• Simple. It proves every paid course is a scam. If a strategy can be automated (path #1), nobody who actually has an edge would sell it to you. They would lose money by giving it away. And, if it requires discretion (path #2), then no amount of money can buy you the experience required to make it work. Imagine thinking you could become the next Tiger Woods by reading books and watching YouTube videos about golf.

• Regardless of which path you take, no amount of money can substitute the work and experience required to succeed. Nobody shares strategies that work on their own. Nobody can sell you experience. So, what are you actually paying for in a course or mentorship? This is why you’ve never learned these concepts before. How many public trading figures would be left if paid courses, mentorships, indicators, trade alerts, trading bots, and everything else disappeared? That’s why the truth about how to succeed at trading will never be widely shared. It exposes the entire industry.

• Wondering who to follow is a legitimate question every beginner has. However, the 2 paths to profitability actually make the question irrelevant. You should both follow everybody and follow nobody. Nobody is handing out or selling strategies that actually work on their own when automated (path #1), and even the greatest discretionary trader of all time can't give you the experience that makes them successful (path #2). 

• This means that all books, videos, and people are simply sources of ideas. Ultimately, you are the only one who can make trading work. Either you discover a profitable set of rules that can be automated, or you spend enough time with a strategy to develop the experience required to make it work. YouTube, TikTok, X, Instagram, and everything else are simply places to find ideas. If you follow people instead of ideas, you’ve lost.

• Even if the trading influencer you’re wondering about is profitable, they still have nothing worth buying. Go ahead and follow them. Watch what they do and test what they’re saying. But, buy nothing. A terrible trader can give good advice, and an excellent trader can give bad advice. All you can do is test the ideas you find.

• When it comes to online trading strategies to learn, just think about path #1. Every publicly shared strategy on social media can be or already has been automated. For the ones that have specific enough entry and exit criteria for trades, they’ve already been automated. You can even find algorithms and indicators for free on sites like TradingView that perfectly plot these strategies on the charts. They’re given away for free or sold for $10 because they don’t actually work. That’s why the question of what to learn reverts back to the first section above this. If you found a profitable set of rules, then you would keep them to yourself. If you shared them, others could copy the strategy until the edge would be wiped out.

• Fake gurus constantly upload trading strategy videos portrayed as fully working systems (path 1), yet none of them give nonrandom results when tested objectively. As you learned from the previous section, all trading strategy videos can only be sources of ideas to test. Nobody would share it if it actually worked. They’d automate it and make money.

• The instructions on how to take the information you find and then begin building your own strategy are below. That is how you actually apply the lessons you’ve learned based on the 2 paths to profitability. You don’t need another strategy video. You need to learn how to test ideas and start developing your approach.

Systematic

• A 100% quantified and fully-automated system/algorithm that could FULLY run itself if you coded it (or you can just manually execute it).

• It is rules based without any freedom on decisions, which means when your criteria for entering a trade is hit, you enter it, and you never do anything that isn't in your pre-written instructions.

• A genuine systematic edge is something you have an incentive to keep private. If a strategy reliably produces excess returns, publicly revealing the exact rules allows other traders to copy it, compete for the same opportunities, and potentially reduce or eliminate the edge.

• This is what essentially every publicly shared “strategy” claims to be doing. Whether it is a set of indicators, a price-action setup, a specific entry model, or a complicated algorithm, the pitch is ultimately the same: follow these rules consistently and the strategy will produce profitable results over time. But, as you saw in the previous section, they don’t work. Trading influencers just continuously spread them in order to convert more beginners into buying courses and mentorships. But, if the strategy being sold/taught actually worked when automated, then they would keep it to themselves.

Discretionary

• You have a trading system, but you give yourself the freedom to make different decisions on a trade-by-trade basis. Some part of the process isn't 100% rules based.

• No matter how quantified and clear your strategy is, including your rules about trade management, you are a discretionary trader if you retain the ability to override those rules in the moment. This includes deciding whether to take a trade that meets your criteria, changing your stop loss or profit target, moving or adjusting a position, or exiting for a reason that isn't already defined by your strategy.

• The degree of freedom you give yourself to manage trades and enter or exit positions varies by person, but, ideally, you want everything to be quantified as much as possible. Remove ambiguity and unnecessary choice wherever you can, because every undefined decision creates another opportunity for human error.