Before I
start this Trading Mission review I would like to take a moment to tell you a
little bit about myself so that you can understand how and why I became a
member of the Trading Mission live trading room. You can also find further reviews and testimonials here at their Trading Mission review page.
My name is
Jenny Toppleman. I started trading around 4 years ago. I started with Forex and
gradually moved onto trading Futures. In the first year I didn’t trade much but
I watched closely and took notes. I traded a demo account with mixed results
never really managing to end the month with a decent profit. Most of the time I
would close a month with a loss but since it was a demo account I didn’t really
care. I put it all down as good practice.
After 2
years of demo account trading on and off and countless thousands of dollars
spent on various courses, EA’s and other useless things that promised results
but never delivered them I finally started trading live and was having
reasonable success. I was breaking even some months, losing some and winning
some too. At the end of my 3rd year of trading I had made around
0.5% ROI on my starting capital trading a live account. I know, it’s not a
great result but at least I hadn’t lost anything.
Things
continued this way until I found Carlos Diaz and his live trading room called TradingMission.com.
Since then things got a lot better. However don’t be fooled into thinking that
Carlos Diaz and Trading Mission are perfect. They are not. Although I love what
they do there, I also have a fair amount of criticism too (as you will see if
you keep reading).
What is Trading Mission?
Trading Mission
is a live Futures trading room specializing in Light Sweet Crude Oil (CL) that
can be found at TradingMission.com. What this means is a trader can pay a
subscription and for that they will get access to a screen share with the head
trader Carlos as well as a chat room where Carlos and other members communicate
during trading.
Who is the trading room run by?
Although
there maybe a few others behind the scenes, the main team running the trading
room are Carlos and Juan.
Carlos Diaz
is the head trader and founder of this service. It is his screen you see and
his voice you hear most of the time. Ultimately he is in charge and it is his
trades you follow.
Juan Alexandrino
is Carlos’s right hand man. He does calculations in the background and can occasionally
be heard passing bits of useful information to Carlos. He is also fairly active
in the chat room during trading hours.
If you use
their support you might also get a reply from Jimmy or Pete who often seem to
be answering emails and dealing with any tech issues or suggestions that
members might have.
I’ve done
some background research for this Trading Mission review on the head trader Carlos Diaz and found that he has
an excellent reputation. He started trading around 20 years ago and has since
been featured on various financial newspapers and websites like TradingPub.com.
How does it work?
This live
trading room uses 2 pieces of software to get the desired effect. There is
Gotowebinar and Chatzy. Gotowebinar is how you see Carlos’s screen and Chatzy
is the chatroom element. They have this video in the trading room to show you
how to set up your screen to get the best experience.
Using the service is very simple. You can simply watch Carlos’s screen, listen to his advice and then trade accordingly. I recommend you use a demo account to start with because it can take some getting used to.
The trading
room opens at 08:30am EST every weekday and closes when profit targets are hit.
If Carlos is having a bad day and the markets are not “playing nice” then he
will close the room in order to stop the losses getting out of control. This
means you never know exactly how long you will be trading for. It might be 10
minutes or it might be 3 hours. On average I would say it is around 1 hour per
day.
Carlos uses
NinjaTrader (and the service is officially a NinjaTrader partner) to execute
trades. You do not need to use the same platform as he does but I find it
helps.
There are 2quite useful videos on the website which show how it works. I
recommend watching these for a good insight. Just be aware that not every day
is like what is shown there.
Is Trading Mission a scam?
Absolutely
not! Carlos is one of the most realistic traders I have ever had the luck to
stumble across. Like I said earlier, he is not perfect (I will explain why
later) but I can say with complete confidence that he really does care about
his members and about getting the best possible results for them. He is full of
very realistic advice about the difficulties of trading and he is always quick
to quash the idea that trading is a road to getting rich quick.
What makes this service different?
Most of the trading rooms I have tried in the
past are not trading on a live account. Carlos is. The moderator in a regular
trading room just talks over the chart and makes vague trade calls. There is
normally zero accountability. Carlos Diaz is not like this.
What I like
about this service is that you actually see him place the trades live. You see
his SL and TP. You see exactly where he went long or short and you are able to
copy it yourself.
Another
thing I like is that Carlos is purely focussed on profit for members. He doesn’t
consider the room a place for teaching, although he does do a lot of that as a
bonus just to keep members in the loop about what is happening.
However it
is important to note that Carlos is not giving away his full trading method in
the trading room. I asked why and he told me he had been testing and refining the
method for years and couldn’t give it away for just $297 which is the
subscription price. However he does teach it separately at extra cost for those
who are interested. I will talk more about this later, but for now the important
point is that you are in the trading room to follow his moves. Any teaching or
analysis is just a bonus.
While some people
might not like this, I personally I am happy to just go along with it as the
trades themselves are largely profitable and I’ve learned some invaluable
things along the way.
I also love
the sense of community that comes with the Trading Mission chat room. I often
login early and stay after hours to trade with other members who are tradeaholics
like myself. This is made possible because Carlos ends each session by giving
his bigger targets for the day. These are really for the more experienced trader
who wants to trade outside of the room hours. I like to do this and I find that
these targets are incredibly accurate. The only issue is that since Oil is very
volatile you absolutely must have a very strict SL strategy in place when
trading alone without the help of a professional. I would estimate that these
targets are at least 80% accurate.
How much money do you need to trade
with Carlos?
Whenever
this is asked in the room the moderators or Carlos himself will usually say the
perfect amount is $20,000 per contract. However you can still trade with $10K
if you are happy with that risk.
I would say
that no matter what funds you have available you really should trade a
simulated account for a while with Carlos before going live. There are a few
little quirks which you need to be familiar with before you go live and I will
mention these later.
