We have tried almost everything that's out there, or at least we have heard about them from our friends, fellow traders and customers. We are amazed, and sometimes angry, at how some vendors can sell useless indicators and make untrue statements on their websites. Reputation, takes a life time to build, only one minute to destroy. As developers and indicator junkies, sometimes we still couldn't resist and buy more indicators. They look so great on the websites, we just had to play with them first hand. Time after time, we were just wasting our money, and the indicators we bought won't last for more than 5 minutes on our charts. Trading is hard enough without fellow traders trying to rip us off. It is those dishonest people who made honest people's jobs more difficult. Here are some pointers from our past experiences. Read through, and it just might save you a lot of money and frustration. Don't make the mistakes we made. Before shopping for indicators or trading systems, ask yourself these questions:

Do you believe in indicators? If yes, keep reading. If no, stop looking for holy grails. They don't exist.

Do the indicators go back and re-dot, re-paint, re-draw, change colors after the effect? If they do, don't waste your time! They will look like holy grail on any chart, and completely useless in live trading. They are not worth the money you spend on them, and they will cost you more later if you trade with them.

Do the vendors show you enough charts as a proof? Do they cherry pick charts? Do they accept your requests and show the charts you want to see before you buy? If they show only 1 or 2 charts, or none at all, they might have something to hide. I don't care what they write on their websites. Seeing is believing. Show me the charts and I will decide for myself.

Do you believe trading is a business that has an unlimited profit potential, yet like any business, you must have sufficient knowledge about what you do, and have the best tools to do your job? It is a fact that money are changing hands every second the market is open. It is a fact that some people DO trade for a living, and a good living it is. If 95% of people who trade lose money, that means 5% of people are making a killing every day. What separate the 5% from the other 95% of traders?

Is a $5000+ system/indicator package expensive? Is a $97 course cheap? What's the real value of those trading tools? How much should you invest? In our humble opinion, it is really not the amount you spend that matters. What matters is whether the systems or indicators work. In trading, anything is possible. You can make or lose thousands in a matter of hours, even minutes. If a system works, $5,000 is not expensive as you can easily make it back. If a system does not work, then even $97 is too expensive, and money wasted. Don't waste your money on cheap courses or systems only because they are cheap. This, however, doesn't imply that a $5,000 system will always work or work better than a $97 course.

More to the points above:

Certainly there are people trading without any indicators. As they say price is the best indicator. We don't personally know how to trade without any indicators, plus it loses the advantage of spotting divergences which requires the comparison of two objects. Trading based on support/resistance or Fibonacci levels along, to us, is not much better than guessing, only in this case I have a few "levels" to choose from, I bet my money on 38.2%, 50%, or 61.8%, etc., like in Roulette, you bet your money on the first 12, second 12 or the last 12 of the 36 numbers. Sometimes you will be right, sometimes you will be wrong. Also, this method is not precise, it could produce large drawdown before turning into a winner, that is, if you have enough faith and are still in the trade when it turns around. If the statement of "When the price reaches a certain Fib level, it might stall, it might bounce, it might penetrate" is true, then I really don't see the significance of it. It can be said with any numbers. It is not how we like to trade. And if we are institutional traders with enough money to move the market, we will certainly set some "traps" on those levels to catch those believers. Indicators are not holy grail. But they tell us what is going on in the market "here and now", provide information and allow us to make trading decisions and projections of what is most likely to happen in the next minute or two. Trade what you see, not what you think.

To this day, I still subscribe to a couple of gurus' daily reports, one trades the Forex market, the other one for Futures. They both mainly trade on price levels. While the Futures trader is, we believe, very honest, from his daily result, however, we have difficulty figuring out how he made his millions, probably by selling his $20,000+ course and memberships. And the Forex trader, we have a hard time believing what he claims. We are sure their methodologies are more than just support/resistance or Fib levels, and there must be people who trade with this method successfully. That method just doesn't appeal to us personally, that's all.

We really don't understand why any one would want to design their indicators to go back and re-dot, re-paint, re-draw, or re-color the past data, other than making their charts look perfect AFTER the effect. This is absolutely CHEATING. We have bought indicators like that. It is really confusing, because we could have sworn that dot was red a minute ago, now it's green. What is the purpose? What is it good for? The most ridiculous thing is, when asked before we made the purchase, the "developer" told us his indicator doesn't do that...... What can I say....

Our indicators will not go back in time to change anything. What you see is what you get. Honesty is always our priority.

Be cautious even if they post a lot of charts (which I RARELY see) but the charts are from odd hours (like more overnight charts than regular hours), or they have 30 charts from over a long period of time. We have bought an indicator from a website like that. The indicator looked so great on their charts, we just had to play with it ourselves or the curiosity will haunt our dreams. Well, money wasted I must say. They only post the charts when their indicator worked. Some 30+ charts from the past 6 months and many of them were from strange hours. We should have known better. Live and learn! It really disgusts us to see people cherry pick charts to cheat others for money. It means they KNOW the indicators they sell don't work. It's like the trailers of a movie where they put together the most exciting parts, but when you spend $9 and go to the theater, you realize it sucks!

We have more than enough charts on our website for you to review. Many of our customers became believers after requesting certain charts from certain dates. We encourage you to send your requests to us, asking to see charts of a certain symbol, time frame, dates and hours, the worst nightmare you have ever encountered, or maybe the one day you lost most money, and compare our charts to yours. We are confident you will become a believer, too! It cracks us to read some comments from potential customers after they received the charts they requested:

"Man...O....Man.....Have you rocked my world with those charts you sent......Thank you for your help.....I am going to order then in a few minutes...."

