Before you pay anyone

Five questions most trading educators cannot answer.

The proof this industry hands you is either unverifiable or irrelevant to whether you can execute. These five are harder to dodge, and the answers tell you what you are actually buying.

Read the five Start Foundations free

Why the usual proof is worthless.

A screenshot

A screenshot is a picture of a number. It can come from a simulated account, a cherry-picked day, a month with the losses cropped out, or an image edited in under a minute.

A real one

Even a real one answers the wrong question. Whether somebody else made money says nothing about whether you will, because you will be making your own decisions under pressure.

A win rate

A win rate with no rule set behind it describes the past and predicts nothing.

The thing worth knowing is whether they can change how you execute. None of the standard evidence speaks to that at all.

The checklist

Ask these five. Watch what happens.

Is the curriculum written down, and is it the same for everyone?

Ask to see the outline before you pay.

  • If what gets taught depends on which week you joined or who happened to be in the room, there is no system underneath it. There is a person improvising, and improvisation cannot be audited or repeated.
  • The dodge sounds like personalization. Sometimes that is real. More often it means nothing was ever written down.
What are you graded on besides profit and loss?

Across a small number of trades, money is mostly noise.

  • A trader can follow every rule and lose. A trader can break every rule and win. If money is the only feedback that ever reaches you, the thing coaching you is a random number generator.
  • The dodge sounds like the market being the ultimate scorekeeper. True, and useless as feedback.
Can they tell you which of your own rules you break most often?

This is the question almost nothing survives.

  • Most traders do not fail from a knowledge gap. They fail on execution, doing the thing they already knew not to do. If nobody is measuring which rule breaks and when, nobody can help you fix it.
  • The dodge sounds like trade reviews. Ask how many, how often, and whether the finding is written down somewhere you can go back and read it.
Is there a gate, or do you just get access?

If paying is the only requirement, the sequence is decoration.

  • A gate means somebody demonstrated the earlier thing before moving past it.
  • The dodge sounds like learning at your own pace. That is a feature in a library and a defect in a curriculum.
When you stall, does anyone know?

Most people who buy trading education quietly stop.

  • If the only signal that reaches the seller is a declined card, nobody finds out until after you are gone.
  • The dodge sounds like reaching out any time. It puts the work on you at the exact moment you are least likely to do it.

Now ask them of Steady Edge Trading.

A checklist that exempts the company publishing it is an advertisement. So here are the five answers, including the one that is not flattering.

Written down, same for everyone

The Foundations curriculum is fixed, ordered and narrated, and identical for every member. It costs nothing, so you can read the outline before deciding anything.

Graded on adherence, never money

Every scored rep grades each rule in the system on its own. Profit and loss is not part of the score, because a correct trade that lost is still a correct trade.

Your broken rule, by name

Adherence Insights reports rule by rule over time, and holds back a verdict until there are enough reps for one to mean anything.

Gates, not access

Every stage ends in one. Knowledge checks, drills, scored reps, written documents and attestations. The pools reshuffle and the answer is never shown.

Stalling, the honest one

The platform can see exactly where somebody stops. Whether that becomes a person reaching out is a promise rather than a mechanism, and Steady Edge Trading is new enough that the promise has not been tested at any real scale. Ask again in a year.

One thing this checklist cannot settle, for SET or for anyone else: whether the person selling can actually trade. No screenshot settles it either, which is the whole point.

The Forge

Run the questions on it.

Foundations is free and takes no card. Go through it, put all five questions to it directly, then put them to whoever else is asking for your money.

Start Foundations free Read the five principles

Teaching for a living and unable to answer all five? That is a platform problem rather than a knowledge problem, and it is solvable without building one yourself. License The Forge.

Educational content only. No profit claims are made anywhere on this site. Trading futures involves substantial risk of loss.