What Should I Ask a Trading Coach Before Paying?

First, turn the fee into a percentage

A fee is not expensive or cheap in dollars; it is expensive or cheap relative to the capital it is supposed to improve. Do this before anything else.

• $150/month on a $10,000 account is $1,800 a year, an 18.0% hurdle.
• $150/month on a $50,000 account is 3.6%.
• $500/month on a $50,000 account is $6,000 a year, 12.0%.

Nothing about the coach changed between those lines. An 18.0% hurdle means the instruction has to beat a year of index returns before you are level, which is a high bar for anything; 3.6% is a rounding error against a decent month. The same fee is a different decision at a different account size, and the reason so many of these arrangements disappoint is that the arithmetic was never done.

The nine questions

1. What did your worst three months look like? Complete answers name numbers.
2. Can I see a continuous record rather than selected trades? Continuity is the property; 12 months unbroken beats 40 good screenshots.
3. Were the entries recorded before the fact? The single decisive question.
4. What is the reward-to-risk of the method, and its breakeven win rate? If the method runs at 0.5R, it needs 2 trades in 3 — ask whether the live results clear it.
5. How many trades is the track record? Under 100 is an anecdote.
6. Am I buying instruction or signals? Different products, different risks. A signal you cannot grade is worth less than a method you can test.
7. What happens if I stop paying — do I keep anything? Instruction persists. Access does not.
8. How is progress measured? Answers like "consistency" cannot be checked. Expectancy over a defined trade count can.
9. What do you not teach? A specific answer indicates a defined method. "Every market condition" indicates a marketing page.

What the answers are worth

An honest coach answers all nine in a paragraph each, and several of the answers will be unflattering — the drawdown was 22%, the sample is 140 trades, the method stops working in chop. Specific and unflattering is what a real record sounds like. Confident and unbounded is what a sales page sounds like, and the difference is legible without any expertise on your part.

Bring your own evidence too

The second half of the transaction is your side of it. If your own record is a spreadsheet written up at weekends, then six months from now the question "did this coaching work?" resolves into how you feel about it, which is exactly the wrong instrument. A record made trade by trade, before each outcome, answers it in numbers instead.

A tenth question, if you want the strongest one available: ask what their results would look like presented to the standard the profession already uses. The GIPS standards require fair representation and full disclosure, with performance across every portfolio rather than the ones that worked.^[1] Nobody is obliged to comply. The answer to being asked is informative.

Two of the answers are worth weighing against published figures whichever way they come back. A method that requires more trading starts from behind: across 66,465 households at a discount broker, the most active traders earned 11.4% a year against a 17.9% market.^[2] And the record you are shown is the record that survived — survivorship bias, meaning the failures never enter the count, measured on fund performance in 1992.^[3]

kappi is a trade recorder: you commit a trade before the fact, it is sealed on your device for a time-capsuled delay you choose, then kappi publishes it on a Merkle-anchored log. The record is yours to share, with whoever you choose. $15/month, no free tier.