How do I get started at Base Camp Trading?

Welcome! We’re really glad you’re getting started with Base Camp Trading.  Here are a few suggestions on how to get up to speed as quickly as possible so you can begin to learn and use the BCT Trading Methodologies.

First, get to the Member Dashboard on our site by clicking the Access Member Area menu choice once you're logged in.  The Member Dashboard is your learning hub, providing access points for many of your benefits, including daily videos, courses, live trading rooms, and more.  You can reach the member dashboard here.  And it appears as follows.  If you're new to Base Camp Trading, or just want a refresher, click the Start Here button to see how to get started, including a walkthrough of the interface.

Customers who have been with us for a while may remember that we previously used other interfaces to access content.  You can still reach the older interfaces by clicking the Switch to Old View option near the bottom of the main menu on the left side of the screen.  There are two different dashboards that we use to offer, and which one you get depends on which services you joined.  The primary dashboard is shown below, and you can click the Welcome-StartHere button to get an overview of what that dashboard layout offers.

Some subscribers will see a different dashboard with similar information in a different format.  We sometimes refer to this dashboard as the "gray and white interface", while the other dashboard is the "colorful interface".  Either way, you have access to most of the same info.  We hope that everyone will find the newest interface the best way to access their content.

Current membership offerings are Platinum Club, Momentum Platinum Club, and Income Platinum Club.  The Platinum Club includes three live trading rooms:  The Momentum Trading Room, the Income Trading Room, and the Afternoon Trading Room.  Momentum Platinum Club includes the Momentum Trading Room.  Income Platinum Club includes the Income Trading Room.  All three memberships include most of the other offerings, such as access to valuable training, like Naked Trading Mastery, our Live After the Bell aftermarket session, Store discounts, and more. In the older interfaces, you'll know if you don't have access to a feature if there's a lock hasp over that option, or if you select the item and a page appears asking you to log in so you can access it.  In these cases, contact support to see what's required to gain access to that part of the site and membership.  IN the newer interface, content you don't subscribe to will not appear.

The Live Trading Rooms also support a PTRV3 app that allows viewing one of the rooms at a time on your mobile device, as well as receiving alerts posted during the room's session from one or more rooms.  To access the app, enter any of the live trading rooms and click on the small phone icon that appears to the right of the Base Camp Trading logo at the upper left of the room page.  It will provide you with the app download links, as well as your unique credentials to use the app.  

The next few sections discuss some of the features you'll find as part of your membership.

Getting Started

Watch the Welcome – Start Here video in your Member Dashboard (which you can reach via the Access Member Area link at the top of most BCT website pages.  The video is the first link in the upper left of your Member Dashboard.

Next, start your learning fundamentals by completing the Naked Trading Mastery course.  If you don't already have access to it, contact our support team to see how to add it to your courses.  Platinum members will find a button near the top to access it, while new members will find it under the Courses menu.  This course provides the foundation for all our trading at Base Camp Trading.  While you may be tempted to watch it briefly and consider it done, we’ve found that many of our best traders have watched training like Naked Trading Mastery many times, so they fully understand the concepts.  You may find that after you learn more about BCT’s trading style and get more experience in its trading methodologies, you’ll pick up more subtleties from training each time you watch it.

If you're looking for courses you can access, you'll find them under the Courses button or the Courses menu on the Member Dashboard.  The Member Dashboard is your road map for many of the features of your Base Camp Trading membership.

There's quite a bit of information at your fingertips, and many new members aren't sure where to get started.  One great place to start is to begin the Naked Trading Mastery course on the Member Dashboard.  The concepts in that course are used in almost every trade we take at Base Camp Trading.  Take advantage of the live After the Bell aftermarket sessions and the live Trading Rooms to see which types of trading are most interesting and helpful to you.  If you want to learn more about a specific trade setup, ask the instructors or our support team for assistance with the next steps.  Below is a list of things with additional information that you'll likely find useful in your trading journey with Base Camp Trading:

Some other starting points as a new BCT Member:

