Book: Kane Trading on: Advanced Fibonacci Trading Concepts
The party's over page
Well, if you made it to this page, you already know the sad news. I recall when I stopped doing the free commentary I got a ton of email expressing to me how badly they felt about that, how much they looked forward to it, and so on. But since then the interest in Kane Trading (called KT from here on) has waned greatly. I don’t think it’s KT specifically, I think it’s serious trading in general. Sure, there are tons of retail back in now using phone apps and a few brokers we all know the names of, but to me that is the opposite end of the spectrum from what the KT project was all about.
Let me go into a little detail about this project. Most of you know most or all of this, but it’s good to lay it out here. By my nature I am a teacher. I love to teach. I used to teach math. In college I was always the one who everyone came to, to ask to start and run a study group. I enjoyed that role. I just want to be sharing what I have learned. Once I got in to trading as a business, I quickly realized it’s a very lonely profession. As it is, I am always so busy and overly committed, and have lived in very isolated areas, that I don’t have friends in the conventional sense, you know, to go hang out with.
I also had another issue. As soon as I started with the trading, studying as much as I could from every source I could find (I read five hundred trading books in the first five years), I quickly realized that although I was gaining something from every source I found value in, no one approach was working for me. I realized I had to create my own path, my own methodology. This is the much shortened version of how the KT methodology was born. But on to the issue.
I realized that the more unique my approach became, the more isolated I became. When I first started we were in the ‘dot bomb’ era, and in the city I lived outside of there were many market meetings. I met lots of traders there, and we used to get together all the time. We had meetings at people’s houses, at various locations, and I met one on one with people. As I became more specialized and more advanced I found that no one understood what I was talking about any longer. Having trading discussions was ‘boring’ for me. I’m not being condescending or arrogant when I say this, I am just saying I had become too specialized, with a unique methodology of my own making, to be able to discuss trading with anyone anymore.
I studied on this for awhile, and decided that creating my own colleagues was my only real option, or just have no give and take and accept that. The latter seemed just too isolated and non-productive. Now, there are more details, enough for an entire book, on the specifics of how I started KT and started to write the books. Some of you know a good bit of the story. What matters to this discussion, though, is that the concept of creating some colleagues was my primary motivation. The fact that it evolved quickly into a productive business that I took very seriously was for the most part a happy side-effect.
I learned something from a previous life, and business, that I carried forward to my decision making in this venture. I knew an animal breeder (I’ll keep the details general for simplicity here, but if you want it to be more concrete you can imagine these are birds, although that is just for your own clarity), and he bred rare (at the time) animals and would give the offspring to people who were interested in keeping such critters. He found universally that when he inquired back to the people some time later the animals were either dead or doing poorly. He couldn’t understand this because the animals were hardy, the instructions provided (which he was very successfully using himself) were clear, and the recipients of good character.
He decided to try an experiment. Since these were fairly rare animals, and many people wanted to work with them and to try to breed them, he decided to charge people for the offspring, and charge a fairly steep price. He found two things out doing this. First, people bought all his offspring at the high prices. I digress here, but this reminds me of a business lesson I learned long ago.
This shopkeeper wanted to clear out this merchandise that wasn’t selling very well. He instructed the manager to mark it down to half price. When he got back all the merchandise was sold, and he was pretty happy about it. He asked the manager about it, and the manager told him that doubling the price really did the trick. The manager somehow heard wrong and though he meant the price now is half of what it should be. Bottom line, people saw the same merchandise at the higher price, perceived it must be quite valuable, and bought it all up. Human psychology, as counter-intuitive as it may be.
So, this guy had no issue selling out all his rare offspring at hefty prices. But the second part was the real shocker. In the future when he inquired how the animals were doing, the answer was always unequivocally ‘Great’. See, people spent a good chunk of cash for something they felt privileged to have, and they took incredibly good care of it. When it was free it was like the dime store goldfish. If it dies because of their neglect, they’ll just get another one. (I won’t comment on how cruel that attitude is, or how cruel human nature can be at times, you all know what I think of that…)
Now, how is all that relevant to my decisions with KT? Well, this would take another entire article, one I have wanted to write for years but just never did, about what I call ‘forum people’. Almost universally when it comes to trading forums the general consensus is that everything should be free, and anyone who charges is a total scumbag and rip-off artist.
