Forget what they tell you in the interview for the trainee trader career program as you will be sold a dream about training and mentoring so you have the best chance of becoming a successful trader. Unfortunately the experience received does not meet this expectation. The “intensive three month career program” is a laughable. Firstly, the course material is poor and doesn't meet the standard of an off the shelf introduction to trading book. Your first two weeks of the course are taken up by basic PowerPoint slides; and the second week is simply a repeat.
Unfortunately, you won’t be shown any real life examples of trades that have been made. They do claim on their website: Our professional mentors will guide you through the trading process step-by-step from devising trading strategies to real-time trading, as well as adjusting any immediate trading decisions to reach our profit target and prepare you to become a professional trader.
Reality: Apart from the guy who teaches the PowerPoint there were no “mentors”. They don’t guide you through the process to devise trading strategies and won’t really speak to you about your strategies until the last two weeks of the assessment period when you have some one-on-one meetings. When help was asked for, you would get about a minute or two of their time and brushed off quite quickly with responses like: Trading can’t be taught as it’s a personal thing and only you can figure this out.
So, from week two onwards you will be left to your own devices on the simulators to pretty much figure things out on your own and hopefully come up with a strategy that works. The usual day was: turn up, watch Youtube to get some ideas on developing a strategy, watch the market, place some trades on the simulator, hope that they work out. Oh and the IT they provide was terrible, everyone had to share a computer with another person to gain access to a charting package. The alternative was to use yahoo finance charts...
The last 4 weeks were the “assessment period” which was a classic –being left alone on the simulators, writing your trades down on a sheet (none of the trades you made could be verified) and some individuals in the class scrubbing their bad trades and just listing the successful ones – hilarious!
So all in all the basic formula is 15-20 students are taken every 3 months, each pay their £4800 fee for the remote possibility to get a job offer at the end of the "course" period. Rinse and repeat.
From my experience I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone.