Social Media - and its danger!

10 juin

Social Media... the part of the Internet that is very dangerous when it comes to promises, money, and wealth.

We've all seen it: on social media, you can supposedly make millions in under 15 minutes. Pictures with a Lamborghini and a TradingView chart above it...

Let's go through some thoughts new traders may not be aware of and how to look at them with a critical mind!
(🚩 -> Red Flag)

📍 MetaTrader / Think or Swim / NinjaTrader / cTrader 📍

There are more, but let's focus on the more popular ones.

Pictures of winning trades are useless when it comes to trading. Trading is done over years in a consistent manner, not over a few trades.
Pictures of MT5, NT, or any other platform can easily be faked.
You can set up your own little server for MetaTrader, play it out, and you have your fake trades.

📍 Fancy Cars / Travels / Houses 📍

Showing a fancy lifestyle is another big 🚩.
All those people with fancy cars have leased or rented them for the image of being successful. It's to lure you in with false promises!
(Although trading can be very fulfilling if you are willing to put in the work!)

📍 New Setup Every Few Weeks 📍

If a channel has a new setup every few weeks, this is only made for scamming new traders, not to have a setup that works.
(Think about it, if you have a setup that works, why would you change?)
Explore their profile, look for this pattern, and sometimes you will find it. Simple step :)

📍 Selling Courses / Mentorship 📍

You can learn all of trading for free.
TradingView has a very nice paper trading feature that you can use and a very unique ideas section where you can find all the information you need!
Here we come to a golden rule when it comes to starting trading: NEVER buy a course or mentorship. Never! You don't need it!
(And also, TradingView's paper trading is free!)

📍 Very Basic Information Available Only 📍

Trading is hard; trading needs a lot of concepts fitting together like RR-System, Money Management, Multi-Timeframe Analysis.
If you see a social media post with 1 chart with some boxes and another picture with a money screenshot, this is 100% fake.
You need A LOT more than 1 chart and a lot more knowledge than you can ever show on even 3 charts.

📍 AI 📍

Oh, we all love AI, but I'm afraid that AI is not in the picture (yet).
Pine can't code it, and the current state of "AI" is a "guessing" game.
(AI just guesses what comes next, in the form of vectors... it's extremely complex, but it doesn't exist in trading.)

📍 Indicators 📍

Indicators are a very nice thing to have AFTER you have your strategy down, not before.
There is no indicator that works on its own; you plug it in and it makes money... that doesn't exist!
(Think about it critically: if that existed, why wouldn't we solve world hunger?)

📍 Typical Selling Point Sentences 📍

"Learn trading in 15 minutes" or "This is all you need" or "Only trade for 10 minutes a day" are the typical scam titles that you see, and with those, you know 100% they are fake.
Trading is not done in 15 minutes, trading is hard work, and trading takes a long time to learn. There are no shortcuts.

📍 Things You Can Ask Them 📍

Typically speaking, they will not answer any of these questions because they can't.
Like "How do you calculate your position size with your current RR setup?" This means they studied this, and you can be sure they didn't :)
Or "How does leverage exactly work?" and like 99.99% of the YouTubers got it wrong.

But a very nice thing to ask is a simple "Can I have a broker statement of your account?" and boom, they are gone.

🏆 Golden Rules 🏆

Never buy anything (you can learn 100% everything for free).
Ask critical questions and follow up on them.
Trading is hard; there is no 15-minute setup.
Trading can't be 100% automated.