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In answer to your question, “If someone claimed that he has an effective strategy for trading in the stock market, why would they share it? Isn’t it going to make it irrelevant when more people apply the same strategy?”Professionals who tell you the statement above is true want you to think they’ve got a secret sauce. They want you to believe that trading is easier for them. By holding back information they can make it appear that they have knowledge there is no way you could ever fathom.There’s so much more that goes into making a trading system successful than the rules of the system. Other than new markets which haven’t been traded before (i.e., options trading in the late 1970s) there’s not much risk in sharing the rules of your trading system.MY FRIEND TEACHES OTHER TRADERS HIS “SYSTEM”Many years ago, a friend of mine started doing classes for traders, teaching them his system. He ran the class every two weeks and the room was full. Their employers paid good money for them to take the class.I asked him why he was teaching the class and he said, “they’re going to draw me a pretty picture”. What TF did he mean by that?I forget exactly what the system was so I’m going to make one up. This way my answer will be anchored to something concrete:Let’s say it was a Moving Average (MA) Crossover “system” on S&P futures, using 10Day MA and 20Day MA:When the 10D MA crossed above the 20D MA a buy signal triggeredWhen the 10D MA crossed below the 20D MA a sell signal triggeredThe optimal risk-reward was to make $2 for every $1 of risk.to round it out, let’s say that one contract was equal to one “unit” of risk.Well, as sure as night follows day, eventually, the “system” triggered a buy signal. The 10D MA had crossed above the 20D MA. If the people he taught were executing the idea, they’d be buying futures. And before my very eyes, the futures traded higher.As the futures continued higher more trading desks around the street were getting the same signal (my friend is smart, but this isn’t brain surgery) and these other desks began buying futures too.As you’d expect, the “picture” (the real-time graph of the futures price) was being “drawn”. Just as my friend had said, “they’ll draw me a pretty picture”. Did he jump into the trade with the people that he taught? He certainly could have. Would he have made money? In this case, yes.So, did explaining his “system” hurt him or make the trade irrelevant? I’d vote no. If anything he made the trade more relevant, because more traders were responding to the same signal. Momentum begets momentum. A body in motion stays in motion kind of thing, right?OTHER REASON/S FOR TEACHING OTHERS HOW TO TRADEOK, so hopefully you can see where teaching someone a specific system doesn’t hurt the trade. But now I’m going to tell you the other reasons most traders don’t mind teaching the rules of their system to people.Back then, there were no algo’s, no HFT - I mean, Instanet was actually a new execution system. But humans are still human. Believe it or not, the players change, technology changes but the game remains pretty much the same.My friend taught these traders the whole system, entry, exit, sizing trades, optimal risk-reward, and all the other risk management related details. And these people were already traders so they had real capital to put behind the strategy.Did it hurt him to have more people piling into the market with him? Not necessarily. As long as the momentum kept going, he’d make money too. But believe it or not, that’s not the reason he taught people his strategy.First, it was likely a trade he’d done for years. He once said to me, “we pick up nickels in front of bulldozers for a living. When those nickels become pennies, we find a different bulldozer”. So teaching people his theories and using a system to capture their interest didn’t hurt him because he was, more than likely, trading something else altogether.For the sake of continuing the illustration, let’s say it was harvest time and he’d moved on to trading grains. He didn’t care about the S&P futures at that point. So he doesn’t lose anything or make anything by teaching people the S&P trade.So what did he gain? He gained the money they paid to take the class. And that money went toward dampening the volatility of his earnings. And for a full-time trader with a wife and kids, that matters.Was he killing his golden goose in S&P’s? Nah, trading systems are a dime a dozen. There’s no one strategy that works for everyone. Trading systems appear valuable in their pristine state. Once a trader gets their hands on it, they can make it worthless. lol. Because humans don’t trade alike.Once those people walked out of that conference room and went back to their offices - they were going to trade with their own cognitive biases with their own mindset and their own moods.Trading systems sound easy on paper. So does the postal system. But in real life, when real people get involved with real money, it’s a whole new ball game. I’m fairly confident at