Krach review: Simon Kloot’s Professional Trading with Institutional Supply & Demand
RSI is telling you to buy. But hold on. MACD is telling you it’s going down. Meanwhile, price is just ranging! What do we do? What indicator do we adhere to? Where the hell are we going? Simon Kloot has provided us with his answer: the ‘Professional Trading with Institutional Supply & Demand’ course, available on Udemy.
A few months ago a friend of mine began trading. He did all the usual. He listened to some experienced traders, set up a Tradingview account, went to Binance, got a signal from Twitter and put in his long. Days later, he was up! 20 freaking percent! Price had hit his target and he was on the moon. A few days later, he put in some more money for his next trade and he lost. Forgot to put in his stop-loss, so he went down hard. He decided he wanted to learn to evaluate the signals he got. Hell, maybe he could even learn to trade? So he studied charts, watched some Youtube videos and read a book. The two monitors he sat behind for all those nights were riddled with indicators. RSI. MACD. Bollinger Bands. Ichimoku. The works. He was prepared to win.
He didn’t.
He lost.
Multiple, multiple times.
He decided to stop trading for a while. Study first. He bought about a thousand hours of courses and realised he didn’t have the time to go through all of them, so he asked me — a price action trader — to check out Simon Kloot’s course.
The creator
Simon Kloot is a trader with over fifteen years of experience in the Commodities and Forex market. For the past five years he has been trading the Cryptocurrency market as well. He diligently posts clean charts on Twitter with frequent updates and is eager to reply. However forthright he may be, he does not go into his methods all too deeply. But that’s what his course is for.
Presentation
The course is called ‘Professional Trading with Institutional Supply & Demand’. The videoclips are short (about six minutes on average). In this 3.5 hour lecture, Simon narrates cool as a cucumber as we look at slides with his definitions and drawings of patterns. In later segments he follows up the slides with a live demonstration on a historic chart.
The course is packaged neatly and succinctly. Sometimes too succinct, because as soon as Simon demonstrates the method on a chart, you’ll often find yourself wondering why he uses this zone as a supply zone, but question why he doesn’t use that zone, but since the content has been segmented into small bits, ranging from beginner to advanced, we hope he’ll elaborate in a future segment and leave it at that for now. Since there’s also a pdf with all the slides on them for reference, we’ll be able to read everything back if need be. Handy indeed.
Content
The course starts off very well. Kloot illustrates the fallacies of indicators succinctly, yet clearly. He proceeds to show you what does work: price action and supply and demand zones. He shows you how to draw these zones and where he puts stop-losses and in addition he shows you the way market makers manipulate price and speaks on the topics of risk management and trading psychology. He never overloads you with information and he never contradicts himself.
There are a few exceptions.
Although he goes deep into S&D zones and target-setting, you’ll sometimes be left confused and finding another exception on the demonstrated chart where we ‘just missed the target by a few pips’. You’ll be wondering, “Missed it by a few pips? What does that mean? Should I adjust my target lower next time? Or should I wait for price to go back?” and be left sans clarity.
Beginning traders especially could easily fail to draw supply and demand zones correctly. Kloot draws a few examples, but I can imagine novices to becoming overwhelmed by the loose approach and constantly think, “Well, why didn’t he go for the previous close as the top part of the demand zone?” Also, at one moment he fills the screen with supply and demand zones without providing us with a clear definition on why price would bounce there or even how we know if price is going toward that zone.
Check the example below. The top zone on the right can actually be extended to the left where price had broken that zone on the upswing and then bounced off of it three times on the downswing before it broke after the fourt attempt. If we hadn’t considered that zone and entered and price would have shot back to our stop-loss, we would have been screwed.
Unfortunately, apart from supply and demand zones, all the other topics are so condensed, it will only give you a vague understanding of them, never mind applying them.
Take ‘risk management’. R:R (risk to reward ratio) is discussed as well as a little bit of insight when it comes to philosophy, but how does risk management relate to our method of trading?
The applicability and the connection to price action trading are often lost.
Take also the topic of ‘market manipulation’. With the word ‘institutional’ in the title, one would expect a deeper look into what the ‘rich, old guys in their ivory towers’ are doing in great detail and how you could benefit.
No.
The only time market manipulation is discussed is in reference to a pattern which in retrospect you could have taken advantage of, but — again, without giving away too much —you’ll be left wondering how one could apply it in real-time, especially with the way he draws his stop-loss level.
