Last night I went to bed early, and I also woke up early. I checked Monday’s close and planned to rest for a while. I’ve been thinking: does having a trading mentor really guarantee you’ll make money? In other words, with someone to guide you, you can avoid ten years’ worth of crooked detours—right? I feel the truth is that when someone guides you, the most they can produce is a “high-spec, premium version” of a useless person! Wow, Coach—aren’t you guys at BTB investment research doing training? This is basically self-destructing your money-making path.

In traditional industries, it’s like this: if an expert guides you for five or ten years, you can basically become a half-expert in that field. But trading isn’t like that. If you replicate all my trading systems, my money management, my market feel, and so on, can you get onto the fast track to making money? That’s not possible. You can’t replicate my two-stake rises and falls, the pain that I still remember vividly—pain that you can’t replicate. You can’t replicate the process by which I found my “enlightenment.” You can’t replicate the cycle where people lifted me up and then spat me out. You can’t replicate the “muscle” and sensory intuition I built through losing money.

After I finish teaching my students, and sometimes when I find good assets to share, they can make money—but there’s a deadly illusion here. It’s that they think they’ve made money in my understanding, not in their own belief. A lot of the time, I use my own rules to block them from having to refine their mindset, and from having to endure the portion of pain they should have worked through themselves.

What guidance can give you is a systematic framework—experience, risk control, and efficient information filtering. It can greatly compress your trial-and-error costs so you lose less money and avoid wasting money in the wrong places. It’s like learning a trade: if someone who knows the business guides you, at least it can help you avoid buying fakes. But the kind of “muscle memory” that comes from actually doing it, the panic that the market brings, and how to keep acting on your own judgment—those require you to practice yourself. Just like fitness: the coach teaches you the proper technique, but your muscles can only be torn and rebuilt by you as you push them hard until they grow back.

Once you’ve spent a few years exploring on your own and still can’t achieve consistent profitability, then yes—by all means you should look for a teacher. But it’s not a teacher who just tells you, “What to buy, when to buy it, when to sell.” Instead, it’s a teacher who can point out, in just a few sentences, why you keep making the same mistakes. The kind of teacher who can send a chill down your spine with just a single sentence. That kind of teacher only shows up under one condition: when you keep making mistakes, get beaten up by the market, and even with self-study you still can’t find a way to achieve stable profits.

What a coach can do is control the trial-and-error cost for students. But you still have to go through every part of the trial-and-error process—otherwise, how would you know that the techniques I’m talking about only account for 10–20% of a full trading system? How would you know why 30% of the market moves are things you can’t understand? Why you can’t trade futures? What exactly is going on with “false breakouts,” etc. A friend told me that in August he planned to come and learn, holding over a million in funds to trade futures, and he told me he wanted to trade futures. As someone new to the circle, I advised him to start by trying with 100u first—see whether he can continuously make money. If he can’t, then protect your principal, and control your hands. That’s what I, Coach, can do. As for him insisting on using over a million to experience the process and results of losing while trading futures—I can’t stop that. It’s something you have to go through to be tempered yourself, but the price is just too high.