Are trading courses worth it? here’s what you need to know [Video]

Markus is a self-made multi-millionaire who was born in Germany. He came to the US in 2002 with $30,000 in his pocket and a dream to become a successful trader.

Over the past 20 years, he traded and invested his way to success in the stock and real estate market, making millions of dollars in the process.

Markus has written three best-selling books about trading and investing that have been translated into multiple languages. His youtube channel with over 4 million views is dedicated to his favorite topic — which is trading stocks and options.

Markus has connected with over 300,000 traders in more than 200 countries across the globe.

He lives in Austin, TX where he enjoys spending time on the lake watching his kids racing their sailboats.

So let’s talk about trading courses. Are these trading courses really worth it? As you know, there’s definitely no shortage of them out there. With all these free videos out there, do you really need to buy a trading course, and if so, what is the best trading course?

What Is The “Best” Trading Course?

Let’s actually start with the elephant in the room. Which trading course is the best? This is one of the questions that always hear, as well as, “Which trading course should I buy?” and “What is the best trading course?”

Here’s something that may surprise you. There is no “best” trading course. You see there’s only “best for you.” So what does this mean? This is where many traders make a mistake in the beginning. You need to know what you want from a course before you buy it. So what do you want from a course? You probably want to make a lot of money, and that’s cool, but how exactly do you want to do this?

Criteria To Consider

Let’s go over some criteria. What do you want to trade? I mean, do you want to trade stocks, or do you want to trade options? Maybe you don’t care and you just want to trade whatever makes the most money, and that’s cool, we can talk about this.

Do you want to day trade or do you want to swing trade? What’s the difference? When day trading, you need to be able to spend time in front of the computer. You might not be in the position right now to be able to do this, to be in front of the computer. So, therefore, swing trading might be better suited for you.

Another important factor to consider, your account size. Do you have a small or large account? This is important to consider depending on your goal. Are you trading for growth, meaning that you want to grow your account, or are you trading for income?

So do you want to have a strategy that you can trade on a larger account, like a $200,000-$400,000 account, or are you in the stage in your trading life where you have a rather small account of maybe $5,000 or $10,000 and you want to grow it?

These are important criteria to consider when deciding what the best trading course is for you. There is no one-size-fits-all trading course. I mean, I would love to tell you, “you know what? I have the perfect trading course for you.” This actually might be true depending on your criteria. It’s really super important that you understand what to look for when you look for a training course.

Let me give you just a few more criteria that I think are universal criteria for any training course.

For example, is the instructor of the training course a real trader? I mean, is he actually putting money on the line? Is he trading a real account? Or is he just showing you woulda, coulda, shoulda trades and say,

“You know what? Here is how much money you could have made if you bought Tesla last year and now it is up, 500%” or something like this?”

So is the instructor actually placing real trades so that you see he is actually trading for income? That’s actually a bonus, right? So I would say, are they trading for income? How is the instructor making money? Because honestly, I think if you can’t make it as a trader, if you cannot trade for income, you have no business teaching others.

In my opinion, one criteria of great trading courses are those that provide coaching and support. Now let’s talk about are trading courses worth it?

Are Trading Courses Worth It?

So let’s talk about this and let’s be honest. There are many free resources available out there. Especially on YouTube. This is where I think it is very important that you don’t feel pressured to buy anything just yet, especially if you’re a beginner or new to trading.

You want to have a basic understanding first.

You want to learn some basics like how to place an order. You should learn the difference between a call option and a put option? What is theta in options? So for basic stuff like this, I don’t believe that you need to pay anybody anything.

I mean, on my Youtube channel there are probably more than 700 videos you can watch, all for free.

Here’s the important thing. Trading courses, or no trading courses. Trading courses are not the magic bullet that will solve all your problems, and here’s why. You see, trading is a skill. Think about it, how do you acquire a skill? Do you acquire skills from just reading a book or watching a video? No, you actually have to do it.

If I wanted to learn how to paint, is it enough if I just read a book on how to paint to become a great painter? No, I have to try it. If you want to learn how to play golf should you just get a book that tells you how to play golf, and you read the book and now you can magically play golf and participate in tournaments? No. Same in trading, right?

Trading is a skill like everything else, and so I hate to break it to you, but there are no shortcuts to success. You have to put in the work. It not what you want to hear, but if you were hoping that I give you the magic course that automatically makes your money hand over fist, honestly it doesn’t exist.

A trading course teaches you the basics and it teaches you some tips, but you have to learn how to trade for yourself.

