Starting traders ask me to recommend and, increasingly, to run seminars on trading. It never ceases to amaze me how many online requests I receive. The inquirers have in common that they are well educated but not very experienced at trading and they are willing to invest significant money in gaining the magic touch from a guru. I tell them the game does not work like that. I advise them to go away and do some low-level trading themselves for six months or a year, practising money management. They may consult books like this one, which is not going to break the bank.

If the trader then still wants expensive training, he or she will be more ready. There are some esoteric training programmes on offer, including based on - wait for it - astrology, whose most famous user, albeit on a closet basis, was trader William G Gann. Even nonsensical trading systems can work if, alongside their selection criteria, they require standard money management techniques, including cutting losses and running profits. I know of one trader who used astrology to trade successfully, as it seemed to me, because of that discipline.

Most training for traders is more on the conventional side. It focuses on money management, charting, and deploying a range of financial instruments, particularly derivatives. There is no shortage of self-proclaimed experts who will take your shilling. But any who make money as traders are, for obvious reasons, thin on the ground.

The seminar business does not have a register of approved persons like for brokers. I know of some real rogues who have jumped onto the training bandwagon, including one fresh out of jail for securities theft.

The free seminars run by firms are often the most insidious. They tend to promote technical analysis in too simplistic a way and may encourage frequent trading, which often benefits nobody but the broker. I know of firms that bribe delegates at free seminars to sign up as clients.

Other seminars are simply an advert for expensive software or training. I know of one individual who places huge adverts for a free course regularly in the national press. The course, run from a hired hotel room, is a pack of lies designed to suggest that it is easy to make huge profits on the stock market, and, at the end, most of those present are persuaded to get out their credit cards and pay for an expensive follow-up course. You have every right to spend your money on such showmanship but, please, do it with your eyes open.