Quote from: SamboNZ on April 27, 2014, 07:56:07 AM

However, I am torn between spending the time and money to learn how to trade myself vs getting a real expert to do it for me.

I would really like to be able to do this myself, and while I believe I have the discipline, intelligence and personality required to be successful at it, I would be doing it part time (although conceivably with the help of some bots) and frankly, given the massive potential pitfalls that this kind of endeavor entails, I'm not sure that my available time is going to be enough to be successful at it.

I'm not a financial advisor, so I am not qualified to give you direct advice for your situation, but here's my opinion on people looking to get into trading:

Quote from: Goomboo on January 13, 2014, 02:13:48 AM

My advice to someone wanting to get into this business but not willing to put in the work necessary to beat the competition - don't. The S&P 500 historically returns around 11.96% per year - in the long run, the casual participant is significantly better off by buying an index ETF (US: SPY is good) and focusing on the day job. 66% of currency traders consistently lose money in every single quarter. The odds don't favor speculative traders.

This is my personal opinion - I'm not a registered financial advisor. Best of luck.

Quote from: SamboNZ on April 27, 2014, 07:56:07 AM

So after researching all this, I know how to start going about learning how to trade, but what I am having huge problems finding is experienced, legitimate, successful BTC traders who I can trust with my money. There are a couple on CryptoStocks which look ok, but it's almost impossible to verify who's legit and who's scamming on that site as most of the companies are not verified and offer very little in the way of other ways to verify themselves.

I see the 'Currensee' site mentioned in this thread, which is a pretty cool concept, but I'm after a BTC based trading company. Does anyone have any suggestions / recommendations?

Even in the regulated markets, there are very few traders that you can trust. Results shown are hypothetical or displayed in such a way as to mask the destructive habits of traders. For example, I can make a strategy in 10 minutes that will produce a beautiful performance chart but is destined to fail. For an off-the-cuff estimate, I'd say that 90% of traders offering their services fall into one of the following categories:

1) Scammers presenting false results with the intention of outright theft
2) Tricksters realizing that their system is the result of curve-fitting and martingale betting, hoping to make a quick buck from a few weeks of successful performance before the account is destroyed
3) Naive individuals who think that a few dozen successful trades equates to trading success

Quote from: SamboNZ on April 27, 2014, 07:56:07 AM

I am having huge problems finding is experienced, legitimate, successful BTC traders who I can trust with my money.

To speak directly to your question: it is difficult to find a successful, legitimate, and experienced trader in any market, let alone BTC, where the lack of regulation results in even greater dishonesty. Finding good traders and money managers can be so difficult that there is a subset of the money management industry which tries to identify the best. If I were tasked with hiring good traders, I would require the following:

1) Low winning percentage. This is perhaps the biggest indicator of a troubled trader. The outcome of any trade is essentially random. Bad traders have a psychological need to win individual (random) trades, so they will quickly cut trades that go in their favor and hold losing trades until the market turns around. This is a deadly flaw which will eventually result in account destruction. Losing traders love to boast about how successful they are "I win 95% of my trades". If you win $1 for 95 out of 100 trades but lose $1000 on the other 5%, you're a terrible trader in my book.

As one of the Market Wizards from Jack Schwager's book said:

"One common adage on this subject that is completely wrongheaded is: you can't go broke taking profits. That's precisely how many traders do go broke. While amateurs go broke by taking large losses, professionals go broke by taking small profits. The problem in a nutshell is that human nature does not operate to maximize gain but rather to maximize the chance of gain. The desire to maximize the number of winning trades (or minimize the number of losing trades) works against the trader. The success rate of trades is the least important performance statistic and may even be inversely related to performance."
- William Eckhardt

2) Average winning trade gain multiples larger than average losing trade loss. A good trader understand that he's just playing a numbers game - he must cut his losing trades quickly and let his winning trades travel as far as the market provides. For example, if a trader makes an average return of 5% on winning trades but only loses around 1% on his losing trades, he can be successful by winning 30% of all trades.

3) Willingness to display track record and provide account statements so that you can reproduce the track record yourself.

4) Humility. You can't work in a field in which success means losing money on 70-80% of your decisions and make bombastic claims about calling the market direction.

There are several other criteria I could rattle off, but these will filter out most of the bad apples - assuming you can even get honest trading results in the first place.