- If you have a Platinum membership, you will have access to 3 live trading sessions that run at various times during the day, in total covering the markets from 8 AM ET to 4 PM ET on trading days. Income Platinum Club and Momentum Platinum Club have access just to the Income and Momentum Live Trading Rooms, respectively. All three have access to the Monday / Wednesday After the Bell aftermarket sessions. Our rooms are often fast-moving, and it takes a while to get up to speed, but jump in and absorb what you can, and you’ll start to pick up more and more with experience.  You can even chat with other BCT Members in the chat room.  Please don’t be afraid to ask questions in the room.  The instructors will do their best to answer your questions, and sometimes other BCT Members will also offer answers.  To reach the trading room, Platinum members can click the Member Dashboard button on the BCT website menu at the top right of most pages, then select the Live Trading Rooms button.  New memberships have a separate option for each Live Trading Room.  Note that the name you use on the prompt to enter your name and email address determines what name is used for you in the Live Trading Room chat boxes.  While you want to enter the email you use to log into the BCT website, you do not need to enter your full name in the name box.  You could change it to Vermont Bob, Trader Susie, or whatever room-friendly name you'd like.

Weekly Live Sessions Schedule:

• Momentum LTR: Weekdays 8am – 12pm ET, covering Equities, Options, Futures and Crypto
• Income LTR: Weekdays 9am-1pm ET, covering Stocks & Options
• Afternoon LTR:  Weekdays 1pm - 4pm ET, covering Equities, Options, and Futures

• After the Bell: Mondays & Wednesdays at 4:15 pm in John's room, providing an aftermarket recap and at times, a rotating series of  educational topics.  This session is also known as “Office Hours”).  

  Who's Leading the LTRs?  Thomas Wood will often be in the Momentum LTR, Dave Aquino is often in the Income LTR, Cody Meeker and Dave Forster typically host the Afternoon LTR and along with John Osborn, cover the Momentum and Income LTRs at times. 

– At the start time of each intraday room session, the instructor goes over the markets in general to get a feel for the overall markets.  The morning overviews are often recorded and are available under the “Morning Market Recap” link on the BCT Website.

Important:  The rooms use a web browser "cookie" to provide access to the room, so if you've configured your browser(s) to prevent 3rd-party cookies, you'll likely have trouble accessing the room. See this knowledge base article on how to enable specific cookies so you can get into the room if you get a blank screen or are asked for a password to enter the room.

An app is available to view the room or to get room alerts on your phone.  Details on that are available in this knowledge base article.

– One or more End of Day videos are usually recorded and available for viewing via the “Daily Videos” button on the Member Dashboard by 6 pm ET (and it's typically there soon after market close).

– You’ll notice that our room instructors are using older versions of the trading platform software. If you want to minimize differences between their charts and yours, you might consider using the same version they use. In TradeStation, we are not all running the new version 10 yet, which looks and operates slightly differently from the older version. Thomas and Dave are still using TradeStation 9.5, which can be downloaded as the “legacy” version on the TradeStation download page (beneath the Version 10 download link on their site).  John now typically uses TradeStation 10.  David Forster and Cody Meeker usually use Thinkorswim.  This provides you with a wider variety of trading platform demonstrations as you view the rooms.  More information about trading platforms is included later in this article.

– Watch your email for messages from BCT about end-of-day videos and other important information. 

Make sure you whitelist our email addresses at your Internet provider's mail page:

• support@basecamptrading.com
• support@basecamptrader.com

Doing so will prevent our messages from going to your spam folder (check there if you don’t see messages soon).  If you're not sure how to whitelist email addresses on your system, contact your mailing system's support for assistance.  Many systems whitelist by going to the web interface and creating a contact for each of the two email addresses, indicating that you're familiar with them.  When you do this, it helps to create the contact at the website of the service; otherwise, the mail may never reach your mail client.  For example, if you have a Gmail account and use Outlook as your mail client, you'll want to go to Gmail.com and create the two contacts there, rather than just in Outlook.  If you want to change the email address you use to log into our website and get information we provide, contact our support team, and they'll help you make the change.