least 60% of the traders thought they could make the “system” better and changed it. The other 40% that followed his instructions getting into the trade, didn’t follow his exit plan. They exited their trades based on their mindset, cognitive biases, moods, etc. There’s a huge difference between theory and practice.SUMMARYLet’s take a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle and list the pro’s and cons of teaching a trading “system”.At the end of the day, what has the teacher lost? Nothing.What has he gained? That depends on why he was teaching the class.If he were still trading S&Ps he’s got more momentum in his trade, making it more profitable.If he was looking for a way to dampen the volatility of his earnings, he accomplished that quite well.Let me know if I’ve convinced you there is no real risk in teaching someone a trading “system” and it doesn’t make the strategy less relevant.But knowledge is important. So my friend did a good thing and he was well paid to do it. How the learners applied that knowledge using real money is a different animal altogether.TRADING GOING FORWARDWith advances in trading algorithms and applying AI, ML, etc. people will be reticent to show you everything about their engine. New markets and paradigm shifts do cause people to hold things back. Mostly because they don’t know what the secret sauce is yet. But their goal is clear.To remove the biases and mood swings of a human and replace them with a machine. A machine that will learn over time. It will be interesting to see the results. One thing I know for sure, a large piece of the pie lies in proximity to the point of execution: a server farm or order routing location.Well, I hope this answer isn’t TL;DR and the information is useful to you. Take care and enjoy your evening.

I was looking for the name of a forum I had seen a while back to suggest to a friend that wants to try his hand at day trading (both stocks and options). I have said everything I could think of to discourage him from trying (for too many reasons to begin to list here). I myself had been a “day trader” with a large prop firm for 8 years after having suffered the indignities of being a stockbroker, and after over 10 years trading on the floors of the CBOE, the NYSE, the AMEX, PHLX and the now defunct Pacific Exchange (San Francisco). Also, I had a seat on the Midwest exchange, but I can’t recall ever exercising a trade on that exchange (I believe the lease for that seat was included in the lease on the CBOE. The MSE was (from what I saw) pretty much located in the cafeteria of 440 S. LaSalle St. in Chicago which is where the CBOE is located and the Chicago Board of Trade is also located (in a different building, but attached to 440 by an indoor pedestrian bridge pretty high up over the street (just guessing maybe around the 20th floor or so?). I didn’t trade wheat and soybeans and other crops or livestock, so I rarely went over to the CBOT except to give friends visiting from out of town the “tour” (if they were interested).I’m not sure why Google took me to this site when I entered “day traders forums), but here I am. I don’t know how I ended up on a thread with all of 3 posts? But I have to laugh when I read that right here the following:“Individual stock trading is dumb, pointless and pointlessly dumb. It's really dumb how pointless trading individual stocks is.You (sic) want to day trade? I think that's a horrible idea, but here are two fantastic forums and communities:”While I agree completely that FOR MOST PEOPLE - trading individual issues is a bad idea. But “most people” doesn’t mean everyone! I worked in an office with over 300 traders and another 1500 or so traders in different offices of the same firm. (Anyone with any experience in day trading already knows just from what I said, which firm it was). And that the vast majority of the trades done at this firm were profitable. Which is not to say the vast majority of traders were successful, but at least they made enough to pay their bills.But I’ll leave my feelings about equities trading at that. I said enough..it’s not for everyone and it can’t be done without a lot of buying power - which is why the firm I worked for was so successful. Having $10 or $20 million in buying power for the AVERAGE trader (much more for some and others had size limits as low as 500 shares of any one issue…and combined buying power of less than $200,000. Those people came and left after not showing a profit in a reasonable amount of time (generally around 6 months just to break even and I don’t think anyone who was new to the challenge ever made a penny before losing at least $25,000++…so those solo dreamers that think they can start with a few thousand (I’ve even seen ads for starting with a few hundred dollars), are virtually certain to be wiped out before they even have the slightest clue about how to trade.But all that aside, the REALLY FUNNY THING (at least to me) is the suggestion of trading Forex rather than stocks???I have traded just about every “investment” dreamt up (at least until I retired - I’m pretty certain “new” ideas still come up every day and there are firms that pound the phones selling the greatest investment in the history of the universe several times a week..