"Ok u win, u totally won me over!!!!! Many Times! I'm waiting for my Tradestation account to open and I'll buy the whole lot of ding dongs u have. If I found u earlier I wouldn't have to pay so much "tuition fees"!"

"Very nice. Thanks very much for the chart. Your indicators do indeed make it look easy. Although I knew about divergence I never saw it so powerfully shown as in your charts".

"From just a brief review of the charts and indicators of ER2 on Dec 17 it looks like there were numerous profitable trading opportunities with PBF. This was not the case with the other company as there were a few BE's and perhaps five or six consecutive losers. This was a fairly dramatic difference when compare with someone who probably does have a fairly good methodology and set of indicators, although I personally find......THEIR indicators are difficult visually for me to follow. I have for some time regarded visual simplicity to be an area ripe for improvement.......It is immediately obvious that PBF studies are clean crisp and present non ambiguous information...... I think divergences can lead us to such a point and low lag or non lagging indicators can get us pretty darn close. Your indicators seem to be of this family".

just saw the gbpjpy 2097 chart. WOW!!! i am def going to do this. prob use all indicators on the chart. i like the vtm and would make for a beautiful chart with the bars changing when the trend changes. i like the hollow in up move and solid when down. u have a really nice product here man. i commend you for doing this.thank you for your time and getting these charts to me. you WILL b hearing from me again really soon.

i found your site by chance on google actually a couple months ago. saved it and NEVER looked at it until last week. such a dumba[ss]!! but if people can see what they r getting thats all the sales you need. and u follow up with the emails quickly. i do like what i c. alot of different ways to trade with this software. i like what u r selling here. i love the show me dots and squeeze. i am def going to buy this. i really like how clean and clear these charts r and how it catches the turns and keeps u in the trend. itunnell is nice!! i like the show me dots. the charts look AWSOME so far! i am 40 and have wasted alot of money on [BEEP] software that i still have 'somewhere'. this is the best visual stuff i have seen that actually works! omg imagine that!! again command you for developing this software.

Those are actual quotes copied and pasted from their emails. And needless to say, they all became the proud PBF indicator package owners.

Some might find this paragraph offensive, but it's the honest truth. When we first started sharing our indicators on the internet, sometimes we received emails requesting to see charts, or asking a lot of questions, before they made purchases. We take pride in our customer service and we don't mind questions and requests. We had been struggling before and we really would like to help others. In fact, customers who came out of nowhere, purchased the entire package, sent a quick thank-you note and disappeared forever really freaked us out! Over time, we realized that those traders are the successful traders. They saw the values in our tools, it made sense to them, the trading setups were easy for them to understand, they knew the indicator package would add to the edge they already had, and a couple of thousand dollars really meant nothing to them since they could easily make it back in a day or two, or even within hours, with the new edge they just acquired. Successful people possess traits that less successful people don't have, and since trading is more of a mind game than anything else, we do need the right mindsets to be successful in this business. They understand the value of money. They invest in themselves. They understand one has to spend money to make money. They make decisions fast. They don't spend years on forums trying to find free indicators that are less useful. They know time is money. They know with the small amount of money they spend today, they will make it back many times over in no time. They can tell the real deal from the salesman's crap, and when they see the real deal, they don't hesitate. They go after any edge they could get even when they are already successful. (Or, especially when they are already successful?) The potential of making money from the market every day is unlimited, in theory at least. If one thinks a couple of thousand dollars is hard to come by, then maybe, just maybe, trading is not for him/her. Of course, the most important thing is to make sure one knows what he is paying for and it will actually work for him, like mentioned above, $97 could be expensive, and $5,000 could be cheap. (Google at $500 is cheaper than Enron at $9.70 a share, right?) With so many "developers" out there and from our own experience, we don't blame any one for being skeptical. You should be. We have learned so much from this experience, and we are happy that our little business gives us the opportunity to connect with traders around the world!

Disclaimer: All TRADING involves risk, while there is a potential to make a substantial amount of money, you CAN LOSE a substantial amount of money as well, no matter what method you use. All trading involves risk; past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results.

Commission Rule 4.41(b)(1)(I) hypothetical or simulated performance results have certain inherent limitations. Unlike an actual performance record, simulated results do not represent actual trading. Also, since the trades have not actually been executed, the results may have under- or over-compensated for the impact, if any, of certain market factors, such as lack of liquidity. Simulated trading programs in general are also subject to the fact that they are designed with the benefit of hindsight. No representation is being made that any account will or is likely to achieve profits or losses similar to those shown.

ONE OF THE LIMITATIONS OF HYPOTHETICAL PERFORMANCE RESULTS IS THAT THEY ARE GENERALLY PREPARED WITH THE BENEFIT OF HINDSIGHT. IN ADDITION, HYPOTHETICAL TRADING DOES NOT INVOLVE FINANCIAL RISK, AND NO HYPOTHETICAL TRADING RECORD CAN COMPLETELY ACCOUNT FOR THE IMPACT OF FINANCIAL RISK IN ACTUAL TRADING. FOR EXAMPLE, THE ABILITY TO WITHSTAND LOSSES OR TO ADHERE TO A PARTICULAR TRADING PROGRAM IN SPITE OF TRADING LOSSES ARE MATERIAL POINTS WHICH CAN ALSO ADVERSELY AFFECT ACTUAL TRADING RESULTS. THERE ARE NUMEROUS OTHER FACTORS RELATED TO MARKETS IN GENERAL OR TO THE IMPLEMENTATION OF ANY SPECIFIC TRADING PROGRAM WHICH CANNOT BE FULLY ACCOUNTED FOR IN THE PREPARATION OF HYPOTHETICAL PERFORMANCE RESULTS AND ALL OF WHICH CAN ADVERSELY AFFECT ACTUAL TRADING RESULTS.

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