– Every Monday and Wednesday at 4:15 pm ET, John hosts a live “After the Bell” event in John's Live Trading Room, where a recap of the day's markets and often a selected training is discussed.  Attendees can ask questions about trading, trading platforms, etc.  Content is typically focused on both Futures and Stocks & Options, or sometimes even other topics. These sessions are recorded, with the last 4 weeks’ worth of recordings being made available via this “Office Hours” link: https://basecamptrading.com/member-home/office-hours/ 

– Get access to Base Camp Trading’s SlackChat by requesting it via an email to support at support@basecamptrading.com.  SlackChat is a chat tool that lets Base Camp Trading members communicate with one another, ask questions, share their ideas and their expertise, etc.  There are various “channels” within SlackChat that focus on futures and options, for example.  SlackChat is available 24 hours a day.

– Answers to frequently asked questions are maintained in our ever-growing knowledge base, which you can reach via this link.  Feel free to search there for immediate answers to common questions on BCT and trading in general. Over 400 articles have been added to this knowledge base, and it contains answers to many of users’ most common questions about our indicators, trading rooms, platforms, chart setup, and trading in general.

– As a BCT Platinum, Income Platinum, or Momentum Platinum member, you also have access to end-of-day market analysis, market weekly outlooks, member-only webinars, push notifications, special discounted prices on indicators and training, in addition to the Naked Trading Mastery course you may already have access to, and much more.

Getting Your Computer Ready to Match What You See in our Trading Rooms

We realize that our traders have a wide range of experience in trading and in computer technology. We expect our traders to have at least some experience with computers or to have access to someone nearby who can help them with the technical aspects of computers. If you have questions about how fast a processor is needed, or how much hard drive space is needed, or how to use a Mac instead of a PC, or how much memory (RAM) is needed, we encourage people to look at the specifications posted for the particular trading platform they are planning to use. For example, TradeStation posts its suggested minimum computer requirements for its platform, and other platforms will post similar requirements.

You can also ask other traders in our trading rooms and chat rooms about what computer they are using, though you’ll undoubtedly find a large variance between what other traders are using, as they’ll have different needs, budgets, etc.

Need help with setting up your charts?

If you use any of the three most popular platforms used by our students (TradeStation, Thinkorswim, or NinjaTrader 8), a Platinum membership grants you access to a course that shows how to set up your charts in each of those platforms.  Look for the "Setting up your charts" course under the Courses tab of the Member Dashboard.  Here's a direct link to Setting up Your Charts.

Using and Installing Indicators

You'll see our instructors using Base Camp Trading indicators, as well as the indicators that are built into their trading platforms.  You can purchase Base Camp Trading indicators for many of the popular trading platforms, including TradeStation 9.5, TradeStation 10, Thinkorswim, NinjaTrader 8, TradingView, Sierra Chart, eSignal, MultiCharts, MetaStock, and more.  While some of these platforms offer mobile solutions, our indicators are primarily designed for desktop versions, though TradingView works equally well on a web page or its app.  Non-TradingView platforms may struggle with any vendor's custom indicators on their mobile versions, so consider using the desktop version of those platforms. 

To use a purchased BCT indicator, visit the indicator download page and provide an identifier for your platform to register it and authorize its use.  The required identifier varies by platform.  Some are account-based, while others are hardware-based.  For hardware-based identifiers, such as NinjaTrader, if you change computers or update your hardware, some platforms may switch to a new identifier, which must be registered for indicators to work on that platform.  Our support team can help you register your indicators again in this case.

Brand New to Trading?

We realize some users are completely new to trading and may need to learn some basics that a trader with even just a month of experience would take for granted.  For example, we often find new traders who haven’t yet realized that a trading platform needs to be installed before you can use our indicators (and most brokers' mobile platforms won't allow some custom indicators). That’s okay – we’ve all been there, and we all just needed a little bit of info to get us moving in the right direction at times.

Some of the best training on how to install trading platforms or perform basic platform functions will come directly from the platform providers. They typically have a large library of resources and a large staff that can help educate users about how the platform works. Most platforms offer a wealth of structured learning videos, courses, guides, etc. that can bring any new trader up to speed on the fundamentals of the platform they choose. We hope users will take advantage of the platform providers' resources to learn the fundamentals. When you have questions about our specific indicators, courses, or other topics, we encourage you to reach out to us, and we look forward to helping you. So if you contact our support teams with generic or fundamental platform questions, we may direct you to the platform’s library of resources, which do a wonderful job of educating new users. This way, our staff can focus on our specific custom offerings, and new students can take advantage of those highly informative platform-based resources.

