulz's major competitor to discredit them d) Legitimate traders with a genuine grievance The official company rep from FXLulz calls or emails you about the thread. He claims that the complaint is completely unsubstantiated, that the person who posted it is a known trouble maker, he didnt lose 165,000 dollars when they slipped his stop, as he only has a $200 account, he used 500:1 leverage and placed a stop 1 pip away etc etc So its now your latest members word, against FXLulz word ? and advertising from FXLulz pays your salary. Are you really telling me that doesnt influence your decision making ? I'll be frank, it would definately influence mine. Lets assume that you are a man of absolute integrity (and I'm sure you are), and you tell the FXLulz representative that your members have the right to free speach, that you wont intervene, and the thread must stay warts and all, and that you will not sucumb to threats of losing advertising. FXLulz pull their advertising, and a week later, you get a letter from FXLulz legal department threatening high court action, or an injunction, or veiled threats not to walk in the woods alone. What do you do then, call up your lawyers and instruct them to accept service, and spend god knows how many thousands of dollars fighting a court action to protect the rights of one member who might possibly be lying or confused, or a shill paid to discredit the guys who used to pay your bills ? You might be a man of absolute integrity who would do that. However, its a matter of public record that certain forum owners would not act in that way. They would delete the thread even if true, becasue its not in their commercial interests. I hate using t2w as an example, they are after all at the black end of the spectrum, but their "CEO" has publically admitted that they delete and censor to protect their commercial interests, and I cant blame them really. Im not really sure that I fully agree with oilys conclusion that "the more members are banned , the dirtier the site owner", after all members get banned for a variety of different reasons, but I think if you narrow that down a little, and look at those banned for expressing opinions that differ from those of the forum owner, particularly if those opinions are detrimental to the owners financial interest, then he might have a point. Even you have to see the funny side, oily says site owners/operators ban people for telling the truth, and he tells the truth, and then you ban him, and you'll probably ban me too, which is no problem, Ive just wasted 30 minutes of my time and I need to a) make a cup of tea and b) get on with some work

cool, your pulling in double what I'm averaging, well done. If its any consolation Ive been banned from most forums too. Thats what happens if you tell the truth. :rofl:

Thats a step in the right direction at least. If you continue to make progress at this rate you should have it all figured out by around 2098

Have you learned NOTHING in the 10 years or so you've been doing this stuff ? Trading with FXCM is a right of passage, most people learn from that experience fairly quickly and either quit or move on. Surely it didnt take you a decade to work out what should be blindingly obvious after a handful ot trades ? Although it pains me to say it, FXCM are a great example of "professionals" trading with an edge.

The moderation policy isnt really an issue. I doubt many of these forums even have an official moderation policy, unpaid moderators are basically told to enforce site guidelines, and then allowed to do whatever they want, and by and large that works most of the time. The real issue is that any successful forum will generally require someone to pay for it, and thats possibly going to cause a conflict of interest. If you are a forum owner paying for running costs from advertising revenue paid by FXLULZ, promoting FXLULZ as a preferred broker (and earning rebates on every trade made by the muppets you reffered) and awarding FXLULZ various meaningless acolades and awards to FXLULZ, promoting them as a "shining beacon" what do you do when someone posts and points out that FXLULZ is being investigated by regulatory authoraties ? or that FXLULZ has been found guilty of various misdemeanours Can you really allow someone to tell the truth about FXLULZ ? The most hypocritical of forums is undoubtadly the t2w zoo, but even they are honest and open enough to admit that they have banned members simply because those members make posts that are detrimental to the sites commercial interests, and that those posts cost them money. I'm not talking about someone posting a rumour, or an opinion, I'm talking about posts that refer directly to official communication by regulatory authoraties, warnings of fraudulant and illegal activities issued by FSA, NFA, CTFC etc. Those posts are being deleted simply because the company committing that fraud are an advertiser, and the forum itself (or teh office junior) is complicit in promoting that fraud to its membership for financial gain. Sites such as t2w promoting a series of illegal investment schemes to its membership on the basis that "teh office junior" isnt capable of typing a company name into Google or undertaking the most basic of due dilligence into their clients really is at the thin end of the wedge, they are saints in comparision to many. Even an independant small forum might think twice about allowing negative posts on reciept of solicitors letters from FXLULZ threatening legal action. And what would you do for example if you found that a member of your staff, or a moderator, or site advisor was running an illegal investment scheme which had been actively promoted on your site, and those individuals where now under investigation by law enforcement. Would you really allow free and open discussion, or would you moderate 24/7 and ensure a very tight lid remained on the story. Moderation is a necessary evil, and so is censorship really. If I ran a forum paid for from my own labours, I'd get a bit annoyed watching FXLULZ's customer representatives using my resources to sell their snake oil 24/7. Id have 2 options, spend time and resources stopping them (and FXLULZ has a very big marketing department and a whole army of muppets posting on their behalf, so totally removing their effluence isnt going to be easy) OR I accept payment, at which point I'm as guilty as they are, and Ive just taken my first step on the slippery slope. We are operating in a fundementally dirty and corupt business, and what happens with respect to forums is just a direct consequence of that.