They never bother to think that their car mechanic, HVAC tech, doctor, lawyer, plumber, electrician, and on and on, they all charge for their services. And the very same ‘forum person’ charges when they go to work. But if it’s related to trading it must be free. Someday I do hope I get to write the scathing article this topic really deserves. Keep an eye on the What’s New page to see if I ever do it.
On with the story. I was developing brand new, totally unique proprietary material that I was using on my own trading journey. In a sense I was formulating my own recipe for Coke™, only for trading. Do you think that any company with any formula would give away the recipe for the ‘secret sauce’ for free? I’ve never heard it done ever in history. But with trading, that’s the only acceptable path?
So, I started to think what might be the best approach to achieve all my goals. Keep my proprietary material proprietary, charge fees that would make people care about what they were investing in, not treat it as nearly valueless, retain that value for those that did invest, and meet one of my most important goals, assist those who wanted to, like myself, do this as a stay at home profession. And all the while create some colleagues I could have valuable give and take with at some point.
My slogan, on the home page, and mentioned endlessly around the site and in one-on-one work with me, is ‘For those who want to do the work’. See, in my experience, the huge, vast majority of people not only don’t want to do the work, but are just lazy in general. We live in a world of mediocrity, and it’s gotten a lot worse as time has gone on.
I wanted to run this as a niche business, only for the serious people who wanted to work hard. Not for people who wanted to take a weekend course and be a super-trader after that, making the thousands a day working in one or two hours, and quitting their jobs, as the ‘dream merchants’ all promise. In a world of hucksters and thieves I wanted to offer a product based on work and what I felt was a solid, robust core methodology. For aspiring professionals only.
I have frequently said over the years ‘I am not a vendor’. Now that the business is officially closed I stick with that. I was never a ‘vendor’, not one single day of this business. I never made a single promise the entire time I ran this business. I never discussed potential rates of return, not one single time. I never said anyone would succeed if they just followed some magic formula only I knew about. I taught about taking a robust starting point, making it your own, doing hard, hard work, all the while always focusing on studying yourself, your weaknesses, your issues. I tried to help aspiring professionals take the next step up on their own personal ladder.
I always tried to tell the truth, as I saw it. Read what I said on the Mentorship Page (I think archiving this site provides a lot of value, which I am footing the bill for, as a service). I have said many times I think one should expect it to take about five years of hard work before one can even hope to be profitable. Not wildly profitable, not quit your job and rely solely on trading income profitable. Just have a shot at profitable.
Not that everyone will be, only that they had a shot at it. Ten years to be a low level master. Low level master. In forums I read if you are not seriously profitable in six months, give up. Imagine telling someone who aspired to be a professional golfer that if they aren’t making money on the tour six months after the first time they picked up a club they should quit, they don’t have what it takes. Some advice that was.
I wanted to be a real mentor, a real trading coach, offering up things that I learned in my almost twenty-three year journey as of the date of this writing. I wanted to take the focus off ‘the setup’ and onto creating a fully comprehensive ‘Trading Plan’ that not only included every aspect of the trade itself, but also of the emotional and psychological aspects.
This is not a journey for most people, but attaining something truly outstanding rarely is. It wouldn’t matter if it was trading, or golfing, or building something. What I tried to teach was the approach. Not so much the guts of the methodology, but the guts of trying to be successful. How many people truly want to do what it takes to achieve their lofty goals? Well, the answer I found was very few, and nowadays it seems to be essentially none. Hence the wind down of the KT project.
In the end, I am very happy I did this project. I accomplished many of my goals. I found some trading companionship, if you can call it that, as I have traveled on my own journey. I got to enjoy teaching and sharing the many things I’ve discovered, some of them quite profound in my opinion.
