Trader's University Review

Here is the latest, complete review on Greg Secker's Trader's University KnowledgetoAction course. Thanks to the contributor of the review for sharing his full experience of the Forex trading course!

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Knowledge to Action (K2A) – Greg Secker

First impressions; was that this was a sales pitch and nothing else; the guys were dressed in poorly tailored suits which didn’t go to meet people’s expectations that we would meet successful traders earning a mint. Of course since realised you can be trading very well and not be earning fortunes, but the first impression in any case was what I or the other 20 or so people expected.

The K2A guy, did a relatively good job explaining the forex market and it was possible to make money from the market. He handled the usual questions on “this can’t be true”, “this is gambling”, if you are a successful trader why are you doing this” quite well. He did boast a little too much he made, but being a designer man myself, I noticed the cheap shirts and clothing they were wearing.

At the end of the seminar in which he gave no real idea as to what strategies one would follow to make money they came out with sell. For £2000 + vat (disc from £3000) you’d get a 2 day Forex Training course, 3 coaching sessions of 30mins each and a Greg Secker DVD set. I had money that I had to use for retraining (any nothing else) so I went for it.

2 Day Forex Seminar

The 2 day seminar at their place in Fulham was interesting. The course was packed with 30 other people and we were all given a manual which contained 3 of Greg Seckers strategies that he teaches on the course. 1 for end of day and 2 intra day.

The Good bits :

1. The instructor was laid back, fun, interesting and had a few of trading ideas over and above the ones in the manual
2. The course went from “this is a candle” level to brief mentions of Fibonacci
3. Relaxed and motivating atmosphere
4. Step by step guide as to how to implement each strategy
5. Good overviews of the forex market and how it works

The Could do better bits :

1. No food given !!! For £1000 /day per person you think they could stretch to a sandwich!
2. Because it starts from basic principles it can be slow for some people, but then moves very quite quickly during the day two leaving the slower ones behind.
3. There is nothing in the course that you cannot read in a few £20 books and read for free on the internet
4. It is overpriced. It is priced at this level, in my view as people must think “if its this much; it must be good”. I have since seen similar courses for a less than half what K2A charge.

The Good bits

1. Met some other people who seemed serious about trading full time forex

The Could Do Better :

1. Be prepared – the coaches didn’t really have much of an agenda or seemed organised to handle the event
This was a no brainer piece of advice for me – don’t waste your money. If you look hard enough around London area you can find the same thing for a lot less.

K2A kept hammering on that brokers won’t teach you how to trade, I found by attending FREE on-line seminars in the evening, that they teach the same stuff, which I paid 2.5k for. K2A are con-artists, they promise the world but deliver nothing. They also fail to mention you require a 10k trading account to make the kind of money they promote in their seminars. Plus during our course they introduced a person who was advertising real wealth programme for £35k, really inappropriate found out from people they then discount to 15k +VAT.

In summary I am more convinced that Greg Secker makes more money from training that he does from trading as do his coaches. Have not seen or heard anything since to make me think otherwise. I am sure these guys trade and maybe some of them trade successfully, they talk a good game, just something in me isn’t 100% convinced of them as I am of what they sell.

On leaving the course, I was not at all confident in placing a trade, attended 4/5 on-line seminars which had some decent presenters, placed my 1st trade after 2wks and by chance hit profit.

I have booked coaching sessions with my coach – I’ll give a final review on these sessions when I have finished them. (Not flexible timing to suit your working life as promised)
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If you need help getting a refund from the course if you've just signed up, check out http://knowledgetoaction.blogspot.com/2008_11_01_archive.html

14 comments:

  1. I wanna learn more about seminars like this one.

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  2. If I came accross Zulu Trade before, I would not have signed up to any forex course!! Zulu Trade is awesome, you just choose from a list of traders, choose the top rated trader and let him/her do all the trading for you :) :) check out www.zulutrade.com

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  3. I have been considering the option to invest my money in Forex trading but I don’t have any idea how much to invest first time in it? Can you suggest some tips on that.
    Forex webinars

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  4. Went along yesterday to a free seminar in West London. Although there were around 50 seats just 3 others turned up, all guys, maybe a bit older than myself. Presenter introduced himself as Gurda Singh and said he was a professional trader not a speaker, had started trading while still at Uni, after initial losses made some money and for 5 years works as a trader for K2A. Said he's very successful, has a good like, travels, charters yachts. Showed us slides of himself in the jungle, up a mountain, huskie sledging, standing beside a private plated Aston Martin.

    Seemed like a nice guy, very smart at 25 years old, gave a great presentation. Said we will make a lot of money with the systems we would learn. Showed us some slides of recorded trades, explained candlestick charts, pips, risk mamangement.

    Said that the normal price for the 2 day course was £9K + VAT but that he had 5 places left for a special program where you paid just expenses, this price was £2999 + VAT but you had to sign up there and then.

    Great presentation but he made it sound too easy; just follow guidelines and you'll make winning trade after winning trade. I asked how it was possible to predict currency movements, he said K2A knew what the banks would be doing and how that would affect currency pairs. The Snap Back strategy looked neat and simple but again I kept wondering how do they know the market is going to follow the predescribed channels on the screen.

    It was very simple: you take our 2 day course, you start to trade, you make money.

    At the end of the 3 hour presentation to my surprise all the other guys signed up right there! I guess they were convinced they could do it, which left me feeling a bit flat.