I think you are being a bit tough on forums. Some forums are worse than others. The t2w zoo is currently the best example of a group of internet marketers cynically manipulating the stupidity of the few to exploit the gulability and ignorance of the many. However, I, and many others wouldnt consider the time we spent posting there as "wasted". I know traders who where once evangelical supporters of forex factory, elite trader, big mikes, this place etc, but who are now totally disgusted about how these places are operated, but even so, most still have no regrets about trying to help out others. I dont think forum owners are getting things quite their own way. Check out the scale of the resources being wasted by management over at the zoo in a desperate and totally futile attempt to stay afloat as their site traffic drops to new lows. Its not easy to get the full picture, and I personally think the situation is a lot worse than it looks, but one things for sure, time's must be pretty desperate, and unless something changes soon, this particular market will have been juiced dry, at least by the forum business model. The zoo will probably be the first failure, but there's a few in the queue shortly behind them who wont last much longer. However even in a place like the t2w zoo operating a proactive policy of dumbing down content, there's still quality historical content despite the sites current adgenda. Thankfully content editors on most forums are simply not capable of assessing the impact of most of the content thats posted. Good stuff does occassionally slip through the filters, and despite the abundance of dumbed down effluence thats actively promoted and hyped on most forums, I'd be hard pushed to identify a single forum that didnt contain something of value. Sure, you could write the combined output of decent stuff on the back of a small sheet of postage stamps, but there's decent nuggets of information that can be mined. I dont follow TL very closely, and their output has reduced substantially over the last couple of years, but Ive seen at least 2 posts that pretty much let the cat out of the bag for anyone that followed up ideas in those posts. Im often asked for advice, and one of the very few things that Im usually prepared to say is "avoid forums like the plague", and whilst I stand by that advice, even I would be forced to admit that there's a wide spectrum of damage that forums cause, ranging from totally destructive, through to mostly harmless. One of the big sticking points for me is the issue of LULZ ? There's no better source of lulz anywhere on this plannet than t2w during their period of the sites decline, its pure comedy gold. Most people who want to trade for a living are going to fail, in the same way that most of us as children wanted to play football as a career failed to achieve those goals, and for precisely the same reasons. If you are going to fail, surely you might as well share a few laughs along the way ? I think we need to accept that time's constantly change and whilst you might argue that the zoo contains a vast amount of seriously damaging content, most of its content is mostly harmless, and there's been no trading related content at all for the past 5 years. What harm can it really do accessing a source of entertainment (other than soiling one's pants laughing) At a push, you might even argue that if a site such as the zoo is proactively censoring content, deleting posts that are damaging to its sponsors etc, then thats actually very useful information if you are lucky enough to witness that happening. I know a couple of people who seriously considered paying mike baghdaddy for training, but changed their minds after seeing t2w deleting posts. If t2w handnt deleted the posts, theyd have gone ahead and wasted relatively large sums of money. It was only t2w's actions in covering up the truth that led these people to understake further due dilligence. I'm not just singling out t2w, I know of similar instances at forex factory, forex tsd and baby pips. So in some ways, the internet marketers running forums do provide useful information, if you know how to interpret it. Even the frequency at which I post on this forum gives away information if you know how to interpret it !