How do you do this? The best way to do this is on a simulator. I want to give you a very specific example from my personal life right now. My daughter is 15, her name is Vivian, and Vivian has a learner’s permit. She would like to get to her driver’s license once she’s 16.

Now, there is the possibility that parents, here in Texas at least, can teach their kids how to drive. So I am Vivian’s instructor, and so I am sitting next to her in the car, but she has to drive. What we are doing right now, we are putting in 50 hours of driving. Vivian has a little spreadsheet on the back of her door to her room where she’s marking off every time that we are driving for an hour.

I wish that this would exist for traders, that they have to put in at least 50 hours on a simulator with an experienced instructor before they trade live, but unfortunately, this is not how it works. We do 50 hours of driving, and out of these, we have our goals.

For example, we will do 10 hours of night driving, because driving at night, as you can imagine, is different than driving throughout the day. We will also do 10 hours of interstate driving. If you’re on the interstate you need different skills because now suddenly everything is much faster. This is how we have broken it down into different skills that she needs to acquire.

So are trading courses worth it? To recap what I mentioned earlier, I believe that trading courses are worth it, and here’s why, with a few “IF’s.” I believe a trading course is worth it IF the instructor is an experienced trader. Think about it, I mean, in order to be able to teach my daughter Vivian how to drive, I need to be an experienced driver. I need to have a driver’s license. I need to have a spotless record otherwise, I wouldn’t be allowed to teach her, right?

If you want to learn golf, wouldn’t you hire an experienced golfer instead of just asking, your neighbor? I believe this is important because after all, we want to make money with trading.

Now, the other important thing is, trading courses are worth it if the instructor can give you shortcuts. So what do I mean by this? I mean, you can acquire any skill on your own. I believe this. I believe that probably you could learn how to play golf if you read a book, watch a few videos, and then just put a lot of time and effort in there, but what do I mean by shortcuts?

Shortcuts are there to save you time and money, especially when trading, right? I mean, if the trading course, and if the instructor can help you to avoid a few losing trades. Losing trades are easily a few hundred dollars, sometimes a few thousand dollars. However, if you could trade losing $1,000 versus investing a few hundred dollars in of course would you do this? Or if you could avoid losing $20,000, would you invest $2,000 in a course? Probably, right?

I also think that this is super important, especially for trading, but I believe trading courses are worth it if there are coaching and support involved, and here is what I mean by this. Most of you already know I am offering a trading tool, it’s the PowerX Optimizer.

Some of you have seen me using it on my “Coffee With Markus” Live streams on my Youtube channel, and I use it every day in my trading. But here’s the deal. A tool is just helping you a little bit, right? I believe that this is a bonus. So a trading course is super helpful if there are tools involved.

Back to the golfing example, if you want to learn how to play golf and you get lessons from a pro let’s say, he says, “Oh, yeah, and by the way, before you diddle around and get the wrong clubs, I actually have the perfect clubs for you.” I mean, wouldn’t that be much easier?

So this is where the tool that I personally use and that is available to you is the PowerX Optimizer, and I love it. We are coming out with a version 2.0 soon.

So I think training is very important. So this is where, for example, a training course is helpful if it gives you the important things about getting started, but then also of how exactly do you trade stocks, and how exactly do you trade options.

If we are looking at trading stocks, you need to know what are the different order types, how do you place a stock to the long? How to short? How to set profit targets and stop losses, right? So this is one of the things where it’s really important that a trading course shows you how to do this, but that’s what I mentioned earlier. I think the coaching and support here are super important, right? Because this is where you need ongoing handholding. For me, this makes a lot of sense.

Summary

So are trading courses worth it? Which trading course is the best? It really depends on what do you need. I know that some of you have wasted a lot of time and money on various training courses just to find out that it is not for you.

This is why I say before you buy a course, okay, know what your goals are. Know what you want from a course. I think that is super important. Know exactly what do you need help with. Then you choose the right one because again, there’s no one size fits all. Trading is a skill, you have to put in the work. I wish I could tell you,

“Oh, you know what? All you need to do is invest in the PowerX Optimizer and tomorrow you will be the best trader in the world.”

No, you know that I’m giving you a 90-day money-back guarantee because I believe that it takes maybe a week, two, three, four weeks to really learn how to use this tool, to practice on a simulator, and I don’t want you to feel rushed at all to say,

“Oh, I’m under the clock and I only have 30 days to evaluate this tool and this course,” right?

I mean, take your time. Take 90 days, because most traders fail in the first 90 days and I want to make sure that you are succeeding.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_qc261zTwY&feature=emb_title