Al Brooks Trading Course Review: Getting a PhD in Trading

Al Brooks recently completed a major update to his trading course. This review will give you an overview of his new trading course, his methodology, the pros and cons, and then we will relate some of our experiences applying his methodology.

Who is Al Brooks?

Al Brooks is a professional trader and trading educator who has been trading for 30 years. Before he became a full-time trader he was an ophthalmologist. He has become somewhat famous in the online trading world through his trilogy of books on price action trading (read about them on Amazon); he has also written several articles for Futures magazine. Some articles have referred to him as the ‘trader’s trader’. He runs two websites based around his trading techniques:

BrooksTradingCourse.com – This is the site where he sells his trading course and posts his blog articles.
BrooksPriceAction.com – This site hosts his Trading Room (see our review of his trading room) and a forum for traders using his methodology.

Also, he offers some good free information to help people get a better idea of what’s covered in his trading course.

25 Chapter Free Trading Course – Al created this text-only trading course to give traders an idea of what’s in the full video course.
10 Best Setups – A brief summary of Al’s 10 favorite trading setups.

Al Brooks’ Philosophy of Price Action Trading

Al Brooks claims that he has spent 10,000 hours testing computer trading systems using all kinds of indicators. The result of all of that research was that he decided to try trading without any indicators on his chart other than a 20 period EMA and that was when he started making money. All of his teaching is based on the idea of trading ‘pure price action’. By that he means getting all of his information from the candlestick bars on his chart and the 20 EMA. He believes every tick in the ES (SP500 futures contract) has meaning and that none of the price information is random noise.

His methodology has some similarities to traditional technical analysis (head and shoulders, double bottoms, etc.), but he also dismisses a lot of traditional technical analysis as nonsense. Compared to every other methodology we have studied, he places a lot of emphasis on reading subtle clues from every single candle on the chart and places less importance on the the larger and more obvious patterns that most technical analysts will point out. For example, he talks a lot about the close of candles, gaps between candles, whether candles close on their high or have tails, etc.

For further insight into his philosophy and background, watch this informative interview from late 2019

Is Al Brooks a Scam Artist?

I have read multiple reviews of Al Brooks on other trading review websites, and there are multiple reviews that say he is a scam artist or ‘snake oil salesman’. Their criteria for making that judgment seems to be based on the fact that he doesn’t trade live with screen sharing in his trading room so that you can see his order entry screen; and also they assume he must be a fake because he doesn’t have a clear track record of his trades for everyone to see.

In our article ‘How to Avoid Scammy Trade Rooms‘ we did mention some of those things as warning signs. However, you have to make a judgment on the totality of the evidence. There are reasons that good traders might not want to trade live in front of their trading room. For example, it could cause additional anxiety which could cause you to make mistakes, and it costs a fair amount of money to buy good screen sharing technology which could increase the cost of the trading room more than what the host wants to charge. Also, it takes time and concentration to run a trading room and explain your thinking and answer questions. This distraction may cause you to miss trades and thus make less money, and I believe this is the main reason Al doesn’t make more of an effort to do live trading. However, based on some things he’s said I believe Al is trying to find a way to do this at least occasionally.

It’s also possible a trading educator could be teaching good material that actually works, but the educator might not be able to trade live because they lack the discipline and mental makeup to execute their own system consistently. We don’t believe that to be the case with Al Brooks, but the point is still valid. Just because you don’t trade live in front of a trading room doesn’t necessarily mean you are a scam artist.

But the most important criteria is ‘Does the methodology that they teach have an edge?’. If someone is teaching techniques and information about the market that are true and actually work, then it’s difficult to accuse them of being a con man. And since Brooks’ techniques do work when applied correctly (based on our experience and others) I am confident in saying that he is NOT a scam artist, and anyone who says he is probably doesn’t know very much about trading or hasn’t really taken his course.

Course Overview

There are two versions of the Brooks Trading Course that are basically the same, the ‘Brooks Trading Course’ focuses on trading S&P 500 futures, and the ‘Brooks Forex Trading Course’ focuses on foreign exchange / currency trading. The material is mostly identical, but the examples use futures or forex charts respectively. You can buy both of them for a small additional charge.

Both courses currently have 180-190 videos totaling 90+ hours in length. The videos are divided into two main sections. The first is ‘Price Action Fundamentals’, and the second is ‘How to Trade’. They are further subdivided into categories with titles such as, ‘Getting Started’, ‘Market Cycle’, and ‘Charting Analysis’.

