Trading advocacy sites
When I launched this site way back in 2005, I wanted one of its sections ("Word of Advice") to embrace the idea of trading advocacy. I had retail traders in mind, for the institutional ones have or should have, at least, their own ways to deal with legal or ethical issues. Probably more sophisticated and more professional ways, too.
I can't say that was an entirely novel idea, but oddly enough, it still remains largely overlooked. One would think that trading forums would be right places for it, but that's definitely not the case. A trading forum run by a vendor and manipulated by a whole bunch of his cronies is hardly a place that would genuinly represent the interests of retail traders. Such forums do exist and despite their pretences to the contrary, they cannot be considered the places that fully embraced this idea.
Being a vendor, I too cannot implement this idea in the way I would truly like it. I am rather constrained by my vendor status. I don't believe that criticising the work and business practices of other vendors would sound credible. It might even get me accused of attacking the business of my competitors out of spite or as a business tactic, however unprofessional it may be. I agree that these are legitimate concerns that every respectable vendor or businessman should take into account and these are also the main reasons why I have not embraced the idea of trading advocacy as fully as one could do this in other circumstances.
Obviously, the same concerns apply to those vendors who run trading forums, but then again how much can you expect from cowardly operators who hide their real names? How much in terms of accountibility, for instance? Not much, and, as I said, it's hard to take forums run by such individuals as sites that genuinly espouse the idea in question. The self-serving nature of such forums is rather obvious and leaves absolutely no doubt if you observe them in practice.
However, some other sites have attempted to fill this void. Unfortunately, the issues I brought up in connection with the forums run by cowardly vendors, do remain valid in this case too. You really don't know if such sites are run by people who are not vendors or if no other conflict of interest is at work here. That, of course, has to do again with the anonymity of the people who run them. Just like with trading forums, or other any other business for that matter, if you don't know the identity of the people behind them, you cannot really be sure what their agenda might be. It's safe to say that anyone who hides their name while running a business is more likely to have an agenda he does not want you to know about or is hiding something from his or her past compared to those who do not withhold their identity from the public.
The first of them, chronologically speaking, is trickortrade.com, unfortunetely now defunct. It was a nice site with a forum where you could discuss the issues raised by the staff and by the site members. This site appeared on the web scene about the same time as eminimethods.com, in 2005 or so, but it did not draw much attention. I contributed to it once, but also lost my interest in it rather quickly.
The second one is tradinglosers.com, still in existence, but no longer active, it seems. It has been around since 2010. I have some doubts about this site. It seems to be run by people whose agenda is rather ambiguous who could be vendors. It was largely a flash in the pan. They wrote only a bunch of articles and their activity fizzled out after only a few weeks. One or two of their articles were right on the money and quite informative, others were rather confusing if not pointless.
And then there is yet another site like that that I have found especially interesting, tradingloonies.wordpress.com, which, as its domain name suggests, is really a blog. This site appeared in 2011, but initially was hosted on some other blog network. Apparently that did not give them the exposure they wanted and so they moved it to the current network. The site seems to be pretty active, there are already 10 or more articles out there, some pretty lengthy and rather well researched from what I could tell. It does look like the people behind it are determined to keep their site active, but only future will tell how long it will survive. Sites like that, as the history of the first two of them shows, tend to be pretty ephemeral.
Still, this particular site has attracted quite a bit of attention, in particular on some forum "for serious traders," as the Trading Loonies authors tend to refer to it, but also in some other circles. Their best days may yet be ahead of them and I for one would like to wish them all the best in their endeavor of "exposing loonies, posers, and other dubious characters of the trading world" which is pretty much their mission statement.
If I did not provide links to any of these sites, it was only because it is against my unwritten business policy to link to sites run by "anonymous cowards" and not because I disagree with their efforts. It is ultimately up to you, the reader, to decide how much faith you want to put in their work. In other words, you probably should verify it with your own research, but at the very least, they do provide food for thought and may open your eyes to things you might have overlooked. If only for that, you should find them useful.
The comment of always verifying things with your own research applies not only to such sites, but, even more so, to everything you read on trading forums, which can be notoriusly bad, sometimes purposefully misleading, sources of information.
Posted on December 2nd, 2013.
Another one bites the dust. Tradinglosers.com has disappeared from the web, though its domain remains parked on godaddy.com. I saw this coming when talking about the ephemeric nature of such sites. Fortunately, we still have the Trading Loonies blog and since it's a free blog, it should remain on the web for much longer, even if its authors are no longer contributing to it. I posted a eulogy of sorts for this site on my main e-mini futures blog.Updated on October 3rd, 2014.