but any ideas as to why all the TechniTrader stuff I posted got completely deleted?

yah, this is surprising, I came here looking for your updates. I hope this doesn't stop you.

Is because this board touts Greencats cd and since some of us posted favorable comments about the Technitrader course, that's direct competition for what Greencat is selling himself. Why promote the competition? I think Greencat owns this forum, but I might be wrong. Oh well. Maybe we should all exchange emails if anyones interested in keeping in touch, before we're all deleted from the board.

Fred

my electronic mail is gnu the first at google mail. replace google mail with the correct address. that's for my junk mail, but if you send your addresses, I will send you my actual addresses, I just don't want to post the one that I use most.

I bought Green Cat's CD, it seemed like a LOT of information, for someone beginning like me, I need a system rather than looking at one chart and identifying a lot of characteristics. So I wouldn't say that Green Cat's CD competes with technitrader, maybe after I have used the course, Green Cat's CD will become much more helpful.

by the way, buck do you have a copy of your commentaries? I must say that I came to this site looking for a review of technitrader, and your commentary convinced me to buy the course.

funny thing, I posted a reply and suddenly it vanished.

my electronic address is gnu the first at google mail, replace google mail with the actual address. this is for my junk mail, but if you send your addresses, I will send the actual address.

I bought Green Cat's CD, its a lot of information for a beginner like me, and right now I can't decide if its useful or not, I think that after I have used the technitrader course, I will be able to make more use of Green Cat's CD.

buck, please email me, I recovered the whole text of your commentary.

I must say that I am not sure if the people here deleted the email, since you are the originator of the thread, could you have accidentally deleted the whole thread? I am not sure.

When I was going through the text of the recovered material , I found that many of the super members were encouraging, and some even had good things to say about technitrader. maybe we are jumping to conclusions. Anyone seen office space? the jump to conclusion mat?

think of this, how many CDs will sell? a 100? how much do they make on each CD, $100? so that's 10k. any trader would make that in weeks or a month. so why go through all the trouble?

I am assuming that the original thread was deleted by accident, if otherwise please let us know. I am posting the recovered text here.

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.

Heh. I am most DEFINITELY the victim of some dark and sinister plot. I don't know if you noticed, but in my very last post, I was asking questions about Howard and Martha's backgrounds and whether anyone knew anything about them beyond TT. I'm now quite certain that I have put us all in grave danger. I have it from several confirmed sources that Howard was seen behind the grassy knoll many years ago in a southern city, the name of I dare not speak, and that Martha, while not a robot at all, is actually the supreme leader of the Biavians, so accurately described in the seminal book about extra-terrestrials by noted author Riley Martin in "The Coming of Tan". . .

Ok, either that, or I accidentally erased the whole post. I'm leaning towards the latter, since, not only do I not know much about trading, I'm also quite the nitwit when it comes to computers. Anyway, Fsquared, and especially Chanakya, thanks for the concern and help. Chanakya, if you want to repost the entire string, feel free. I'm still in work h3ll, and probably won't have much time to post over the next 3 weeks, but based on the number of views, it looks like some people were at least finding the previous posts useful. Once things slow down with work, I will get back to posting. Hopefully by then the market will be in better shape for me to start actually making some swing trades in my paper trading. And if the posts get erased AGAIN, then you will all be able to find me in the basement wearing my ever-so-stylish tinfoil hat. . .(but I am NOT telling you which basement!)

Chanakya - did your course arrive over the weekend?

hey guys, I just received the package. although the post office is less than 50 yards away, they couldn't find my flat and the package went back to Seattle. then they shipped it again overnight, and it took four days to finally arrive. the people at technitrader were extremely nice as has been reported by many others including you guys as well. I'll keep posting thebuck's narrative.

Well, it's night two here at TT central and dvd 3 is all Martha, all the time. Just a quick word of warning to anyone considering buying the course, and it's a small point in my opinion, there is NO flash here whatsoever. It's just Martha plowing through a powerpoint presentation. She rarely, if ever, strays from the script. It's like I'm half expecting a naked guy to beam in from the future and try to terminate her at some point. She seems to know her stuff. But if you're the type of person who just HAS to have someone cracking jokes and dropping stock-trading war stories along the way, you are going to be VERY disappointed. Don't take this as me being on my high-horse, but the learning itself should be entertainment enough, and if it's not, I would definitely think twice about dropping a grand on this type of course. As it is, the information has gone from inane to fascinating already, at least to a novice like myself. In fact, I've decided to forget that dvds 1 & 2 ever happened. Technitrader will now and forever be known in these posts as an 11 dvd set. Done.