I suppose it depends when they started out. There's nothing of interest or value on the forums these days. The old crowd might hang around for laughs and from habit, but I very much doubt that anyone new to the game will be contributing to any forum 5 years from now. The other issue as you point out is that there's no incentive really to publish anything of value, and definately not on a forum.

How much is missing ? a dollar, 10 dollars, 100 dollars, 1000 dollars, 10,000 dollars, 100,000 dollars ? If its 30 dollars or less its probably just bank charges, those bankers need to pay for those bonuses, and its sure not by trading. If its more, someones having a laugh.

Thats fair comment. Ive built automated systems where individual components of that system can run into thousands of lines of code, and the reason for the additional complexity of course is that its worth putting in the work to get what might be considered to be a very small improvement, but which can have a significant impact on performance. If I look at most of the code Ive written, a significant amount of that code is handling connection state, and handling exceptions when the brokers API fails (which many do with alarming regularity) Oily's a forex guy, using MT4 as his charting platform, so the question really should be could Oily really impliment something in 30 lines of code in a language such as MQL ? To be honest its doubtful, but only becuase a certain amount of defensive programming is required. In MQL I can call a function to open a market order in one line, but realistically, I then need to check the status of that function call, to determine if I was filled, partially filled, determine what was the entry price was etc. If Im going down the market order route, then I need to call a modify function to set stops and targets, and again, I need to check the status that the order was actually modified as intended. If wasnt for this sort of stuff, I have absolutely no doubt that I could impliment in 30 lines, and Im being deadly serious. Im presuming that I'd be allowed to use the platforms inbuilt technical indicators (all of which are probably based on more than 30 lines of code) Id probably need 20 lines to handle the risk management, a couple of lines to get a directional bias, one line for entry trigger, one line to call the open function, one line to add stops and targets, a couple of lines to limit the system to a single trade. 30 lines is a tough call, but just about achievable. The results would be a bit rough, and drawdown larger than Id like, and I'd probably have to diversify and trade several instances of the thing but it would work. Another 30 lines for some basic trade mamanagement and we'd be rocking The moment that you start adding in the defensive code to handle disconnections, and to handle those instances when things dont work out as planned, and a few basic UI elements, your 30 lines of code probably expand to 300 lines. I'll give you a great example of the typical problem you might encounter in MQL. The language allows you iterate through open orders, or through your trade history. You can achieve that easily in a couple of lines of code. The only problem is that the function reads this data from the user interface, so if the user sorts the data displayed in the UI, or worse still filters the data, you'll end up with unexpected results. So consequently, you cant actually rely on the inbuilt functionality. If your strategy relies on an accurate knowledge of historical trades (for example trading a progressive betting strategy) your going to have to impliment your own independant solution because realistically, you cant rely on the technology provided by the broker. I guess this is something of a pointless argument anyway, Ive seen strategies implimented in languages such as R, MATLAB and various AI tecchologies where implimentation detail that would take tens of thousands of lines of C++ are abstracted away into a single function call. In some cases those strategies need execution speed, and they get re written, or they dont. The point is, Im fairly certain Ive seen fairly complex MATLAB strategies for stuff such as dynamic hedging of options that easily fit into my 30 line constraint, but I consider that to be cheating and I suspect that you would too, but where do you draw the line in terms of language abstraction ?

They are equally useless for automated systems... But that's another issue

:rofl: Trading might not be a "science" but you can apply scientific method. Its not rocket science either. I dont really trade automated systems these days due to reliability issues, but if there was a broker out there responsible enough to take this stuff seriously (and there isnt) I could write a profitable automated strategy in about 30 lines of code, and I suspect that a lot of the quant boys could do it in less.