(multiplied by the number of financial services companies still in existence on any given week, month or day).I had worked for both Merrill Lynch and EF Hutton during those torturous 5 years as a broker after selling my business. These were the two most “elite” brokerages at the time (most of the 1980s). They paid their Warton grads to dream up investment strategies that sounded so good, even I sometimes left the meetings about their “newest and greatest product to date). I, of course,w knew there had to be a catch even to investments that “had no downside - the worst clients could do was break even” (which in one case I remember quite clearly was absolutely true, but only if the client was comfortable with waiting 30 years for their zero coupon bonds to mature in case the rest of their “portfolio” became worthless. (30 years to break even? I think I’d rather just cut my losses and get out of the losers at some reasonable “I cry uncle” point.But NO MATTER HOW BAD some of the investments were..no matter how much some of the brokers lied to their customers, no matter how inappropriate some investments were for the specific clients…these brokers still pushed incredibly unsuitable products to them like annuities, futures, options, (can’t forget options on futures), and other ridiculous and criminally unsuitable products like limited partnerships that are less liquid than the Rock of Gibraltar on those 90-year-old pensioners…, I have never seen or heard of any financial “strategy” that was half as bad as the worst con ever to be legalized than FOREX!!!! I remember during my first few nights of trying to trade (and not getting any fills) until maybe the third or fourth night going to sleep after trading late (sort of required if trading Asian currencies) and having a profit…only to check my account the very first thing after waking up after a full “night’s” sleep only to see my “profit” was now showing as a LOSS!The currency markets (Forex) is NOT REGULATED. I KNOW FOR A FACT that my lonely little limit orders were snatched up (long or short) and same with my closing order the night my profit was converted to a loss (and the last time I ever traded Forex after having zero issues over a 30 year span of trading options, stocks, futures, and “selling” funds, ETFs (not called that back then), etc….With Forex, someone was on the other side of each trade I did (same as in any trade in any market) ..but it was THOSE very same traders who actually determined the price of the “pair” (currencies trade in “pairs” - I’ll assume anyone taking this FOREX nonsense seriously most likely doesn’t even know that - in fact I can’t understand to this day how I was ever convinced to trade FOREX - even despite the fact I was begged to trade for someone else…it was not my money and the “investor” was a washed out trader who worked in the same stock trading firm I did. He was impressed that I took home a paycheck every month while he took home 3 paychecks in over 3 years (good thing he had a rich mother).It took that one night and one successful (I thought) trade for the light to go on in my head about what was really happening.Unless you are a very large account (other than in Forex) for whatever bank is executing your Forex trades, you can’t make money. The “game” is rigged. The bank’s trader on the other side of your trade sees you want to by “Pair X” on a limit order at $ x dollars a contract. No one else is close to your price. You want to take your profit fast since “pairs” can and do trade with sudden volatility. Your opening trade is filled at your limit price and then you put in a “market order” to grab that nice little profit. You get the confirmation, but in the morning you get the “corrected trade” showing that you not only didn’t have a profit, but you had a loss!!!Can this happen with stocks? Yes, if you trade after hours with an individual on Instanet or any of the ECNs. But make a mistake DURING MARKET HOURS on an ECN (let alone with a specialist or a market maker) and the trade will be busted.Forex? Busted trades? Yes…if you make money, the trade is likely to be busted. Lose money and the trade is “in the books” (unless the bank decides you didn’t lose enough, in which case I guess you very well might see the trade busted so you can realize an even larger loss than what you thought you had!!!Seriously, you are better off playing Keno in Las Vegas than trading Forex!! In fact, you may have a better chance of winning one of those multi-state gigantic lotteries than making money on Forex. And that’s without even buying a lottery ticket (not that it really makes a difference one way or the other). Or maybe it does…maybe buying a lottery ticket where the winner gets $40million makes your chances of winning go up to a zero percent chance if you have the ticket … up from less than zero without the ticket??