So, dvd 1 (formerly known as dvd 3) starts out with trendlines. What are they, what are the various types, what can they tell you and how do you spot them? Interesting. (seriously) After 15 or 20 minutes of trendlines, we move on to. . .wait for it. . .waaaait for it. . .BUY SIGNALS baby! Can I just say, "Oh. Yes." That's what we've been waiting for. When does daddy BUY SOMETHING? Well. . .we don't know quite yet. Martha's easing us into things, like the little trading virgins that we are. We learn what some "early buy signals" look like and how to identify them. The great part is that you don't have to be some kind of savant to see them. I looked around at quite a few charts afterwards, and sure enough, there they were. Amazing what you can see when you know what to look for. Now, the rub is, you don't just run out and buy because you saw a "buy signal". There more to it. A lot more. Where does it take place on the trendline, what type of market is it, what type of stock is it, what do some of the other signals indicate, and so on. You know how on the free dvd they culled 3000 stocks down to a small handful that you might want to buy? Well they got there by subjecting those stocks to a lot of stringent requirements. The good news is that by the time you pick a stock to buy, it's been through the Technitrader ringer, therefore you should have a lot of confidence in it.

The final 20 minutes or so is about candlestick patterns and candlestick buy signals. These were SUPER interesting. We learned 4 patterns and 3 signals, and again, when you look at charts, there they are. These signals are more solid than the early signals we learned earlier, but again, this is just a jumping off point for more scrutiny.

So far, things have made a lot of sense (though I don't think we will ever actually get into WHY these patterns mean what they do. Martha & Howard are too cool for that dorky crap) and the BS meter hasn't gone off yet. Honestly, I was half expecting the dvds to consist of that cheesy infomercial guy with the beard telling me how i could retire in the next 9 months (and oh, by the way, do you want to buy 10 cases of "orange-glo floor cleaner"??) But Martha and Howard have been straightforward and no BS. There was so much information in DVD 1 (f/k/a 3) that with stopping to take notes, it took about 2 hours to get through. (Most of the info is in the book, but I find that actually taking my own notes helps me to retain the info.)

Next up, DVD 2 (f/k/a 4), and special guest presenters, the stars of "The Girls Next Door". (ok, not really, but how great would THAT be?)

Previously, on "Who Wants to Marry a TechniTrader Millionaire?", Martha completely b*tchslapped Howard for suggesting that buy stop limits be set at 1/8 of a point higher than the previous day's high; Dragon, of the infamous "Candlestick BuySignal Gang", ran off with Engulfing White's girl, Shooting Star, and TheBucksStartHere's volume nearly overdosed on its moving average. . .what will happen tonight? Stay tuned and find out on tonight's episode of TECHNITRADER RUNNING DIARY!

Ok, well, things aren't quite as exciting as all that, but I'm learning a lot, and I find myself thinking about this stuff much more often than is healthy for my day job. 20 minutes of work, 10 minutes of looking at stock charts, 30 minutes of work, 15 minutes of reading my TT notes. . .it won't be long before trading as a career won't be an option, it'll be a necessity. Anyway, we're on dvd 4, which as I mentioned before, should totally be dvd 2, since the original 1&2 of the set would be best used by most people as drink coasters.

This dvd started out with Howard back at the podium discussing the actual mechanics of trading. Not just how to make the trade, but the different types of orders you can place and why you should really only be using one type as opposed to the other options. He also talked about how you should determine what your entry price is (once you've found a stock that has passed muster, of course) and how to set certain limits so that if your pick doesn't do what you thought it would do (yes, it happens, believe it or not), you minimize any losses. It's all making sense Howard, and much more interesting and relevant than how the internet works, thank you very much. If this course lives up to what it's billed as (get your trading up to a 75% success rate), then these techniques will increase your profitability to a huge degree. You're basically leaving your upside wide-open (to a certain degree), but setting your orders so that if there's any type of loss, you nip it in the bud right away and move on to another trade. This is where all the talk about "no emotions in trading" comes into play. If you're the type of person that just has to keep making "one more bet" at a losing blackjack table, even though you're getting crushed, just because you can't emotionally accept the loss and walk away, you're going to have a difficult time. Unless of course, you can cut those habits and become a stone-cold trading machine like Martha.

Next, Martha comes back and lectures on finding buy signals using a charting program. The TC/2000 from Worden is what is taught, and you get a month of free service when you buy TT. I understand from numerous posts on the internet that the program is now up to TC/2006 (or something like that) and that it is a widely used and respected charting program. The good news is that TT comes with it's own programs to use in TC/whatever, so you're not out there trying to create your own charts, just using the ones that Martha develops. After Martha pulls some charts using the charting program, we start looking through them for buy signals. She literally looks at 99 charts on the dvd, and honestly, it took no time. Of course, she's really good at it, and it would probably take me 2 days on my own, but still. At some point, you've got to think that you'll reach a level of proficiency that will allow you to breeze through them relatively quickly as well. I will say though, she was looking at some very subtle things in the charts to either keep them in or boot them out. She really didn't find any that she liked that well, but kept a few, mostly, it seemed, for the sake of continuing on with the explanation of the process. One of the tenents(?) I've heard used more than once already is that you should be looking for a reason NOT to trade (i'm not a poker player, but i've heard that same reasoning used for hold'em games. you should be looking for a reason not to play a hand.)

