Technitrader - Running Diary

Hey guys. Happy Holidays to everyone. I’m really glad that a few people have found my reviews of TT helpful and maybe even a little entertaining. It definitely gives me motivation to keep making the posts. I’ve been on a bit of a break due to the holidays, as well as some ramp up in a couple of work projects, but I’m back home from my holiday visits and I’m off work the rest of the weekend, so I’m hoping to provide a condensed review of the next several dvds sometime in the next couple of days. I’ve got some good comments, as well as some bad, but as the case has been in the past, the bad is about presentation, not content.

To answer a couple of questions I saw in the posts:

Newbie – I suppose I could have already started paper trading, but I really want to follow the course as its meant to be followed. That’s the only way to tell if it really works or not. And honestly, I don’t have time to paper trade, follow the nightly email support, finish up the dvds (including note taking & outlining) AND write these reviews. Plus, and don’t take this as me being all preachy, I think rushing things and skipping steps is usually the major pitfall of people who take on something like this course. You get the course, it’s set out in a very specific manner, but you get excited about halfway through and jump the gun (premature exploration?) I’ve spent the money, so now I’m going to trust Martha & Howard and the method that they have set out for me. If they say not to paper trade until I’ve finished the course, then I’m not going to. That’s not me being a sheep, that’s me wanting to take away any potential roadblocks to success. If I follow the course exactly as they say and it doesn’t work out, then I’m blaming M & H, and you will definitely hear about it (though at this point, I don’t expect this to happen.) But if I take a detour and it doesn’t work out, well, was it M & H’s fault, was it my fault, a combination? We would never know. Plus, as Martha pointed out, the market has been around for a hundred years (or more?) and its not going anywhere anytime soon. DON’T rush it. Go into it with all of the tools that the course is set up to give you.

Proclivity – You should get out of the house more. Just kidding. I appreciate the vote of confidence, but seriously, we’re not setting a very high bar for entertainment here. Martha sounds like she’s reading the phone book and Howard is like listening to my grandpa talk about what it was like back in the depression while he sits there and fudges his huggies (ok, my grandpas are both dead, so they’re not talking about the depression or pooping in their diapers. I’m embellishing, sue me.) Someone could go in, tighten the structure of the dvds up a bit and work with M & H on their delivery and make this a whole new ballgame. But you know what, that would make the course cost more and they really strike me as the type of people that want the course to be available to as large a group of *students* as possible (not that they aren’t into making money on it either.) Plus, I like to think that they’re out making too much money using these methods to worry about what we think of their abilities as entertainers (keeping my fingers crossed on that one.)

