In between the formal education and solitary screen time, there is another form of learning. It happens on group chats that never end up being silent, in weekend gatherings when one orders more coffee than they need and the discussion lasts three hours longer than intended, and in comment sections when a thought by a stranger proves to be more helpful than anything in a textbook. The forex trading community of Argentina has a significant amount of infrastructure constructed based on these informal avenues, and the culture it has produced carries a feel that institutional programs can hardly duplicate. The relationships established there tend to last longer than the platform on which they were established, moving to a new application as sellers seek to move their buyers there.
A large portion of this community activity has become dependent on Telegram as its infrastructure. Argentine market conditions channels vary in the tightly moderated groups where professional traders post analysis and answer member questions, to less tightly controlled groups where members post chart screenshots at midnight and discuss entry points with a vehemence that an outsider would struggle to comprehend. The better channels are ultimately useful not because of the quantity of the content but because of the quality of the feedback loop. In a trader who has posted a position rationale and three of the more experienced members have countered with particular counterarguments, the learning that comes out of that dialogue condenses what could otherwise take months of independent trial and error to accomplish in a single dialogue.
The physical gatherings have not been destroyed by the digital migration in a manner expected by even the organizers. Communities that had been initially only online communities found out that regular face-to-face meetings altered the character of their relationships in a manner that was significant to the caliber of further online communication. One community in Buenos Aires, which began as a WhatsApp group of eleven traders, now hosts quarterly events at a rented location in Palermo where members give trade reviews, talk about macro developments in the business of the peso, and sometimes invite guest speakers in the brokerage and fintech sectors. Minimal, yet the responsibility is real, and some members have attributed those sessions with unfreezing habits which online remarks could not shift.
There has been a shift in gender relations in such societies that illustrate general developments on who is entitled to engage in financial markets. More and more Argentine women have moved into the forex trading arenas with some feeling that there are already communities that are friendly and others creating parallel networks with the sole aim of accommodating the female traders who were put off more than taught by the testosterone-infested environments of some existing groups. Such organizations as Mujeres en Finanzas Argentina have provided arenas in which the discourse about markets can be intermingled with the discourse about the specific pressures and barriers that influence the relationship of women to financial risk-taking. It has led to an expansion of the demographic base of the community that seems to be enhancing the quality of the collective thinking as opposed to addition of numbers.
The formulation and operation of these networks has been influenced by regional identity as well. Cordoba traders are more likely to form communities with particular preferences, less disposed to Buenos Aires-style analysis and more sensitive to the export of agriculture that shapes the economic environment in the area. The trading community of Mendoza is endowed with the power of the wine export business and international trade with Chile, which makes its members particularly sensitive to the currency relations in the region and which is sometimes forgotten by the traders of the capital. These geographical variations have created communities that do not merely replicate each other but instead they provide a truly different analytical lens that adds to the greater national discourse when they collide with each other.
The mentorship process has developed naturally in these communities in what is not usually termed as mentorship by either party. A well-traded trader who frequently responds to queries in a group chat, or reflecting after the trade with candid acknowledgement of errors and even taking time to discuss the line of reasoning instead of merely stating them, is likely to act as a mentor regardless of whether that title is ever applied. Some traders who later pursued their own capital professionally can trace their development to an individual they met in an online community who generously shared knowledge and influenced their learning path. Such kind of transmission is informal, unscripted and more importantly driven by the pleasure of seeing someone else get better, that type of transmission is not something that any curriculum has so far figured out on how to create.