Books, and videos only give you information, but information alone is not enough. And some of that information is actually detrimental to your success. You really need a mentor to guide you.

For example, look at all of the trading indicators and systems — the information — that’s being taught.

There are dozens and dozens of indicators you can put on your chart. You would think then that the more indicators you use, you’d have more information to make good trading decisions.

That couldn’t be further from the truth.

If that's supposed to be useful, then why is it — with all of this information — that a major retail broker’s analysis of 43 million client transactions showed that 90% of traders lost 90% of their money in 90 days? Why is that?

There is a branch of statistical mathematics called permutations and combinations. It deals with the different ways that you can order a bunch of objects.

For example, if you have 2 objects, A and B, there are 4 permutations possible: there’s A or B or AB or BA.

What this means then is that by using just 5 indicators — like a moving average, Stochastics, RSI, whatever — that there are 325 possible permutations those 5 indicators could be applied in.

That's too much information, and you just can’t trade that way, as evidenced by the 90% who fail quickly based on being taught all of that information.

For a comprehensive analysis of technical indicators and why they are not valid as predictive tools, read, Technical Analysis And The Active Trader, by Gary Norden. Norden spent 15 years as a bank trader in London and never knew anyone who used such things until he began to trade his own account. Stunned, he spent 2 years researching the subject, chronicling his findings in his book.

I use a simple process that consists of just a few basic rules, with each having just 1 of 2 possible options to choose from.

That makes trading simple. Trading is simple as long as you’ve got someone to guide you.

Outline of Trading

• Identify a trade opportunity.
• Determine the viability of the trade.
• Place the trade through the trading platform.
• Manage the trade.
• Close the trade.

Sounds simple enough.... But, therein lies the problem: it is simple. The reason that's a problem is because most folks only look at the resolutions to them as "what" to do, and "when" to do it.

For example, an approach to identifying a trade opportunity in a USD quote currency (such as GBP/USD) might be to look at price dropping down through some support boundary on news of a U.S. Fed rate increase. Both of those conditions are indicators of price erosion (price should continue to decline) for that pair, right? But what more often than not happens is that price flips around, and spikes significantly upward.

Why would that happen? It might at first glance appear that you made some bad judgment as to interpretation of what you see going on with price action on the chart, or that there must be other news trumping the Fed rate hike.

Unfortunately, FOREX educational resources — whether that be books, videos, or courses — can only generalize broad "rules" that address a large student base of varying knowledge and experience. It is classic regression to the mean — training developed for the mean. However, the statistics show that this type of education fails because 90% of the traders who study it fail.

Having said that, I want to make sure you understand that I'm not implying that FOREX education resources are bad or deceptive. They are not. They provide, for the most part, good, solid information. It's just that the information is cast so that it is easily consumable by the most number of people. So, it isn't that the education is bad, it's just that it is lacking in focus on the underlying principles that information is based upon.

In the price movement scenario I just mentioned, for example, the facts that price dropped below support, and the Fed raised interest rates is just the information. But that really doesn't give you anything to trade on.

Of more importance to just information is: Why was that support trend line drawn where it was, and how significant a line is it, and what time frame was it drawn on, and why did the Fed raise rates, and what and when was the Feds last actions, and what are the current economic and political climates in the two pair countries? I could go on. Endlessly, actually.

And that's why I wrote this course the way I did. It's geared for the person who already knows the basics of trading, and has experienced just such a scenario with trades as in the example I just gave.

It's only someone who has burnt their hand grabbing the handle of a hot cast iron skillet who is not only open to learning what not to do, but who also has the mindset to actually make changes counter to what they thought was correct based on gaining an understanding of why something happened as opposed to just what happened based on some indicator 'signal'.