Once we had our small group of buy signals, Martha began explaining indicators. Indicators are what you use to back up any buy or sell signals that you found using your charting program. TC/whatever allows you to look at several different indicators w/ each stock that you are viewing, so it's pretty easy (in theory) to analyze your stock by looking at the candlestick pattern and the indicators all together. We get about halfway through the second indicator and "boom" dvd over. That's another funny quirk about the course. It's like they didn't say, "Ok, let's end this dvd at the end of this section, then we'll pick up with the next section at the beginning of the next one." Someone has just said, "Ok, these dvds should be an hour apiece and we're cutting them off at an hour. I don't CARE that you were right in the middle of a topic. The HOUR is UP." And that's just what they did. And, so, that's just what I'm going to do. It is Saturday night, after all. . .

Next up, dvd 4 (f/k/a ), and all the sweet, chocolately goodness that indicators have to offer. . .

Have a great weekend (what's left of it.)

Technitrader - Running Diary

DVDs 5, 6 & 7

Well, it's been a crappy week filled with flu, holiday parties and a lot of work. Still, I was able to watch a few more dvds along the way. Since I'm behind on these posts, I'm gonna do a fairly condensed summary of 5, 6 & 7 (I'm dropping the f/k/a moniker, mainly due to laziness). I've seen people talk about watching all the dvds twice or three times before starting to paper trade, but honestly, I think that I'll probably just watch them the one time. Between watching the dvd, rewriting my notes into an outline and reviewing all the prior outline material each time I add notes (plus these postings), it's probably taking me 2 or 3 hours for each dvd. Plus, I really think I'm getting more out of it by doing the note taking and outline creating than I would from just sitting and passively watching the dvds 2 or 3 times, though that probably isn't a bad method either.

Dvd 5 continued on with indicators and got into regression lines a little bit. I consider myself to be of at least average intelligence and this stuff is by no means easy. On top of that, they provide a lot of info, but they fly through it. I'm constantly stopping and starting the dvd player to take notes or to back up and try to understand just what Martha was explaining. This stuff could be a real mind bender for some, especially if you're not a naturally "technically minded" person. The wrap up of indicators took up all of dvd 5. The big point here was that indicators are ONLY to be used to back up or tear down a buy signal and should NOT be used as buy signals themselves.

Dvd 6 started with a little pep talk by Martha about how everyone feels overwhelmed at this point and how it's like driving a car. Feels super fast and confusing at first, but very quickly becomes second nature. Phew! Was nervous there for a few. . .

In this dvd we learn how to go back and caculate how long an upcoming run might last and what kind of point gain we might expect from it. This was followed by some retracing and summarizing of where we've been so far and how it all fits together in your nightly stock picking. They do this a lot and it's a good technique because sometimes you can't see the forest for the trees, so to speak, and it's nice to hear Martha or Howard go back and tie it all together. There was some explanation about chart history and how you have to go back and figure out what different trendlines, buy signals and indicators have meant to a particular stock when they happened in the past. Makes sense, right? Some discussion of splits and how you can make money on them, but not in the way most amateur investors think you can. (mainly you do it by taking advantage of those amateur investors' ignorance. sorry guys.) From there, it was homework time. Homework consisted of going through some charts, picking your stocks, calculating buy stop limit prices and explaining why you chose the stocks. Basically a little trial run of what you would be doing every night. Afterwards, Martha walked (ok, she ran) through the charts and talked about which ones were good, which were bad, and what would have happened had you bought them. I did ok, but did miss one of the really good ones. You'll be happy to know that I remained emotionless about it though. The Martha3000 would be so proud! (wait, is proud an emotion? ok, then maybe she wouldn't be. . .)

The rest of dvd 6 was a discussion by Howard about money management (what kind of share lots to buy, how to caculate your gains/losses, when to start buying larger share lots, etc.) and the different options that online brokers offer. I have to say that some of the money management seems kind of wacky. Some of it made more sense after a little explanation, but some of it still seems kind of weird. They're the professionals though, so I'm going to trust them for now. The point with online brokers is that they don't all offer the same things, and for us, some things are mandatory, such as buy stop limit orders and OSO order processing (execution of one order submits a second order).