Disqplay – I have been very happy with the TT course so far, but this is coming from someone who (i) had exactly zero prior knowledge of technical analysis, (ii) has not started paper trading using the TT methods, much less real trading, and (iii) enjoys what basically amounts to taking a full semester college level class. Regarding your situation, TT is very adamant that you only need a few thousand dollars to invest to be successful using their methods, and so far, all of the information in the course makes that seem like the case (not like those no money down real estate courses where they tell you to use cash advances on your credit cards to buy rental property. Umm, not that I’ve ever bought one of those. . .uhhh, someone just told me about it. Yeah, that’s it.) You won’t be able to swing trade (if you’re interested in that), until you build up a relatively sizeable capital base ($25K+), but you can position trade until you’ve built up your capital and can get into more short term investing. Unfortunately, $1,000 for the course isn’t even all that much when you consider how much other courses, subscriptions to magazines, newsletters, etc. cost. Unless you have done a considerable amount of technical analysis, I can’t imagine that you would take this course and not come away with a lot of valuable information. It’s no magic bullet and they constantly are preparing you for the fact that is a long and sometimes difficult road, but there has been nothing so far that makes me think that I can’t achieve success using this course (stay tuned, I’ll probably end up crying about all my losses in 6 months or so.) It sounds like Fsquared has had some pretty good success with TT using a fairly small capital base. If you’re semi-retired, then you’ve probably got a decent amount of time to watch the course, study it, review it and can really make the most of it. A couple of things I will note are that you will be spending about $30/month on the TC/2007 downloads, which are integral to the course, so build that into the cost when you are deciding if this fits in your budget. Also, I considered buying the course on ebay, where you get everything but the email support. The course that I bid on ended up running up to over $600, so I bailed out and bought directly from TT. I haven’t started the email support yet, but I feel like I can already say that this is going to be INVALUABLE in making this thing work. I think it is misleading when they call it “email support”. That sounds like you can email them if you have problems or don’t understand something. And you can certainly do that (they claim to reply to all emails within 1 or 2 days), but what it really is is a daily email from Martha with stocks to use as your “study picks”, along with discussion of the previous day’s picks and continuing education about the TT program and how it is used. Sort of seems like something you would need to be successful, doesn’t it? Well, you do NOT get that if you buy a course off of ebay. And you can’t sign up for it if you don’t buy directly from TT. I get the feeling that people who buy the course, but don’t get the *support*, find that they are much less successful with the course. That’s just speculation on my part, but I’m pretty confident that it’s true. So, as Orange said, there is a lot of free information out there, but it’s definitely scattered and some of it’s false, misleading, whatever. If you have the money to spare, TT is probably worth it. Unless something major happens, I plan to keep posting and will hopefully have a lot more information about the results to share with everyone. One quick note on that though, Martha says that it usually takes somewhere between 6 months to a year to get proficient enough at swing trading that you can go live in the market. I know that a lot of people will say that paper trading is BS and that you should just jump in live after a week or two, but as I mentioned before, I’m following the plan, so until I’m up to the % of success that Martha requires before going live, I will continue paper trading. I really just see it as an opportunity to add to my capital base prior to risking any of it on methods that I’m not familiar with or proficient at.

Ok, thanks again for the replies, kind words, etc. I’m sure everyone would love to hear from anyone else who has experience with TT, so if you do, please consider taking a few minutes to jot down some thoughts to share with everyone.

Also Enrolled in Technitrader

I have just completed DVD 3 of the Technitrader course, and so far, I am quite pleased with my purchase. Like TheBuckStartsHere says, the presentation is a little stiff, but in some ways that's one of the things that made the course appealing to me. Howard and Martha come off as completely honest, very knowledgable people, and their explanations are easy to understand - even for a newbie dufus like me.

I, too, explored the Ebay alternative but decided the email support would be worth the extra money.

I will also follow the study plan they have layed out for me and not jump ahead.

Okay, I guess it could have been deleted by accident so I'll apologize for jumping to conclusions.

Keep posting though - nice to see progress

Did you finish the TT course and if so, what has been your experience? Are you paper trading?

Hi Amyday,
It looks as if the others have lost interest in posting their results to this thread as they have not posted in over 2 months. Anyway, if you have any questions about the technitrader stuff, you can email me at aferenczhalmy@gmail.com for a faster response, or for a slower response, you can post here as I do not check this thread everyday. I'm actively using it and have been successful with what I've learned from the course. Ultimately, you'll never know if the course will be worth it to you if you never buy it, because you can only say it was worth it if you make your money back, and then a lot more on top of it. To date, I've made more than 3 times what I spent on the course, and that was within about 3-5 trades, using a small amount of money - ~$2500. I don't trade as often as I used to simply because I'm quite busy and haven't made as much time for it (I have kids now), but I can tell you I wouldn't trade without using what I learned from Technitrader, unless I'd found something better, and to date, I have not.

Let me know if you have any questions I can help answer. I don't work for Technitrader, or Decisions Unlimited, but I can speak from practical experience using what I've learned in the course.

Fred

What do you think about the course today?

