ForexSpirit

I receive the occasional reader e-mail which I am always happy to answer.

A lot of great questions were asked by a reader named Kris in an e-mail exchange with me earlier this year. I feel that these questions and my attempt to answer them are worth bringing to a wider audience as there is a good chance that you might have wondered about these issues too.

Quite a lot of ground was covered in the discussion so I am going to break it up over several posts.

Your site is excellent. Very educational. I was wondering if Dirk du Toit’s mentoring is required to become successful at the 4×1 strategy. I’ve been observing and trading the forex market for 2 years and have a good understanding of technicals and how fundamentals affect the market (in theory, anyway!). I’m thinking about getting his book, but I’m wondering if I work at it on my own can I become successful at it, or would I need his mentoring service. Your comments are appreciated.

I think it is entirely feasible for someone to become a successful, profitable trader through just their own hard work. All too often though this route ends up with many dead-ends and potentially lost money.

For me having a mentor or coach is a fast-track way to reach your goals. There is normally an up-front cost associated with such training, but you end up avoiding many of those dead-ends and get to where you want to be much faster (as long as the mentor/coach is worth their salt of course). This is true for just about any endeavor, such as in sports, music, business or trading.

It probably depends a lot on what style of training and/or learning works well for you.

If nothing else, I think buying the BWILC book and reading it might be a good way to help you determine if Dirk’s mentoring will suit you or not. If you don’t like the information in the book then obviously there’s little chance that you’ll find the mentoring useful either.

The book contains a lot of ground work information about how to approach trading using the 4×1 strategy. All the basic information is there, but there isn’t a ready-to-go system contained in its pages. You could quite easily generate your own trading plan using the information it contains, but how successful you’d be at doing this probably depends on how experienced you are as a trader already.

Dirk’s mentoring primarily consists of numerous exercises where he gets you to change your thinking to be in line with the information in the book. He basically burrows deeper into the thinking behind what is written in the book, and gets you to perform tasks and do some critical thinking so that you end up seeing the value of what he has written. Further stages in the mentoring then have you put together your own trading plan using your conclusions from the exercises, along with your own personality traits and preferences, so that you end up with a trading system that is uniquely you, while still having the 4×1 system as a foundation. By this stage you know why you are trading the way you are, so that you have complete confidence in your approach.

More than anything, Dirk as a mentor gets you to do all the hard work yourself, just like any good mentor. He’s just there to prod you in the right direction if you stray too far. If you’re disciplined, motivated and a self-starter then you should be able to figure things out on your own and still be successful at it.