As a fanatic of free knowledge and information, it troubles me to see that so many people are taking workshops about trading from unknown sources that can cost more than 1000$, instead of just picking up a book which covers the same material, and with even better clarity. Please note that I am talking about commercial courses in here and not academic ones (which have their own disadvantages to be sure, but that is another topic altogether).

A popular among these course is the overpriced course about option trading. Most of the time, it involves explaining the basics of what are options, the put and call parity (although some don’t even bother with that), and of course, trading strategies with options.

After covering the basics, they go on to explain the strategies of what type of options to buy and a whole combination of strategies. The market would rise? They tell you to buy a call option. The market would fall? buy a put option and so on. This is where the audience is confused. What good are the option strategies if you don’t know the direction the market would go anyway? To remedy this, some courses follow up with chart reading and explain the various techniques (if you can call those techniques) to try to predict where the market will be heading. Sounds terrific for the layman, although he will soon find out his results are very very poor.

If you’ve been to such courses, the question that often should cross your mind is why these people want to teach you these techniques anyway? Wouldn’t they be better off doing it themselves? It reminds me of the fortune teller that is asked “How come you don’t buy a lottery ticket instead of telling people what the lucky numbers will be?”. The answer is a simple one: the fortune teller has figured out long time ago that there is money to be made by offering people such advice, since most people would believe him anyway.

Of course, he knows deep down inside that he has no special abilities, and that is why he does not buy a lottery ticket himself. He thrives on the ignorance of people to rationalize why he does not buy the ticket. Words like “moral” are tossed around with no apparent reason. The same goes for the seller of the option course. He knows things are not so simple and he can’t make it work. But why not sell the illusion that it would work for you? More often than not, if you confront them, they’d start attacking you and tossing words like “You have to have self-discipline to make it work etc…”

Think about it for a moment. If it really works, then he would NOT tell you about it anyway because it would ONLY DECREASE HIS CHANCES of making it work. This is because if more people do what he does, the opportunity to make money would decrease.

So before you fall victim for this, why not just go to your library and take the book?