I have asked people (applicants for my personal mentoring program and Slo Gro Pro training programme) the following question since about two years ago:

What was the main attraction and / or benefit that triggered your initial involvement in forex trading?

• [A] Making a lot of money with little money?
• [B] Making very high returns due to low margins?
• [C] Provide additional income on a part-time basis?
• [D] Potential for non-job based consistent long term revenue?
• [E] Other? (Please give details)

The winner by a country mile is making a lot of money with little money and [B].

I also ask a follow-up question:

Have your views regarding the above changed?

In almost every case where the initial response was [A] or [B] it has changed.

This is fascinating. Let me explain to you why.

It is clear from further investigation that making a lot of money with little money is for most people entering forex trading not enough.

In addition to a lot with a little it had to be

These two add-ons are really what have changed for the people on my personal mentoring program.

They have realized like oil and water, “a lot with a little” and “quick & easy” doesn’t mix.

Thousands and thousands of entrepreneurs have done it. You probably know a few amongst family, friends and acquaintances.

I can even use myself as an example. In 1998 I have started trading with a relatively small amount and until now, 14 years later, I have sustained myself and my family solely from my expertise in trading.

I can assure you it was neither quick nor easy!

And take Wall Street (forex) trading star Jim Leitner who has made millions and millions himself. From a short CV you can see that he started out with a little money (and clearly he made a lot):

Again, it is clear that quick & easy doesn’t feature as part of really making lots of money with little money.

So, where does this deadly “quick & easy” meme come from?

(“Meme” = A unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another.)

How has it sneaked into the equation and thwarted the plans of so many?

Marketing wizards!

Marketing wizards have successfully redefined the “make lots of money with little money” need by overwhelmingly spreading the “quick and easy” meme and saturating the entrance portals to the forex trading industry with it.

The legitimate need has been replaced with a bogus solution.

I can tell you this: In real life forex trading is an entrepreneurial effort with a long term focus, with the realities of toil, hard work, continuous effort and uncertainty, need for lucky breaks (but remember the harder you work the luckier you get) and the always looming possibility of ultimate failure or success, due to internal or external factors that change the whole time.

Marketing wizards have successfully replaced this (above) with the idea that forex trading is a series of effortless short term experiments to find some magic system which will deliver certainty about a lot of money with little money (with continued little effort and in short time over and over (every day / every week / every month) forever.

The ultimate marketing coup is to create a need or problem and then provide the solution.

In today’s “instant” culture there is no time for time consuming processes or solutions. (Things like the realities of forex trading like it really is …)

You spend a few hundred bucks, plug in and sit back to determine if this one is your personal quick and easy route to permanent riches with

The illusion is created that the immediate performance (after purchase) of a system is normative for future performance.

If people believe this, marketing wizards will be able to sell product after product in short order to serial buyers.

Therefore the subtle introduction and misuse of a small three letter word, “per”. (Per = “with every / each instance”)

I kid you not

The following has arrived actually in”My FX Inbox” after I have penned the first draft of this blog post:

I am sure you can see that this dynamic is a far cry away from the legitimate goal to make a lot of money out of little money.

The bottom line is most people start their attempts with forex trading with a haphazard concoction of own attempts, freebies, and other short term efforts, robots, signals or whatever “quick & easy brew” the marketing wizards dish up at that time and never get even close to their original goal of making lots of money with little money”.

Have YOU TOO lost the plot?

Are you also pretending to yourself and the people depending on you, and your judgement in the matters of their long term financial future that you are indeed looking to make a lot of money with little money and that is why you are spending all that time trawling the forex trading space

you just want the quick & easy?

I hope not.

Making a lot of money with little money is not something accomplished in a few weeks by doing nothing with no risk, no money down, no problems, no uncertainty, no sleepless nights, no trauma, no fear, no worries and no luck (but you make your own luck!)

If you believe that you will not be making lots of money … ever.

Other people will be making lots of money – and some of that will be made of you.

Do the right thing, right.

You are a hardworking, intelligent and street smart person?

Everything you have really applied yourself too has worked out well?

Except until now, “forex trading”?

Maybe, just maybe it is because you have lost the plot about making lots of money with little money?

Maybe, just maybe it is because you have been fooled by the “quick and easy” mindset?

Maybe, just maybe the problem is not “forex trading” but your mindset?!

It is not quick and easy, but here is your opportunity to turn the tables:

Since August 3, 2011 I have decided to track emails I receive regarding forex trading systems and strategies from the who’s who of forex trading gurus.

I call it my FX Inbox.

