Trading Mission Review

Trading Mission Review

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 3^rd 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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