Trading Courses: What to Check Before You Pay
A trading course is paid instruction in how to trade, sold as videos, live classes or a membership. Before paying, check what the seller can document: the Federal Trade Commission has sued course sellers whose earnings claims had no support, including one that collected more than $370 million.
Trading courses range from a single recorded class to memberships with live sessions, chat rooms and coaching. Some teach well. The trouble is that the buyer cannot see the quality until after paying, and the federal cases against course sellers show sales pitches built on income claims rather than on teaching.
How it works
The product is information, sold before it is tested. A course is usually a set of lessons on a strategy, with extras such as live trading sessions, a community or signals. The price covers access, not a result.
The seller is paid at the sale. A course business earns from what it sells, whether or not the buyer later makes money trading. That is not a sign of bad faith; it is simply where the incentive sits, and it is why the claims in the pitch deserve the most checking.
The pitch leans on outcomes. The FTC cases below describe pitches built on depictions of wealth, lifestyle posts on social media and claims that instructors were successful traders. US law does not ban earnings claims, but the FTC’s position in its 2020 case was that a seller needs “a reasonable basis” for one, in the words of its consumer protection director.
A worked example
Take a hypothetical buyer with a $10,000 trading account considering a $2,000 course.
- The course fee is a cost the account has to earn back: $2,000 / $10,000 = 20% of the account.
- So the account has to gain 20% before the course has paid for itself, and that is before commissions, spreads or any losing trades.
- With a $5,000 account the same fee is 40% of the account; with $50,000 it is 4%.
The smaller the account, the higher the return needed just to cover the fee. That arithmetic is the first thing to run, before the syllabus.
The original data
169 videos in this site’s study of 24,971 YouTube search results have “trading course” in the title. They come from 101 channels, the most from any one channel is 10, and their median view count is 89,440; 110 of the 169 have 20,000 views or more. All of them are public videos.
Many are course-length. The median video runs 36 minutes, and 53 of the 169 run an hour or longer.
| length | videos | median views |
|---|---|---|
| under 10 min | 16 | 2,100 |
| 10-30 min | 52 | 120,423 |
| 30-60 min | 48 | 162,680 |
| 1-3 hours | 41 | 108,090 |
| 3 hours or more | 12 | 21,930 |
What that means for a buyer. Course-length material is public for free: 53 of these videos run an hour or longer. A paid course has to offer something beyond that, and the buyer can check the free versions first. The grouped counts are in the course video file.
What the FTC cases show
Online Trading Academy. The FTC sued on 12 Feb 2020, alleging that the company used false or unfounded earnings claims to sell programs costing as much as $50,000, and that it had collected more than $370 million from consumers in six years. The FTC said trading data from a platform its customers used suggested the vast majority did not make any money. The Sep 2020 settlement carried a $362 million judgment, partly suspended, and barred contracts that stopped customers from posting reviews or talking to law enforcement. In Aug 2021 the FTC sent checks averaging $175 to 31,144 consumers, and more than $13.3 million of consumer debt to the company was forgiven.
Raging Bull. Sued in Dec 2020 over what the FTC called bogus earnings claims and hard-to-cancel subscriptions, it settled in Mar 2022 for $2.425 million. In Mar 2023 the FTC began sending 9,862 payments totaling nearly $2.4 million to consumers.
IM Mastery Academy. The FTC and Nevada’s attorney general alleged in a May 2025 complaint that the scheme, which also sold its trading training through a multi-level-marketing structure, generated more than $1.2 billion since 2018. On 13 May 2026 the FTC announced a proposed order against five main defendants with a $795.8 million judgment, the remainder suspended once assets are turned over, and a ban on selling trading training. The release says such an order takes force once the district court judge approves and signs it.
A checklist before you pay
- Earnings claims. Ask for the documentation behind any income figure or student result. The Online Trading Academy settlement barred earnings claims without written documentation to support them.
- Instructor claims. Online Trading Academy called its salespeople “education counselors”; the order banned it. Ask whether the person teaching trades, and what they can show for it.
- Refunds and renewals. Read the refund window, and check whether the price renews each month and how to cancel. Online Trading Academy’s customers owed it debt, and Raging Bull’s were on hard-to-cancel subscriptions.
- Gag clauses. A contract that limits reviews or complaints to regulators is a red flag the FTC acted on.
- Recruiting. If buyers earn by selling the course to others, the product is partly the recruiting.
- Registration. The CFTC says firms that solicit you to trade generally have to register with it, and its RED list names foreign firms that appear to need registration and lack it.
When it fails
A clean record is not proof of quality. The absence of a case says nothing either way, and a checklist cannot say whether the teaching is any good.
A case comes too late to make buyers whole. Online Trading Academy’s refund checks averaged $175, against programs that cost as much as $50,000. Enforcement can stop a practice, but here it returned a small part of what was paid.
Free videos have incentives too. A free video can carry affiliate links or sell a paid product, so the free material is a way to judge a teacher, not a neutral source.
No course removes the costs of trading. Spreads, commissions and the other drags set out in why traders lose money apply after a course exactly as before it.
Related
A trading mentor is the one-to-one version of the same purchase, with the same questions to ask. Paper trading is a way to test what a course teaches before risking money on it, and how to avoid a trading scam covers the cases where a course is a front for something else.
Ask the seller for the documentation behind any income figure in the sales page, and read the refund and cancellation terms before paying. If either answer is vague, the free material is the better place to start.
— Michael Whitman
This page is educational, not financial advice. Test every idea on your own charts before risking money.