FINFLUENCERS & TRICKS OF THE TRADE
Wolves in Sheep's Clothing, or Masters of the Market? Unraveling the Realities of Trading Influencers
Improved financial literacy, whether aiming to be to be a more savvy saver, invest your money better, or learn to trade stocks or futures, has never been easier.
The internet houses an incredible amount of content, which can drastically improve your financial know-how and thus have a significant positive effect on your financial outcomes. There is a heap of good guys (and girls) out there who are producing and distributing content for all the right reasons, and plenty that aren’t.
When I was a young man, I did some work experience at a stockbroker where I worked alongside the Barefoot Investor (he wasn’t barefoot then), and over the last 12 months have also met some excellent people in the biz like Owen Rask and others….these guys sell courses and products, but definitely seem genuine and seem to have the best interests of people at heart when they’re doing it. Many don’t however…they run get-rich-quick type trading schemes, and it’s important to be aware of what to look for when someone is pulling the wool over your eyes.
I’m a big believer in ‘Standing on the Shoulders of Giants’, in everything I do, whether it be picking up the phone to people in my network who have encountered a similar issue i’m going through, to paying for golf lessons from a pro, or buying the pro version of Duolingo or Yousican to learn Spanish and Guitar. I have a lot of things that I want to learn in this life, and not enought time to learn them, so I’m happy to pay others to speed up my progress. It means I’m not wasting valuable time and effort when learning a new skill by going over ground that could be learned 100x quicker by following someone who has already put in the blood, sweat and tears, so you don’t have to. But I think it’s only fair that you pay those people well so that you can take the shortcut.
In my never-ending quest to learn the ‘Art’ of trading, I've tried and paid for MANY of these services, and been burnt MANY times, as I'm sure some of you have. The worst part of all this, in my opinion, is that their tricks make you feel like a failure…ie - these guys seem to be killing it, but I’m not??
The most common 'Tricks' I've found are;
Carefully word-smithing statements so that there is ample 'wiggle room' for the promoters to claim winning trades, but also avoid responsibility for losing trades.
Plotting a mish mash of lines of a chart, trend/resistance/support levels, to subsequently claim the ones the market goes near while ignoring the ones the market pushes straight through, or labelling them a ‘failed breakout’ or a ‘look below and fail’. How are you meant to know when its a breakout, or failed breakout in realtime??
Recommending a multitude of shares, options, and strategies that you can't keep up with, only to 'Cherry pick' the ones that worked out for P&L and marketing purposes and quietly remove the ones that didn't.
Quickly removing unhappy clients, to ensure their testimonials and chat rooms are filled with those that DID do well.
Outright manipulation of the data and lying about their results
Using casual discord comments to users as ‘proof’ of how they got a call right…ignore if wrong as wasn’t an actual claim.
Make a call, take the tiny move as a target, - claim success if reverses, claim success if continues due to ‘runners’.
Using a ‘?’ at the end of statements to claim both success and plausible deniability after the fact.
Using multiple accounts and cherry-picking the profits from the account that worked.
Also, be aware that a lot of these guys have arrangements with brokers that provide them rebates on turnover, so they’re incentivised to promote lots of churn in positions.
Does this post make me a hypocrite, given I offer a paid substack, and can also receive referral money from brokers? Maybe…but I’ll let you be the judge of that.
I’ve just done a spring clean before my family and I take off on our World Tour 2024, and I found all my old trading documents. Literally hundreds of pages of trading notes, prices, and failed strategies. This is what becoming a consistent, profitable trader looks like. It DOES NOT look like some FURU on twitter who proudly proclaims he’s been trading for 3 years and is now an expert in some obscure technical analysis indicator. Over the last few months, I’ve shared and publicly documented on twitter and youtube my trading 3 seperate times;
September Challenge: $5,000 live account to target $7,500 in 4 days.
October Challenge: $5,000 live account to target $7,500 in 7 days.
Traders Live Podcast: $20,000 demo account to $22,195 in 40 minutes.
I’m not showing this to brag (I definitely have my fair share of losses), just to suggest that if you want to find someone to turbo-charge your learning curve and fast-track your way to profitability in any area of life, you better filter through a lot of crap out there to find those that can prove they actually walk the talk.
The other big difference for me personally is that I see a difference between paying for a ‘tip service’ and investing in educational content or data to inform your own trading decisions. I don’t run a ‘tip’ service, and in my opinion they create more issues than provide solutions. I just provide extremely valuable data to traders to make better decisions and hopefully improve their profitability as I’ve done.
“Give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime.”
I’ve been trading for 20 years, with mixed success until fairly recently. I have more than ‘enough’ in life, and my intention with everything I’m currently doing simply to improve outcomes for retail traders by providing insights from both my personal experiences, as well as incredibly actionable insights from the historical model I spent thousands of hours building. I am loving the process of creating a community of like-minded people who are actually serious about becoming better at their craft and ultimately financially free, whatever that means to them.
But beware those looking for a quick buck…it’s a jungle out there.
Cheers
Marto