For those very new to trading, our indicators require that a base “platform” be installed on your computer. You may hear us reference these platforms in the rooms, such as “TradeStation”, or “Ninja Trader”, “thinkorswim”, or “Sierra”, to name a few. The platforms a specific indicator is compatible with is listed in the details for each indicator in our store. Platforms are standalone programs or, sometimes, web-based tools provided and maintained by each platform maker. Trading platforms provide a charting environment, trading systems, and other tools to help traders work with the markets they choose. Each platform has unique features, and there’s no single best choice that fits all traders. The choice of platform depends on each person’s needs. For example, for some traders, trading in an IRA is important, so a platform that supports IRA trading may be more important than one with the fanciest stock option analysis tools. One trader may value a responsive support desk with a short hold time, while another would be drawn to the one with the absolute lowest commissions, even though you may not be able to reach their support team as quickly. The trick is finding a balance that is right for you.

You may also notice that many platforms offer multiple versions of their software. Sometimes the differences between versions are slight, while at other times there are significant changes in the platform's look and feel, and even in the compatibility of indicators across versions. We suggest that you observe the trading rooms to see which platforms the room hosts are using – and even which versions. You’ll likely find that our instructors aren't always running the latest versions of the platforms for various reasons. The platform makers are usually interested in getting as many of their users onto the newest version of their platform so they can retire the old version sooner, but there may be instances where staying with the older version a bit longer offers advantages as the new version matures. If you want the charts on your system to look as close as possible to the ones you see in the trading rooms, you may want to match the specific versions of the platforms in use. If this creates an issue, it’s not required, even if you don’t exactly match the platforms in the rooms, you can usually get very similar charting results on other platforms.

There will be lots of other things that you’ll learn to get you started and the information above should be enough to get you well on your way. 

A Word About Managing Risk

Trading involves risk, and it’s important that you properly manage it.  You will hear occasional mentions of risk management in the trading rooms, but it’s surely factored into each and every trade taken in the rooms.  It’s important that you know how to properly manage risk in your own account. Like many aspects in trading, what works well for others may not apply to you or your account. Risk management is more than just determining where the stop is placed. Your risk-based rules need to be adjusted to align with your trading style, account size, and other factors. So, learn about proper position sizing, exit management, reward-to-risk ratios, etc.  Ask questions in the room and take training to accelerate your learning.

Many new traders are tempted to jump into “real” trading and learn with real money.  We firmly believe that any new trading system should be tested in paper trading before even considering using real money.  Even if the system works for others, it’s imperative that you prove to yourself that you can make the system work.  That’s an important part of building the confidence it takes to follow the trading rules.  There’s no sense in risking real money until you do.  In fact, due to the added challenges of “real” trading, it’s more challenging to make money in real trading than in paper trading.  So, prove that you can comfortably and correctly work the strategies to generate consistent profits in paper before you switch to real trading.  Have fun doing it, too, because once you understand the rules and how to follow them, trading can get a lot less stressful, and that’s a great way to trade.  We look forward to showing you how to trade this way.

If you'd like some more ideas on how to get started with paper trading (developing your trade plan, etc.), check out this additional knowledge base article: https://support.basecamptrading.com/hc/en-us/articles/4411774165147-How-can-I-get-started-in-placing-trades- 

Use a consistent email

Most of your account is tied to one email address - the one that you use to log into the BaseCampTrading.com website.  If you use the same email when you contact us with support questions or other inquiries, you'll find it much smoother, because we'll see all the products you're entitled to use.  If you must use another email to reach us, let us know your "primary" email in the message.  If you want to change your email address, we can update it for you and keep everything in sync.

Again, welcome, and remember to ask questions in the rooms when you need clarification, and give yourself time to understand BCT’s trading approach.  We’re confident that we’ll soon be counting you among our many members who’ve learned that BCT offers a great way to trade.