Why I built a webinar
Five days, forty hours live facing the market, without the travel: why the webinar covers the essentials of the seminar, remotely.
The seminar, a format that continues
The seminar has been around for a long time, and I still run it: a week of immersion, far from home, with all the logistics that entails. But not everyone can block out a week abroad, nor the desire to add a plane ticket and a hotel.
The constraint is not only financial. Blocking out a full week requires shifting a professional, and sometimes family, schedule, and doing so months in advance. This is a real inertia, independent of motivation: you can want to make serious progress and not have that week available.
Forty hours live facing the market, from your home
The webinar covers the essentials of this format: five days from nine a.m. to six p.m., meaning eight hours live per day, facing the market — forty hours in total — plus a debrief every evening and a one-hour individual meeting at the end of the week. The only difference is that you stay in front of your own workstation. I wanted to keep the rigor of the live format without imposing the travel.
What the week contains
From Monday to Friday, via videoconference and in a small group. Five elements structure the day:
- Eight hours live, the market commented on throughout the session — forty over the week.
- Questions and answers interspersed throughout the day: a question asked while the context is still on the screen is better than the same one in the evening.
- A daily debrief, where we review what was done and, often more instructively, what was not.
- Your own trading in parallel if you wish — demo, prop firm, or real account. Positions are analyzed after the session.
- A one-hour individual meeting at the end of the week, to conclude the five days based on your situation and not on an average.
What distance does not replace
The benefit of the format is not saving on a plane ticket: it is that you learn at your workstation, with your screen and your shortcuts. What you understand on Wednesday, you understand where you will trade the following Monday — nothing to transpose, and transposition is precisely the moment when good resolutions are lost. The seminar, on the other hand, gathers twelve participants in the same place, lunches included: part of what is exchanged there does not pass through a screen. It continues for this reason.
One non-negotiable condition remains: being available for five days, with a working workstation. A week attended halfway does not provide half the benefit. And the objective remains to learn to think like a trader, not to copy positions — without staged demonstrations or promises of gains.
The seminar remains the most immersive format; the webinar keeps the seminar’s rigor without the travel. All that remains is to choose which constraint you prefer to take on.
Benoist Rousseau
Independent Trader — CME & CBOT Member
About the author
Benoist Rousseau is a trader, member of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) and the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT), an economic history specialist educated at the Sorbonne, and an experienced educator. Founder of a recognized trading school, he trains traders every year in discipline, risk management, and market psychology.