All trading courses that claim to teach you trading strategies are a scam - this is the reason why

Making this post because it seems like many people do not know how trading works in the financial industry - quant trading, IB proprietary trading, hedge funds.

The key thing to know is, the more a trading strategy is known and used, the more ineffective the trading strategy becomes. Simple logic - the same pie is shared between more people, until it becomes obsolete.

So even if the person selling the course has legitimately made money using their trading strategy in the past, the moment they sell it in a course, the strategy becomes useless, because it becomes saturated.

To earn money from trades, you need to come up with your own strategy.

This is what industry traders do. They backtest financial data & find strategies that work, and have not been used. They trade for a period of time using that strategy, and when the rest of the market catches on and the trading strategy becomes obsolete, they start their find for the next strategy.

So tldr, trading strategies are dynamic. There is no course that can teach a time-tested trading strategy. At most, a course can only teach you how to create your own strategy.

(Whether technical analysis as opposed to fundamental analysis is fluff is another matter)

Edit:

There is a distinction between a course that claims to teach a trading strategy, and a course that teaches you technical analysis for you to create your own strategy. What is surely scam, is the first one.

For courses that teach you technical analysis, these may be legit, but even so, the entire field of technical analysis's reliability is hotly debated. Ever since computers are invented and access to large historical financial datasets are available, back testers have found mixed results applying technical analysis to data.

Regarding saturation of trading strategies, retail traders using a strategy taught by a course is not what saturates the strategy. It is quite clear retail traders do not affect the markets in any way. The point is, if a strategy can be taught in a course, it is already saturated, because there is a very high likelihood the strategy is simple and industry has already been utilizing the strategy at scale. HFT algorithms has made retail day trading quite obsolete.

What do I mean by obsolete? Does making a profit from a trade means the trader is successful? How should traders measure their success? Traders should measure their success not against the scenario where they don't invest their money, they should measure their success against the scenario where they hold the stock they are trading for the long term, or hold a well-diversified portfolio instead.

This means making a profit from a couple of trades, does not necessarily make a trader successful. Because making a profit from a trade, using any strategy or none at all, is easy. This is a statistical phenomenon - up or down, 50%. What traders should be thinking, is whether their active participation in the market outweighs passively investing for long term. S&P 500's annualized returns the past 3 years has been ~20%. If a trader is confident they can beat these benchmarks consistently, over the long term, sure, go ahead. Or if they simply have excess cash and want to learn, sure, go ahead too.

Last point. If reading this post makes you frustrated and you think, gdi this guy doesn't know better, I have been making profitable trades so I know better than him (or even worse, you bought a course before so you have emotional attachment to the money you splurged), there is a very high chance you are not fit for trading. You are emotional. An ideal trader would not care about a random post online telling them their strategy is trash. If you have a good trading strategy, know how to hedge your positions, and make consistent profitable trades, you would have been indifferent to this post.

Last last point. There are so many free resources out there. If your first instinct was to buy a course from some flashy individual flexing his money telling you you can earn easy money, instead of doing simple google searches of good books to read about trading, downloading free pdf of these books, and spending a few days to read a couple hundred pages, you are most definitely, not fit for trading. You believe in the dream of easy money, not hard work.

And just to be clear, there have indeed been cases of people earning easy money by making a few trades without having done proper research. But this is gambling, so at least call it what it is.