    I stayed behind afterwards to ask Gurda some questions regarding how to predict market movements, what the success rate is. He said "you've" seen the slides, you've seen it works so just sign up".

    Now I'm a skeptical 47 year old tight git who doesn't part with money easily and I wanted to go away and think about it, after all £3600 inc VAT is a lot of money for me.

    Gurda became a bit pissed off with me and said people that think don't do, and that I wouldn't do anything (which may be true). He asked me what my ambition was, I told him to pass on some money to my children, maybe a million each (hey, a guy can dream).

    He asked me how I felt as a 47 year old being lectured to by a 25 year old - the implication being that I wasn't successful and he was. I replied I had no problem with it, after all I'll listen to anyone regardless of age if I think I can learn something. He said he would be able to give his kids a million as soon as they were born.

    Finally he asked me what car I drove, I told him a 20 year old Ford worth £400 and I was happy with it. He looked really pissed off now so I beat a hasty retreat out of the conference room.

    I am interested in forex trading so I'll get a couple of books from amazon and open a trial trading account and see how it goes.

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    Replies
    1. If you drive a 20 year old Ford worth £400, you really need to get a better job and stop messing around with the big boys.

      "I am interested in forex trading". How cute.

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    2. 'Sweet Jesus', So much Ego!!! The smart guy is the one with the cheap car. Nothing worse than a depreciating item sitting in your driveway. Dumb 47 'smart guy',stick with the old ford and go to Zulu trade & do your own research from there. Good place to start. Ignore the snobs!!

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  5. Is this place for real?

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  6. The customer can lose money, but the firm can never lose, thanks to the per trade fee.

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  7. I have recently finished a 2-day course course on have some mixed views. On the one hand there is no doubt that this is mainly a sales company and that they do mislead you on your prospects for making money (yes pictures of boats, ferraris etc but the MD drove a beat-up BMW). Particularly concerning is the course was filled with rank newbies of whom many will have had unrealistic expections from the seminar and probably never make it to profitability, because they underestimate the hard work and time required. I am a relative newbie but much better informed it seems. I am willing to put a lot of time into this over a period of years and do not expect instant results. I no longer think their strategies are going to be a printing press. Nevertheless they are in some cases master salesmen with a refined pitch and unless you are a hardened skeptic they will take you along for the ride to a point. The courses were a massive upselling opportunity. We got told no lunch, but lunch magically appeared as long as we went into the next room to hear about the next "Master" level of training - 20K worth. Incredibly about 10 people signed up on the spot with no results from the first course! Great salesmanship. Other brokers/companies where there with "information" pitches at various points, often informative nonetheless.
    On the plus side there was no material in the courseware that I felt was wrong or even misleading. In fact much of it is probably good advice (IMO). However, eventually I read between the lines and could see that the presenter only had 2-3 years experience trading himself and knew less about many topics than myself (he visibly looked afraid when I asked something about central banks!). Some of his responses to peripheral question where I believe quite misleading. Don't worry about correlation on currency pairs? Pffft. It's obvious that this increases risk and this contradicted his earlier statements about our job being to reduce risk. Most people in the room would not have appreciated this and appeared to be taking the presenter's word as gospel.
    In summary, I do feel the course was far too expensive, on the other hand I don't think it was a waste of time and money for the following reasons: Personally I do need some focus and direction in my trading and starting with some simple strategies may work for me in the long run. Secondly, the course did IMO provide a decent knowledge foundation of the market and basic trading - with the caveat of a handful of important basics left out, presumably with the aim of simplifying the course as much as possible. Next committing to a course and an immersive environment can have a positive impact on it's own regardless of the course. Then some exposure to real traders, such as they were, is useful if you don't know any and have no concept of what pros do. I believe there are people in their emply who could be called experienced professionals (one or two of the coaches). There were tidbits I learnt that would have been hard to find on the internet or in a book for example.
    I hope to make use of the experience regardless of whether it was good value but I will not be in a hurry to sign up for the 20k year-long training package - not without results.
    In the end my advice would be this: If you are serious about learning trading but know next to nothing and have the money for the course AND are willing to invest significant time into learning, then this course may be worth doing. But listen with a critical ear as to whether you are being pumped vs. being taught (the Psychology of Trading session was just a mix of sound wisdom and pumping expectations).
    I don't believe this course is likely to get many of the attendees to the point of making money. That is just the law of averages. Trading is not easy, and it's no particular fault of the course itself.
    One sentence summary: possibly worthwhile, but expensive.

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  8. You must actually be willing to start and run your own business. This is not some kind of a scheme to generate cash without any effort.

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  9. If you are serious about learning to gain financial freedom through Smart Money trend trading and not through Dumb Money day trading and scalping then visit my website. I am a full time trader that is looking to share my knowledge with the right people.

    www.TheTradersCosmos.co.uk

    Do not waste your time and money with K2A. My contact details are on my website

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  10. Having the best forex expert advisor plugged into your trading account can make a big difference in the way you trade the forex market.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Hi, Thanks for your great post, there are much nice information that I am sure a huge number of guys and gals don’t know.

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  12. I am going through some forex training of my own in one of my business classes, and I have yet to attend some of these seminars. I feel like I should mainly because I need to learn more about what I should and should not be doing when it comes to forex trading strategies.

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