I'm inclined to agree with him about the 2 system input constraint. even two inputs is one more than you really need. I'd probably hire him, but I suspect I dont have much I could offer him

Some people believe that we get what we focus on, and if thats true, focussing on all of the negative attributes that you dont want possibly results in you getting negative results. Personally, I dont buy that particular brand of bullshit, I'd rather try to understand the problem, and then try to find solutions. There's a whole bunch of problems identified in your post but they are mostly just symptoms of a few bigger problems that you need to identify For example.. Distractions such as people going out shopping, falling asleep, chatting on skype, ******* their girlfriend etc. Why is that happening ? If these guys where earning 10K a day would that still happen ? Perhaps these people lack disipline, or lack experiece of working in the type of environment required. Maybe they just require more supervision and monitoring. Can you remove these distractions ? can you supervise them more closely ? can you change the process in some way to ensure they are where they are supposed to be and engaged in watching the market, can you impose financial penalties if they arnt, can you incentivise them to modify their behaviour etc etc People not following system rules... have they been sufficiently trained, can they correctly identify entries and exits retrospectively, can they identify system rules on a simulator perhaps played back at slower speeds than real time, perhaps intuitively they think the rules make no sense, perhaps they lack training, perhaps its just lack of focus, perhaps theyre afraid of failure, perhaps they dont understand how an edge plays out over time. Perhaps you need to take more steps to determine that they do understand system rules. This has to be a step by step process. How can you expect someone to trade a trend if they dont know what your definition of a trend is. Perhaps you need better real time decision support systems, perhaps you need better visuals on charts to identify no trade area's, less cluttered charts etc etc There's probably just 5 or 6 main problem area's. My gut reaction is that the people you are hiring are not traders, unless you can get a nice wedge together, you'll be stuck with that and you'll have to work within the constraints you have. However, the muppets that you are hiring are aware that markets can be traded and there's money to be made. Their expectations will be unrealistic. Thats your first task, ensure that they understand wots wot, and eliminate the nonsense and damage caused by reading garbage at places like the zoo. Next job is to get some decent training materials together, focusing on each specific element of your system. Imliment this training one bit at a time, and walk them step by step through the process. I suspect that you have failed to provide any objective metrics by which their performance can be evaluated (other than they made or lost money over a given period). The next step has to be putting those metrics together, and then evaluating them against those metrics, and providing feedback and training. I suspect that they have no belief in the system. I suspect that the concepts on which the method has been based have not been explained to them, and that they have no quantatative evidence to indicate that the system actually works. If you claim that your trade entry has a 60% probability of gaining 10 pips before losing 8 pips, then force them to determine and prove to themselves that this is in fact correct. I suspect that these people cant really see how their trading careers might potentially develop, I suspect that they are not being compensated adequately or fairly. You need some sort of structered development program which makes things clear to everyone involved whats expected, and what happens given in various scenarios etc I also suspect that they are not adequately supervised or supported throughout the day. Someone needs to be on these peoples cases, remotely observing, or soliciting feedback etc. I suspect they know noones watching, and so they take the piss. There's not enough financial motivation to make them pay attention, the rewards are not manifesting themselves as per there unrealistic expectations etc etc, so you'll have to impose some disipline. If you do what I say you'll make some money, but the good ones will quit because they dont really need you, and theres usually a better deal to be negotiated elsewhere

What attributes do these people need ? age, education, experience etc Once thats defined maybe people could suggest ways of reaching them. After that you need some sort of funnel to process applications and evaluate suitability Most traders with a decent track record are going to be looking for capital, so unless you can compete you dont stand much chance of attracting talent. The only alternative is establishing some sort of development program where you proactively support non profitable traders in the hope that your investment pays off before the good ones inevitably leave you ! The fundemental problem with this idea is that the good people inevitably always leave once they have established a track record You also have to be quite clear about why you want these people, do you want them to trade profitably, or are you just looking to replicate a prop shop type environment. Are you going to fully fund them, part fund them etc etc.

I suppose you learn not to buy trading education. Its a lesson well worth paying for

Ive been trading for almost 15 years now, and in that time, Ive never met a single trader who could actually explain the ross hook without contradicting themselves. Every single forum thread on the ross hook is the same, a bunch of people who where taught the set up by Joe, but who have totally different interpretations of what it actually is ! Im not particularly interested in Joe's methods (for reasons I wont go into) but out of curiosity, can these set ups be identified objectively, are there rules, or is it all a bit discretionary ?

I find my coin is fairly consistant

You don't have a system. If you did you could automate So now you need someone who has discretion, and if they have that they don't need you because you have nothing that they need or can't get elsewhere What a mess