Website Reviews

About EliteTrader.com

Elite Trader is one of the oldest and most popular trading forums on the internet. I'm not sure what year it was founded, but it has been around since as long as I can remember. It is run by (I believe) a guy named "Baron Robertson" from Orlando.

Most people use the site for the forums, but there are other sections of the site (broker reviews, software reviews, book reviews, and options analysis). The reviews section, which some people think is the best section of the site, has very bad reviews. Most of the reviews are just sparse one-liners and biased, one-dimensional reviews. Investimonials has much higher-quality reviews.

The forums at Elite Trader have a different mix of traders (systems traders, discretionary traders, day-traders, swing traders, traders who work in the industry). There are probably a few well-known trading people people who post in the ET forums, although the only names that come to mind right now are Timothy Sykes (who hasn't posted since 2007), Don Bright (of Bright Trading), and Michael Covel (of Turtles fame).

My Opinion

Elite Trader is a major dissapointment. Basically, 99% of the posts are crap and 1% are great. The low signal-to-noise ratio makes it not worth the time to go through all the junk to find the good stuff.

Most of the Elite Trader critics complain that there are too many ads and self-promotional posts. Personally, I don't think this is true at all. For me, the problem is the supposedly legitimate posters. The negative attitudes contaminate any sense of civility in most of the threads. Some of the posters are pathologically snarky and jump all over other people. Other posters have huge egos. If someone mentions Ed Seykota, there will be 50 posters who talk about him as if they know him personally. Other posters act like know-it-alls. If someone posts a question about order routing for example, you will get 2 guys bickering back and forth who both claim to know exactly how the microstructure of the market works - and that the other guy is a complete idiot. Although I haven't posted there much at all, there have been times where I needed some info from other traders so I posted an extremely simple question, only to receive completely inane and useless answers. I get the feeling that the better traders (and posters) are just lurking because they spend most of their time trading and also have a low tolerance for the typical Elite Trader bullshit.

Although most critics complain that Elite Trader isn't moderated enough, the real problem, in my opinion, is simply the overall "personality" of the forums. Most forum owners are very aware that you need to take a leadership role in setting the tone for conversation within the community. But Elite Trader is essentially a completely open forum (with regard to attitude, if not content). Think of it as a Craigslist Rants & Raves - but for traders.

As far as the positive things about Elite Trader, it does make entertaining reading during downtime. And, because there are so many people posting, the forum incidentally acts as a news forum where posters can get information about recent events in the trading world. For example, if you need first-hand information from other traders about something like the flash crash, then you'll find it on ET. Because of the news-like utility of the site, it reminds me of the 2+2 forums in the online poker world.

Although I have never looked at the trader journals section of the forum very much, I think this section of the site would be very useful to a newbie trader who wants to look over the shoulder of a real money trader. There are enough journals so that there will probably be one where the writer has the same strategy as you (e.g. contrarian swing trading, writing credit spreads, etc).

The best thing about the site, by far, is the high volume of posts and the varied categories of forums. If you want to start a conversation with 20 other traders about the wheat/corn spread, then you'll be able to do it on ET but probably wouldn't be able to do it anywhere else.