Mentoring has become quite popular these years. In the center of this movement we can encounter experts that for some fee help other people make a career, develop skills, and avoid typical mistakes in certain branches of knowledge.

The advantage of this method of education is that the student can get knowledge filled with practical skills. In trading, these services are also popular. With it, some managers started off as experts and even opened schools of trading and investments.

However, beginners are wondering how to choose a mentor. People take different ways of doing it: some find a mentor at once, some start off with self-education. In the latter case, fees are charged by the market in the form of losses that traders experience for mistakes. This article is devoted to the details of mentoring in trading: why experts for it and how a beginner should choose a tutor.

Why should an experienced trader teach someone

When a beginner starts looking for a mentor, they encounter ads of many traders who, in their turn, demonstrate impressive results and sums with many zeros. A question appears: why do they need to teach someone else and take more eyes for this? To my mind, there are several reasons:

1. New source of income
If a trader charges fees for learning, this means they want a compensation for their time and effort they could spend on trading. Hence, such lessons cannot be cheap. Moreover, this way managers can make money on attracting people — their students — to partnership programs of brokers. This is how traders make money on their trading. Most often, students become investors and increase the capital of their manager.

2. Vanity
Human qualities are also their in traders, and many of them crave for social recognition. They enjoy happy feedback from former students. Some managers just enjoy the process of teaching.

3. Enthusiasm
There are categories of people who are eager to be useful for the society. Such experts are few, but enthusiasm can also drive people into mentoring

I will single out special cases when people cannot trade successfully for psychological reasons. Excitement, lack of mental balance, emotional unstability are the reasons for negative trading history. Howevee, they have pedagogical experience, experience, and knowledge. On the other hand, such traders are hard to distinguish from frauds that seek likes and subscribers in social networks.

How to choose a mentor?

Understanding the motives that drive traders into teaching, let us find out how to choose a good mentor.

Firstly, make up your mind about your goals. Do you need to learn the basics or make your trading better? In the first case, when you need the basics, there is no reason for seeking help of an experienced trader. On the Net, there are plenty of free materials that can help you find your way through the main notions and categories. Then you can practice on a demo account, then switch to a cent account, and then decide on your trading style depending on your character. Thus you will get some experience, positive or not.

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Choosing a mentor, check for not only their results but also the type of their trading system. If you are psychologically uncomfortable with scalping, there is no reason for learning from a scalper as you will have no result.

The following factors are important:

1. Statistics of trading. You mentor must have a public account showing the results of all of their trades.
2. Trusting contact. The mentor must seem nice to you because financial issues require mutual trust.
3. The tutor must not promise you miracles. No expert can give a 100% guarantee of efficacy of their trading system. If you face such a trader, think twice before learning from them. The mentor must be ready to tell the bitter truth, shaking the student up. This is the issue of being sincere.
4. The mentor must make room for your initiative. Otherwise, you will have trouble trading on your own. Your practice in the real market should take up at least 40% of your learning time. Many aspects are better understood in practice.

Some mentors have chars in messengers where you can meet previous graduates. Take a month to monitor the quality of the trader's analysis by getting the initial knowledge yourself, as I said above. Otherwise, you might fall prey to your own credulity.

Price and length of learning

The price of your learning will depend on the expertize of your trader. I advise you against courses cheaper than 150 USD for group learning. As I wrote above, the manager will try to compensate for the time they spent on the students. Moreover, the price will be influenced by the number of successful students and the profitability of their trading.

As for the length of learning, you will need no less than 3 months. Get ready for the way to be long. Optimum length is 6 months.

Also, check for the form of learning. You can study:

  1. In a group.
  2. Individually.
  3. In the form of consultations, studying just certain blocks of the program.

Closing thoughts

With time, a beginner realizes the necessity to learn from a more experienced manager. The demand for such services forms the supply of mentoring services.

Basic motives that make traders work as teachers are additional income, the development of a partnership network, and subjective psychological factors. Choosing a mentor, check the statistics of their public trading account, make sure the trading system suits your character, and never trust their promises for 100%.

The price of the course depends on the popularity of the mentor and the profitability of the strategy. The length of learning may vary from 3 to 6 months. Try to learn individually.