I had been on one or two gurus’ lists but decided to follow-through on a few new JV offers (i.e. give my email address to someone who convinced the guru he has some magic to share with other marketing wizards) and see where it leads…

Now, six months and one thousand three hundred and eight email messages later, I can boast that I have at least a few hundred new trading systems, strategies & methods offered by the cream of the crop of forex trading gurus!

Just think about it. Excluding weekends I have received almost 10 emails per day, (from about 5 or 6 individuals) touting some system, strategy or method of forex trading.

The forex space is truly in the grip of professional marketing wizards Read the rest of this entry

Hi There

I have said in one of the previous blog posts that people are not successful with trading because they don’t understand what it is all about.

I think there is for most people a huge disconnect between what they hope they can achieve in short order with forex trading versus the reality.

To overcome this you need an approach and attitude that is supported by the structure of the Slow Grow to Pro program.

I want to illustrate this for you with a real life example from the fascinating world of sports training, particularly golf. Read the rest of this entry

Hi There

I have already given you some snippets of how relational analysis contribute to the success of the 4×1 (+1) trading strategy with my analysis of the EURUSD and the real time call of the mid-year low.

I got a question a day or so ago which basically said, “yah-yah but what did you do the last few weeks with the euro topping out above 1.4200 and bottoming at 1.3000.” In anybody’s book that is a big move, but not uncommon these days amongst major currencies.

Good question and I am happy to answer as follows:

I am going to give you a slightly edited version of my Monday Briefing of Monday November 8th. This ‘Monday Briefing’ will now become a Weekly Briefing in the Slow Gro to Pro programme. Its purpose is to show you more of the power of proper relational analysis (as done in real-time by the proprietary owner of the concept “relational analysis”). Read the rest of this entry

Hello

In the area of online business development and marketing I have done this numerous times and I will probably do it a few more times because I am here to stay.

But the question is if it is beneficial and is it optimal to work like this? The answer is clearly “NO”.

Even though you can successfully argue that you do move forward, jumping from one product or strategy or method to build your business to another and making complete U-turns in some cases, grab here, leave there, eventually you are in a one-step-forward-and-two-steps-back loop.

A while ago I have unsubscribed from almost all the online business email lists I was on, I have chucked all the programmes (you know how it works, you bought something so you stay on the list even though all you get is more affiliate product offers), canceled subscriptions – even serious guru’s – and decided to stick to ONE!

One I could identify with, I feel we share some values and I feel he has more than his own interest at heart. Another thing is I can recognize value. And what he offered was really valuable and dirt cheap. I knew (and know) if I contribute what I can the monthly subscription I pay would be the bargain of a lifetime.

In the blink of an eye the results were there: clarity, purpose.

Where I was in a perpetual state of uncertainty about what to do next, where to focus everything was just like so obvious. I am not talking specific instruction. To tell you the truth I haven’t even read half of the stuff I have received since then. The decision to go from the many to the one was the crucial point.

Trading history

I ask my personal mentoring clients since many years ago about their “trading history” including their training efforts or what they did to build expertise. There is a wealth of information once you begin to analyse and compare these histories.

At this stage I want to consider one of the most crucial results. Read the rest of this entry

Hi There

In April 2010 the annual FX Street Trader of the Year 2010 contest was launched.
The 2007 winner and runner up, and the 2009 winner were my clients, BWILC owners & people I had mentored.

This year I decided to see if this was just luck.

So I put out a challenge.

“My guys” can dominate this competition and I can prove it.

I put my trading philosophy and for all practical purposes my business on the line.

I didn’t intend to send a seasoned A team of mentoring clients to this challenge.

No. I would send newbies.

The FX Challenge Preparation Programme

In order to prepare participants for the “FX Challenge” I took important sections of my personal mentoring programme and reworked them into a new non-personal programme.

We had about three months to prepare for the FX Challenge and the FX Challenge was a live account trading competition that lasted for 8 weeks.

I said at the time that it is important to know that there can only be one first prize winner but there can be many winners if you use the competition correctly.

When I pondered the content of my first attempt at non-personal training I decided to skip the very important first phases of the mentoring programme and go straight to the 4×1(+1) strategy and the median trading methodology.

Group wisdom with guru sauce.

Like in my personal mentoring programme I gave the participants tasks to complete and then I made compilations of their responses, I responded in the compilation document to some of their questions and added some corrections and made some additions and general remarks and then I provided the compilations to the participants.

While this was happening I also provided them with a Weekly (Monday) Briefing and some of my other Daily Briefings and market summaries. Obviously one of the main issues for newbies is “what to use” and what not to use. What to ignore and what to incorporate? I helped with that.

There was a discussion forum where I encouraged discussions of the issues and made my own contributions. Here I posted several relevant articles I thought would be useful, always keeping in mind the problems of information overload.