An extension of that example is when price breaks out, but it actually being a fake-out (price goes into the opposite direction). In an ideal world you would want him to explain how to arm ourselves against fake-outs, but it never happens. I understand not wanting to base teachings on exceptions, but if you mention them and if they make or break your method, is it silly to ask for further details?
In the Advanced section, Simon has some gems which he discusses openly like ‘the Engulfing pattern’. Again, I’m not giving away the content, but this pattern offers an indication as to where price will go.
The problem here is that multiple timeframes offer multiple zones and a multitude of these patterns. Which one to pick?
The same doubt rears its head in the discussion of a zone that has been touched only once, yet something happens that does not fall in line with his theory. Simon proceeds to explain this strange phenomenon by going to a lower timeframe, zooming in and showing us the many touches we could not see on a higher timeframe.
Yes, but if we zoom in on any lower timeframe, wouldn’t multiple touches be an expected occurrence on any chart?
He also talks about price patterns where pattern A (which will invoke a bounce) and pattern B (which will break through) look almost identical. The patterns can be interpretated in different ways on different timeframes. I wish I could share this section without giving it away, but when Kloot explains the difference on a fully-formed chart, it’s like him pointing to a silhouette of either a duck or a goose while he is looking behind the curtain.
He also talks about a zone becoming exhausted, but offers no clear indication on how to gauge this before price enters the zone.
The live trading examples don’t really go into these examples. In fact, most of what is discussed does not return in the example videos. It makes it difficult to evaluate the method. You start to wonder how he ever determines where price is headed.
After one video Simon explains a difficult notion with a few exceptions to which the answer is, “You’ll learn by practicing the method.” Of course trading is a skill that needs to be trained, but in offering a course, one cannot rely on practice to fill in the grey zones the course introduces. Imagine a car dealer telling you, “You can stop the car from moving by pushing in the brake pedal with your foot, but unfortunately that doesn’t work all the time, so you have to do something else to stop the car, but I can’t really tell you how to do that or even how to know beforehand if the pedal isn’t going to work, but with practice you’ll learn”.
Apart from the depth with which Kloot goes into the supply and demand zones and the way he simplifies the topics, a third highlight are the exercises. He offers two handfuls of exercises so you can become a better trader and understand the method better. Also, you have the ability to check his charts on Twitter and Tradingview. One advice would be to wait for a chart to come out, not look at the chart, but only the pair and then do it for yourself and see if it matches up with Simon’s chart.
Effectiveness
I forced myself to use this method for a few trades and found myself constantly applying the knowledge I already had to make up for the ‘grey zones’ Kloot had left. The simplicity of the method is where both its value and its downfall lies. Too many times I had to rely on the knowledge I already had to fill in the gaps. Too may times did I know which zone to use and which not to use due to my own experience. Mind you, Simon Kloot himself says in the description on Udemy, it’s not the Holy Grail of trading and he is completely right about that. You will still have to discover a lot of things for yourself through practice, but also how to correctly draw supply and demand zones, because he just leaves that part open.
The good part is that this course will set you on the right path and is clear and short enough to not overload you (like the book Naked Forex where a million patterns are explained with a billion criteria which leave you paralyzed). You will want to get out there and trade and with this you have that possibility.
Interactivity
According to my friend and the reviews Simon is quite helpful and does his best to respond to emails from students. Unfortunately, due to the account not being mine, I did not get to evaluate this personally, so this is a simple case of ‘ benefit of the doubt’.
Price
The course costs 199 dollars. Compared to many other lesser trading courses on Udemy -one being just an explanation on how to set up a cryptocurrency wallet- this actually is a reasonable price. However, apart from a few gems, you’ll find most of the information on Youtube for free, but you’ll spend hours and maybe days trying to form a coherent method as Kloot did. You have to decide if that’s worth 200 dollars.
Conclusion
I was really doubting whether to give this a 6 or a 7. On one hand, beginners will actually learn some things, not get overloaded with difficult concepts and jargon and will be able to take their first steps almost right after. On the other hand, they could become confused by the identical patterns, the seemingly selective drawing of S&D zones and the non-applicative nature of the other topics. Especially to someone who has worked with indicators and wants to look at price action, this course can be like rowing without paddles.
But if you’re a more experienced trader interested in some gems from an experienced price action trader to supplement his own strategy, this course will do that.
If you’re a beginner who wants detailed explanations on entries, exits, when to trade and when not to trade and expect a full-fledged strategy after 3.5 hours, this course is not for you.
If you are a beginner looking to understand the basics and take their first steps to becoming a profitable trader, this course provides just that.
Krach Score: 7/10
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Simon Kloot’s info: Udemy & Twitter
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