Dvd 7

Dvd 7 starts with Howie talking about the different types of sell orders and when/why they should be used. Very similar to the buy order discussion, though, unlike buy orders, there are a couple of different orders that you can use to sell, depending on the situation. After that Martha spend the rest of the dvd talking about long term buying strategies. Very informative and very insightful. I'm focused on short swing trading, but Martha says that long term investing is where the real wealth (i.e. the kind that allows your grandchildren to become celbutantes) comes from, and I guess that makes sense. She also says that you really can't just short swing, you have to do both long and short term trading. Ok, ok, I'll do it. Not as s3xy, but I'm all about passing down a ton of wealth to my unappreciative grandkids someday (for the record, I don't even have a kid yet, so i'm not actually slamming on my grandkids), so I'll make that part of my overall strategy. We go through a fairly lengthy discussion of product cycles and how stock prices relate to the different points of those cycles. It was literally an entire semester of a business school class in about 35 minutes, and honestly, it made a TON of sense and was probably taught better than it is at your average business school. It certainly got me thinking more seriously about what industries are ripe for long term trading. My understanding is that you get a decent amount of help with long term trading in the emails after you've finished the course and began your trading.

Ok, so I kind of flew through all of this, but hopefully it's still somewhat helpful. At the rate I'm going, I'm hoping to be paper trading fairly early in January, so maybe these posts will get a little more interesting then. . .

First off let me wish you and yours a wonderful Holiday Season.

I have been toying with the idea of getting the TT program for the last couple of days and would be curious to know if you think that it is worth the price of admittance. I realize you have not completed the course nor have you actually started trading using real dollars using the information that you have gotten from the program.

I my case being semi-retired and living on a moderate income with some money to invest would be curious if you would or would not recommend this program.

Thank you for taking the time and effort to share your thoughts with the group.

Robert

My thoughts on Technitrader

Much of what I learned in the Technitrader I had learned elsewhere, but what the course did for me was tie everything together to make sense, and also showed me how to apply it properly. It provided the missing links I could not find elsewhere just by reading the books I've read. There were a few new things that I learned that were key to being successful as well.

I've been looking for others who have had experience with this course to see how they are doing. I'd recommend it - although you have to manage your expectations and not expect to much. There is great information in the course; it's pretty much as TheBucksStartHere writes - the presentation isn't flashy, but it's practical. I've had the course since the summer 2006 (July). Took me a week or two to get through it. I've been trading for several years with sporadic success here and there, and the reason I got the course was to learn how to trade sucessfully CONSISTENTLY. I can say I've done that. I've made up the money I spent on the course and now I'm working on pure profit. How much have I made? The reality is that I started with around $2000-$3000 dollars on my first couple of trades to be cautious until I was comfortable. I've averaged around 20-25% on each trade - Now after all the screening, and some orders getting filled successfully, and others not because they didn't meet the criteria for entering a trade, I've been into 2 or 3 stocks, and made over $1000. Had I put more money out on the table, I could have entered more position potentially, but also the length of time of each trade was a factor. The trades lasted about 3-4 weeks. There might have been faster trades out there, but this is the way the ones I picked played out. So for a little over $4000 invested, I made over $1000 roughly. With more practice and effort, this will increase. I did this with minimal time (running scans at night and putting in trade orders the night before the market opened just like they teach in the course) invested. So I'm happy with it. It might not be for everyone, but I'm getting what I wanted out of it, and might consider buying some of their other courses in the future. I didn't think it was necessary to watch the DVD's multiple times, but taking notes, and reviewing the concepts as you're going through the DVD's was very helpful.

Another critical piece is using Telecharts 2007 software. I don't think I could have done this without it. The reason being is that the Technitrader methodology course is dependant on at least 2 indicators that I believe are proprietary to Worden Telecharts 2007. This isn't a bad thing, because the indicators are quite good and very helpful. Since they are proprietary to Worden TT, you won't find them in other charting packages, which would make this difficult to implement if you rely on those indicators as this course does. However, you can still use much of the Technitrader information without Telecharts 2007, but results may very, and I personally wouldn't recommend it. The Telecharts subscription is about $30.00 a month, and you get more than just charting software. You get access to their forum where you can talk to other users, and the software is very powerful once you realize it's full potential. I won't use anything else.

One more thing I will say, and they mention this in the course is that when students first begin looking at charts on their own, they tend to be much more strict and find fewer trading targets at first but this is easily corrected - the chart examples they present in the course are pretty obvious when you look at them, but when you start scanning charts for your own stock picks, they sometimes don't seem to jump out as easily. What I found was I had to relax my perception somewhat, not be overly strict or rigid in looking for the buy signals in the charts, and once I had a little more practice at it, I began to find numerous trading opportunities.

So take this for what it's worth. I'd say the course did for me what was advertised. I wish the price of the course was a little less expensive, but it's their methodology and it works, so they can charge what they want. if you don't want to pay full price, try looking for someone who is willing to sell theirs on ebay, or elsewhere.

Fred