This is the only way you can teach relational analysis. Real-time.

I also added a “trade reporting” function. Everybody could report their trades on a daily or weekly basis and add maybe a few notes about the rationale of what they did. This was really a hit. And it contributed a lot of value to see what others were doing and how they went about implementing their 4×1(+1) strategy.

The FX Street 2010 Trader of the Year Contest

The following numbers are approximations. I have not tried to verify the details.

There were around 240 registrants in the live trading competition. I have no idea how many eventually did trades. Of these about 60 (25%) were my clients (FX Challenge Preparation Programme & Class of 2010 mostly).

As far as I could see of these 60 about 20 eventually did some trading in terms of the competition. (I was completely hands-off during the competition.)

The results of the competition after 8 weeks of trading were: Read the rest of this entry

Hi There

A few years ago two Harvard psychologists studying perception and observation did a famous experiment.

They set up a basketball court with two teams of people passing basket balls around. The one team had white T shirts, the other black. They made a video of this.

The video had a twist.

At some point a student in a full gorilla suit entered the court, stopped, faced the camera, beat its breast and left after spending nine seconds on the court.

The researchers then showed this video to Harvard students and asked them to silently count the number of passes made by players in white T shirts only.

After the video was shown to students they asked them if they saw anything extraordinary?

Half of the students didn’t see the gorilla. Read the rest of this entry

Hi There

In this short series of blog posts I am looking at important changes in the forex trading space.

I made the point that most beginners can’t do pure technical analysis. Their charts must be named. Why? Because of the need to put it in the context of fundamentals and market dynamics. Experienced (professional) technical analysts generally do this ‘subconsciously’ – automatically. They have a contextual understanding in which they embed their analysis to interpret it and make sense of it. As a result they can see, hear and feel the charts imparting sensible messages.

It goes without saying that beginner traders don’t have this. Yet, instead of doing pure analysis, just with the data, they want the names, they want to embed it but they don’t have the fundamental knowledge and understanding of market dynamics to really see, hear and feel the charts. And this is why the majority of traders fail.

They have, due to this impenetrable convention that technical analysis in ultra-short timeframes works, things upside down. Marketing wizards needs trades. They have designed, shaped and formed this forex space to efficiently get Mom and Pop traders to trade in the most efficient way for them (the marketing wizards). So everything from the point of view of the new Mom and Pop trader is upside down, wrong side first, inside out.

Thus you are bombarded with the idea that your entry ticket to successful trading is technical analysis of intra day charts.

In reality your entry ticket should be a thorough understanding of the driving forces behind currency prices and the market dynamics these forces unleash. Both in a macro and micro context.

My objective in these blog posts is to show you that in order to make serious progress in your forex trading you need to enter into an elevated and continuous discussion with me regarding these driving forces behind currency prices and the market dynamics they unleash.

Once you understand it your charts (if you still need them) will be speaking volumes in clear, crisp language to you.

You will see things that have always been there but that you just missed.

Today I am going to give you a taste of what this means.

Click here for more on forex hurricanes and typhoons

Marketing wizards, as opposed to, market wizards, dominate the retail forex trading industry primarily because it is so synonymous with the growth of the Internet as a communications tool and space. Understanding these developments is very important for anyone who would like to make a business of trading currencies.

The majority of people who investigate forex trading want to make money by trading their own funds. That is the business they want to enter: Making money by buying and selling foreign exchange.

Like anyone considering a new part-time / full-time business venture there are a series of questions one asks at the beginning. What can I make? What must I invest? How much time? How do you do it? Read the rest of this entry

During the last few months the much talked about new US retail forex regulations regarding leverage were promulgated into law and while the margin requirements were hiked with 100 – 500% despite the protestations of the beneficiaries of high leverage there were some other hurricane like regulations slipped in that really affect everyone from US citizens to everyone else who were over the last 10 years lured to trading with US companies.

In January 2010 the US regulator of retail forex trading, the CFTC, threatened to raise margin requirements 1000% and consequently drop the attainable leverage from 100:1 to 10:1. At that time I have posted on my blog that it is a done deal, the regulator will increase margin requirements substantially, irrespective any protests and people should rather focus on trading within the lower leverage environment.

Fast forward to 21 July 2010 and the announcement of the Dodd-Frank Bill which is supposed to regulate “Wall Street” and what do we see?

Retail forex trading in the United States, and for United States residents, experienced a paradigm shift with the lumping of retail forex regulation together with regulation aimed at the “too big to fail” banks after the financial catastrophe and bailouts of 2008.

The general gist of the Dodd-Frank law is that Read the rest of this entry