The Active Traders community was a great experience. Some of you here have had the chance to take that journey with me and I'm eternally grateful! The idea of Active Traders was to see if we could build an army of traders pooling their brain power together using the same methodology to achieve impossible results. Yes, an overly ambitious goal, but an exciting journey none the less.
I believe the community was live for almost 4 years. In that time we reached many people, and helped some traders develop their craft. However, it did come with a price. Chat rooms in the small cap or OTC world gained a reputation for being quite toxic. They attract people who are at their weakest, and prey on their wants not their needs. For me, being the gatekeeper of the #activetraders discord community, it took a huge amount of effort to advertise our room as the opposite of a "quick win by shadowing", "hot stock tips", "make a quick buck", type of room. We were about the journey of learning. We were plagued by gamblers, compared to other rooms who made ridiculous promises, and I slowly realized that this uphill battle would only get worse and more expensive to maintain.
Bringing it all back, the real objective of the chat room was to trade and learn with like minded traders while sharing and developing my own methodology. With a baby on the way, and an opportunity to trade with a reputable firm, I realized that this objective no longer fit my own goals and in fact, doesn't help the traders who had worked with me so closely in the community move to the next level. Your path to learning isn't improved by ghosting the trades of a streamer, or trying to mimic someone else's success. It's improved by learning and failing on your own terms. And the only way to do that is to be free of the crutch of a "chat room" and just go trade. Test out what you've learned, and then learn from it. Lose small, lose small... then win big. In my opinion, trading chat rooms become a sink for your trading potential in exchange for a sense of belonging.
In closing, this is why I closed the room. It was the right time to, and I was confident the traders who were part of that community already had the tools necessary to stand on their own. It's with the knowledge of that experience that I open a forum for discussion, much better suited for self development in this craft we call trading.
