Since there seems to be a fair amount of curiosity concerning Pokersam and his trading pit, let me share my experience there. I was member of his trading pit for about 8 months. I ended my membership earlier this year. I’m a full-time software engineer but do some day-trading in my personal account (with e-mini S&P futures). I also trade my 401K account (mainly using SPX-based ETF’s for that). Anyway, I was intrigued by EW due to the fact that it is a non-lagging, predictive system, and I ended up joining Pokersam’s site to learn more about it.
On the positive side of things, Poker is a purist as far as EW is concerned and knows all the rules inside and out. I did indeed learn a bunch about EW being on his website. My time there actually started out well, and I was initially pleased with the investment of time and money. Pokersam was very friendly and welcomed questions and was forthcoming with answers and explanations of why he came up with the counts he did.
On the negative side, while Pokersam is indeed an expert in EW, he is also a terrible trader who completely lacks any sort of money/risk management scheme. In addition, he has a fairly poor understanding of options although he claims to trade them all the time. He also, as I’m sure doesn’t go unnoticed by anyone except him, has some serious personality issues. Things eventually went downhill for me on his site. I was one of the few people besides him who actually posted in the trading pit. I came to understand why when I started posting alternate wave counts and even some more classic TA opinions. Sometimes these disagreed with Pokersam’s take on the market. He eventually PM’ed me to let me know that I should avoid posting anything that contradicted his count or raised questions about where he said the market was going. I ended up lurking for a few more months after this, mainly to see what would happen with his $10000 account experiment (remember that one that he never mentions anymore) as well as what would happen with his market calls. He also could be a good contrarian indicator at times. He made one good trade with the 10K account and then blew it up on the next trade. He never actually admitted this. He simply stopped talking about it. He had done some serious damage to his personal account being on the wrong side of the August 2011 drop. He made some good and some bad trades after that and eventually went short in the late 2011/early 2012 run-up. When I first joined the site, he would post his trades. After going short, he stopped posting his trades. I PM’ed him to ask if he was still holding his puts after the big run-up. He said no, that he had sold them a long time ago even though he had been posting in the pit for some time that if you weren’t short you should be. Eventually, he said he was going to stop posting his trades as it was too much pressure and too much of a distraction for him. It looked to me more like he had blown up his account.
Anyway, that was my experience in the pit. I find the whole thing fairly sad at this point. Pokersam could be a good teacher of and excellent resource for EW if he wanted. He certainly knows a lot about it. Unfortunately, I can’t see that ever happening.
For me, I don’t use EW at all for my day-trading. I do use some of the EW concepts in my longer term swing trades, somewhat like Cobra does if you follow him, looking for corrective vs. impulsive moves, etc. As far as EW practitioners go, I think Pretzel is one of the best I’ve come across.