The original post was from TheBucksStartHere:

So, I just received the Technitrader home study course yesterday, and since there isn't a lot of information out there about it, I thought it might be of interest to some folks if I kept "running diary" of my experience with it, a la ESPN.com's The Sports Guy (though don't expect my writing to be as good.) Let me just say up front that I am in no way affiliated w/ TT, nor do I have any sort of bone to pick with them, so any comments will just be my unbiased opinion. I'll save a little space by not going into details about what TT is or purports to do, since anyone reading this has probably been to their website and maybe has watched their free dvd, both of which give plenty of insight as to the point of the course and what TT is all about.

Just so you know where I'm coming from, here's a brief bit of background on me: Despite knowing a decent amount about how the market works (undergrad finance degree/corporate finance atty.) and having a moderate sum in the market (about half in a 401(k) and half in a brokerage account) and consider myself to be EXTREMELY novice when it comes to trading. I haven't been trading in individual stocks for very long (less than a year) and have really just picked a couple of companies that are hot and stuck with them. No short selling, options, etc. It's this general lack of knowledge and the desire to eventually make more than just "some extra cash every year" that led me to start looking around for some tools that teach me how to find high-quality short-term trading opportunities. My goal here is to learn how to be successful in position trading, eventually move into short swing trading, and with any luck, someday trade full time. And you lucky folks? Well, you're along for the ride! Yeee Hawww! (don't worry, I won't forget you once I'm independently wealthy.)

DVDs 1 & 2

Monday night and I'm totally psyched to get started. Unfortunately I didn't get home from work until late, but a little lack of sleep isn't going to stand in the way of me and some good old American fortune building, is it? I didn't think so. So, I start the first dvd around 10 pm or so and wow, let's just say that neither Howard or Martha will be winning any public speaking awards anytime soon (no offense, public presentations just aren't everyone's thing.) In 4 words: Stilted cue-card reading. That's ok though. I don't need them to be dynamic, I just need them to teach me how to pick stocks and make money. Anyway, the first two dvds are pretty much snoozers, with quite a bit of rehash of the free dvd: What TT is about, how the course works, what you can expect, etc. They also go into some excrutiating explanations about how "the market" works, how trades are made, the history of Nasdaq and NYSE, HOW THE INTERNET WORKS (c'mon Howard we KNOW this. it's a seris of tubes. d'uh.), etc., etc. (I understand that there are a lot of people who will find this stuff useful, but probably not a lot of people who have reached the point that they are dropping a grand on a trading seminar. Then again, I'm probably just a complete a-hole.) Howard also walks us through the timeline of a company going from start-up to being listed on the NYSE. I realize that it's a VERY high-level explanation of corporate finance, but it's painful. Really. (And honestly, he's taking some pretty big liberties with some of the facts. "Where you building this plant, Howard? Dreamland??")

Some high notes, however, are the explanations about charting (the Japanese had this figured out 2000 years ago), a few subtleties about bid/ask, what caused the bear & bull markets of the past century and a few other tidbits. All in all though, not exactly riveting stuff, and not much that you couldn't have seen on the website or free dvd. The manual "which some students call their 'trading bible'!" has so far been a print out of the power point slides that are being used for the presentation. 2 dvds and I'm already 90 pages in. So much for being intimidated by the nearly 600 pages. . .

Anyway, I'm sure that we're only a couple of dvds away from some stuff that will turn my puny lil brain into a crumpled wad of paper, and honestly, I can't wait. I'm ready to start talking charting dammit! 11 dvds to go, only 10 roses. . .tonight, the most dramatic rose ceremony ever. . .stay tuned.[/quote]

Anyone have any feedback now that it's been a year or so?

HI,
I took the methodology course just a couple of months ago and am just starting the paper trading. I originally considered the ebay option, but would have paid more in the end to get the 2nd half of the course which includes the support and emails. I think its a great course and I can't wait to see how I do using the new tools I've learned. I'll keep you all posted, so far I am very pleased with my investment!