What results can I expect with
Trading Mission?
This is the
million dollar question! However it is a very tough one to answer because
members post their trading results in the chat room and I see quite large
differences between what members post. This happens for a number of reasons.
For example some members might pull the trigger early in order to squeeze a few
extra ticks while some might be slow to pull the trigger and can therefor enter
late.
I’ve also
noticed that some members like to take quick profits at just 10 ticks while
others take profits at 20 ticks and other like to hold out for the big targets.
What this
says to me is that traders are not using the service like signals but more like
a tool that they fit to their own personal trading style. They adapt the
strategy to fit their own risk appetite (to use a phrase I learned in the room).
Because of
this factor I cannot of course say what exact ROI you might enjoy by being a
member, but I can tell you about my own personal results. I will post my
personal account growth for individual months below:
January – 27%
ROI
February – 9%
ROI
March – 3%
ROI
April – 26%
ROI
May - 11% ROI
June – 2%
ROI
You will
notice that my results above are drastically different to those Carlos shows on
his own results page (hyperlink) on his website. This is because I trade the
targets and levels he gives out during the room outside of the room hours. I
also often achieve different results from him during the trading room because I
close for a quick profit where as he often holds longer since he is talking and
performing for the room which I think can sometimes be detrimental to his own
results.
What do I like about the service?
The Trading Mission
service is honest and profitable and the chat room element adds a community
feel. This is why I have been a member for 6 months and I why I will continue
to keep trading with them as long as the standard of service stays the same.
What do I not like about the service?
There are a
few things which I would definitely like to change about the Trading Mission
live trading room experience.
Carlos and
Juan are both native Spanish speakers. I’m not sure where they are from but
they often speak between themselves in Spanish. This isn’t a major issue
because it is just calculations and things like that being passed between them
and it is not really information for members but I personally find it a bit
distracting to hear them talking in a foreign tongue just before going into a
trade. It did in the early days make me hesitant to pull the trigger on going
into a trade. It also on occasion made me pull trades early if I thought Juan
sounded stressed out saying something in Spanish to Carlos. In fact this
bothered me so much at first that I had Google translate open in order to try
to understand what they were saying to each other on these occasions when this
happens. Over time this has bothered me less and less as I understand they are
not trying to hide anything, they are simply in the moment and working to
analyze the markets and react in real time.
The SL’s can
sometimes be bigger than I would prefer. Carlos does not use the standard risk
Vs reward model that you see many traders use. He places his stops according to
his price action analysis. This means you can sometimes be risking a lot more
than you intend to be taking. For a newbie this can seem crazy. Why risk 30
ticks to make 10? I have come to understand that this strategy does work generally
over the course of a month. However if you are expecting to be profitable everyday
then this service is not for you. I doubt any service will be for you if you
have unrealistic expectations like that but I know from the chat room that many
new traders do. Once you have made your peace with the larger stops and are
willing to put your faith in winning months rather than winning days/weeks you
will feel a lot happier.
I have asked
if Carlos can call the SL in advance and sometimes he does but sometimes he
forgets and sometimes he just can’t because it will change as the trade
evolves.
Another
thing I don’t like about the Trading Mission experience is that Carlos can
sometimes jump in too fast without giving much warning. I understand that he is
working in real time and this can’t be a slick presentation because he is analyzing
and trading live but sometimes it would be great to get a bit more notice
before we dive in.
There are
also pro’s and cons to how the trading room works. Some days I love how quickly
the trading is done because profits have been made but on other days I wish the
trading room would stay open longer so we could trade with Carlos and Juan all
day. However I have come to learn that they manage funds for private clients
after the trading room hours. I asked if they could keep the room open anyway
so we could just watch that but they explained that (apart from the confidentiality
issue) each clients has a different account size, set of goals and risk tolerance.
Therefore it would be impossible for them to deal with that and explain it as
they go. I understand this, but I would also love to see what is going on
behind the scenes after hours.
Do they have more to sell once you
become a trading room member?
I didn’t
realise it for the first 2 months of trading with them that they actually do offer
a mentoring program where Carlos reveals his secrets. They don’t shout about
this or ram it down your throat. What seems to happen is they open it up for
new members every 3 months or so. I haven’t personally taken this offer yet but
I will do in future because other chat room member have said it helps them understand
more about what Carlos is making certain calls. This allows them to better
judge the calls. So they can stay out of riskier trades and also jump in
earlier on less riskier trades. This appeals to me and since I’m already a TM
convert I will definitely jump on this offer at some point. However for the moment
I am happy to get the daily analysis, live trading and targets that are the normal
service that I started with over 6 months ago.
Trading Mission review final conclusions:
Do I
recommend Trading Mission live trading room? Yes of course I do. I’m sure you
guessed that by now. However I recommend strongly that anyone reading this who
is thinking about becoming a member should definitely trade a demo account with
them before going live. As I discussed above, Carlos can enter trades quickly
and can pull trades quickly also. This means you must be in tune with him and
how he trades and that does take a little bit of getting used to.
For those of
you who do decide to become a member I’m sure you will be profitable as long as
you work out your own trading objectives first. Do you want to take quick profits
or do you want to ride the trades as far as they will go? You need to think
about these things before trading live.
If you have
been struggling to trade Oil Futures and you would like the help of a true
professional then I highly recommend Trading Mission and Carlos Diaz. They are
honest and profitable and sometimes their calculated targets are so accurate
they have to be seen to be believed. Yes there are losing days, and yes some
days can get very rough (that’s trading!!) but if you stick with it and follow
Carlos you will be in profit by the end of the month.
Thanks for
reading my trading mission review! Please leave your comments below as I will be happy to
answer them.
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