BPA trading room Q&A: April 21, 2015
When are you planning on releasing new videos for your trading course? Can you discuss what it will cover?
Audio duration: 5min 36sec — Scroll down for video slide samples and transcript.
Brooks Trading Course update
Video slide samples – No audio narration (4min 20sec)
This video is much faster than the actual speed because I wanted traders to be able to quickly see what the changes look like. Please do leave comments below if you wish to share your feedback or have questions on course update. A full length video lesson will be available later to better show the complex animations, and invite more feedback.
Audio transcript
I’m no Leonardo
Yeah, I’m in the process of totally redoing the trading course, but I’m not Leonardo Da Vinci. Leonardo Da Vinci carried the Mona Lisa around with him for 20 or 30 years and he kept adding to it – kept touching it up, kept touching it up; became this, life-long project, and for me, the trading course is that way as well. I get a lot of questions in the room, I get emails, I get questions on the trading course website, questions when I speak, when I do webinars, and all of that gives me an idea of what traders need from the course to make it more useful.
I’ve been resistant to learning on how to make better PowerPoints, but over the past couple of months I’ve spent a lot of time learning. People have been helping me, but I’ve been learning a lot about how to make much more useful PowerPoints. And in the course right now, you’ll notice that there are a lot of slides that are all text, and sometimes there’ll be five, 10 slides in a row without text. Well in the new version of the course almost every slide has charts. But it’s going to take me six months to complete. I don’t know if I can do it in six months. I think I have probably another 800 hours of work to do. That’s not an exaggeration. There are a couple of people who know what I’m doing and I show them stuff, they’re helping me a lot. Based upon what they’re telling me I should do to make the course really user-friendly, and based upon the rate at which I’m accomplishing what they’re doing, I think it’s going to take me maybe six months to complete what I really want to do.
Most trading course text replaced by charts
And what I’ve done so far, I think, is very useful. I think traders are going to find it much easier to use than anything else I’ve ever done. So instead of a lot of text slides, I’m having a lot of charts – almost every slide is a chart with new material to the left of it and then animations going through taking traders through step by step by step. Next year, I’m hoping to add video to the course as well, but that’s going to take me probably at least a year. I first have to get through the current project. So what I’m hoping to do next year is use Camtasia or some other screen capture program to capture trades that I’m placing on my other computer and then put them into the course. If I do the Camtasia capturing of trades, which I’m hoping that I will do, I’ll probably also put them on the Brooks Trading Course website. But that is way down the line.
Right now I’m redoing the course, and I have to say I like doing the course. I’m an old guy now, I’m 63. I used to like watching a lot of sports. I used to like watching even sitcoms, and now, for whatever reason, I’ve lost interest. Maybe I’ve seen every variation on every theme so that a lot of what’s on TV at night is uninteresting. I play tennis several days a week, I run, I lift weights. I live a pretty quiet life. I see my kids occasionally. My fiancé, Laura, and I, we go out to dinner almost every night, but we don’t really socialize much, I like life living a very quiet life and I like sitting in front of my computers and thinking. I’m constantly thinking about things. And it makes me happy to sit down and try to create slides that I think will be helpful to traders, and that’s what I do right now with my spare time. It will probably take me six months to do it, to go through all the slides – and it’s not an exaggeration. I think it’s going to take me 800 to 1,000 hours to redo all of the slides, at least that’s what I calculate now based upon the rate at which I’m doing it.
Audio and video recording
And then I have to record everything. And now that I’m getting old, as you can tell, my voice tends to crack after I talk for a while, so to record the videos to create the audio for the PowerPoints, I have to talk – some of the videos are 30 minutes long – I’m keeping all the videos on the new course to about 30 minutes. Right now, there are some videos that are over an hour; I have broken those into two or three videos going forward. Also, I have numbers on all of the slides so it will be easy if you’re going through the video – it will be easier than ever – you’re on slide 31 or something. And I also put a little Table of Contents at the start of each PowerPoint so that you’ll have some idea of what the video will have.
With the audio, I probably can talk 10 or 20 minutes without my voice getting too unpleasant, so even to record a 30 minute PowerPoint is going to take me probably several hours. Since I’m breaking videos up into pieces, instead of 50 videos I’ll probably have 65 videos, and they’ll all be about 30 minutes long. But it’s still 30, 35 hours, and if it takes me three hours to record each, that will be another 100 or 200 hours on top of the 800 to 1,000 hours I need to create the slides. I’m not going to do the editing of the audio and video; I have someone who’s going to do that for me. However, the little pieces that I’ve seen so far, the little testing that we’ve done, I think traders are going to be really, really happy with how it turns out.
To me, I’m really happy with it, and it’s part of my motivation. I feel like I’m doing something really good and helpful, but also there’s a certain amount of creative element to it. I’m kind of prosaic, kind of concrete and I’m not good artistically. But I do feel I’m pretty good at logically organizing things, and understanding things, and communicating things. I’m working really hard to try to communicate really well with the new videos. So to me, I think they’re going to be fabulous. I think it’s going to be really, really good. But assuming I can keep at the pace that I’m doing, it’s probably going to take me six months to complete the project.
So that’s a long answer to the question.
Al Brooks
Information on Al’s Online day trading room