In Al’s original book, ‘Reading Price Charts Bar by Bar‘, he was criticized for being a poor writer and for being very hard to read. He has obviously put a lot of effort into getting better at explaining things, and this course should be valuable to very new and very experienced traders. The ‘Getting Started’ videos seem to assume very little experience in the markets and start off pretty basic; the very first video is ‘terminology’, which is important because Al has a lot of jargon that he developed just for his style of trading, and if you don’t understand what a high 1 or high 2 is, you’re going to get really lost when he explains what he’s seeing in the charts.

The videos are very professional and it is obvious how much thought went into each one. He uses a lot of chart examples, and the explanations can get confusing. But he uses color coded explanations on the chart to help the student know exactly what bars to look at and what he is pointing out about those bars. That technique is very helpful in making an inherently confusing subject reasonably understandable.

Although the course starts out with the basics it goes very deep fairly quickly. He goes into many different topics that we have never seen covered in any other trading course with topics such as ‘scaling in’, and ‘actual risk’. The course covers everything you need to know to analyze a chart, plan a trade, and manage your trade. There are sections on trading every type of market condition including trading ranges, weak trends, and strong trends. And Al goes over multiple types of setups in each market condition. And then there are several videos with example trades in all the different markets.

Although the course is very comprehensive, it is so broad and deep that it is very hard to take in all at once. It is not really possible to just watch the videos straight though and then start trading. The methodology is very subjective is many ways, and applying all the things he teaches can only be done with a lot of practice. Even the smartest traders are going to have to go back and review his concepts and his trades to really grasp what he is trying to communicate.

Another great feature of the Al Brooks methods are that they are very generalized. He has a theoretical framework for trading that takes into account all phases of the market, how price in a market actually works, and reading what the market participants are doing. His techniques are not based on seasonality, or market quirks and tendencies that may change over time. And unlike many quantitative and robot systems, his strategies are not based on market statistics created over a set period of time when the market may have been acting differently that it is now.

Because his techniques are so generalized and based on ever present market realities they can be applied to any time-frame and any market (assuming it has sufficient liquidity and volatility). That means that once you master his style of trading you should be set as a trader and you don’t need to learn any other systems.

Also, subscribers to his course will have access to his daily price action blog which is a very valuable resource. Every day he posts his thoughts on what the market is likely to do based on his read of the price action before the market opens. He then does one update about 20 minutes into trading, and then does a daily recap of what the day was like and what good setups he saw on the 5m chart of the e-mini. And recently he started doing a daily analysis of the EUR/USD also. We have found this daily blog to be a very valuable resource as you can compare your read of the market to his.

If you want to get a little bit of a feel for Al’s style, watch the video below where he goes over his 2020 outlook for the stock market.

Pros and Cons

Pros

• The course has A LOT of content, and the content is organized, well-presented, and goes very deep.
• Al’s price action methodology is very powerful and can be applied to all time-frames on any market.
• Unlike many other trading systems, the Brooks methodology is not subject to drawdowns during periods when the market is not in sync with the methodology. Rather, the core of the methodology is reading the current market condition and using strategies that are profitable in that market environment. That is not to say you won’t have drawdowns with his system, but the drawdowns are a result of misreading the market, bad execution, and the normal strings of bad luck that are inherent to the business of trading.
• Al is a very experienced trader who has spent a lot of time thinking deeply about how markets work and that is obvious from his teaching.
• His course is very low-priced (on sale for ~$350 currently) considering all of the great content he provides. He could easily sell it for $3000+.
• His member’s only daily blog is a very valuable resource for helping to understand the current market, and he also points out the setups he saw during the trading day. Reading his daily analysis is also really helpful in learning his methodology.
• The course videos are very professional and well thought through.

Cons

• The course has A LOT of content, and it takes a lot of mental effort and time to digest
• Related to the point above, because the methodology is complicated and subjective it takes a lot of practice to learn it. If you go through the forums on brookspriceaction.com, there are several threads about ‘Are you profitable trading this method.’ There are several posters who reply that they are making good money, but it took a couple years of practice before they started making consistent profits.
• Al uses a lot of his own jargon that takes some time learn. Thankfully he has a terminology video to help with this problem.

Our Experience with Al’s Methods

We have been applying Al’s methods to trading for a few years now after buying his books and his original trading course (which was much smaller and not as well presented). In no way would we claim to be an expert in the Al Brooks methodology, however we have still had some success by focusing on a few setups in certain market conditions. His methodology covers all types of market conditions and many setups. Each trader will surely feel more comfortable with certain markets and setups to begin with, and it is a good to focus on trading those, building confidence, and learning what factors in the market make a particular setup more or less likely to be successful.