I got to run a successful business my way (for example, did you notice that I never ran a single ad on this website in its entire lifespan of over seventeen years as of this writing?). Not a huge moneymaker (which was as I expected for a niche approach), but successful in my eyes. Over the years I have gotten to know many people, some who still keep in contact with me from time to time. And I did manage to ‘create’ some colleagues, two in particular which stand out.
One of the two I have collaborated with on some projects, and we still remotely link up our comps and work on market stuff when we have time. He was the first mentor student I had, and he was surprised when I told him that the mentorship program was created for him. He had contacted me and asked if I would be willing to mentor and he was a very serious candidate (he’s a professional money manager), so this really fit into my idea of how to actually create a colleague, hence the mentorship program was born. It was nothing I ever intended to do.
After that we kept in contact, and discussed projects we might be able to work on together. After some time had passed we hadn’t communicated for awhile, and we hooked back up. By then I had developed a lot (and I mean a lot) of new material and made many new discoveries. I really wanted to share some of this with him, and he wound up mentoring with me again. He basically became on ongoing student for quite some time, the single person I did the most work with during the entire project. As it was becoming clear the project was winding down, and ‘someday’ I’d close up shop, he commented how cool it might be if he was the first and last student that I had.
Fast forward to today, and it turns out that was, indeed, the case. During this long process I showed him things that I’ve only shown to him and the one other person I mentioned above. I sometimes joke ‘And then there were three’. A club of three. Anyway, I was telling him one day about the unique role he has played as far as my legacy, and in my transfer of knowledge so that some day when I’m gone hopefully my material will live on. He joked he was ‘The Chosen One’.
We still joke about that to this day. It seems I’ve come full circle. I ended where I started, in a sense. I sent him an email the other day after listening to the song Video Killed the Radio Star by The Buggles. (As an aside, that was the first video ever played on MTV.) In the song it says “You were the first one. You were the last one.” What a fitting place to end it.
So, that’s the super-condensed version. Like the movie version of a long book. I want to thank all those that participated in this grand adventure. I hope you learned a lot, whether you chose to continue pursuing trading as a profession or moved on to other things. I especially want to thank all my mentor students. That was some serious fun for me, and I hope also for you. It helped me, too, by forcing me to really think about what I was doing. This has truly been a great time, and I hope my honestly and integrity throughout have been a beacon of hope for everyone in a world like the one we now live in.
As for me, my focus remains, as I have said all over this website and in my works, on my own trading. I am at the high point of my skill set so far on this journey, and I hope it keeps rising. I have reached much farther than I ever thought possible, or even imaginable for me when I first started. I have seen things that have honestly scared me. There is so much order to market movement, and the universe itself, that it boggles my mind.
One time I discovered something that seemed so ordered, so unfathomable that I nicknamed it ‘The Mind of God’ technique. This isn’t as spiritual as it sounds, as I named it after something Stephen Hawking said about the Higgs boson. If I am paraphrasing this correctly (there are more versions of what he actually said/meant than there are teach you to trade charlatans out there) he said if we can find it we will finally know the mind of god. He was basically saying if we can verify its existence we will understand a lot more about how the universe is constructed.
When I discovered this concept I actually felt a bit frightened. It was the oddest sensation I’ve had with respect to trading, and perhaps in my life. I once said to ‘The Chosen One’ that it was like I was peaking under the edge of a tent, looking inside and seeing something I wasn’t meant to see. That’s what scared me. And trust me, I’m not kind of person who gets easily scared by things. For example, I love spiders and snakes, we once had a bear rubbing on our front door and I thought it was awesome, and if I saw a Bigfoot, I’d be fascinated.
All I will say is that there is something definitely going on here that is beyond just banging trades out. There is some kind of order to all things, and the more I dig into the market, the higher the base from which I am working as far as skills, the more I can see. I have no intention of ever stopping my work on trading. This is my life’s work, and I hope that when my time is up they find me slumped over, mouse in hand, at my work station. Hopefully my stop holds and the trade I was in gets closed out :-) Good luck, my friends.
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