The Trading Book Review - Managed Service

Trial Parameters

Name: The Trading Book

Website: www.thetradingbook.com

Length of subscription: 12 months.

Market during subscription: Mostly bullish with patches of high volatility

Type of service: Managed Service Futures Trading

Price: $99/mo per $10K invested

Overview

This was an interesting one, big excitement going into this as the lead trader is a well-known industry figure who appears as a speaker in industry events and has a lot of experience. We initially joined the Gold Trading Service at $199 a month. The gold plan consists of a daily 3-hour live webinar and is an intensive follow the leader-type day-trading service. The second is a swing trading service that lists several swing trades in publicly accessible Excel file with clear entry, exits and stops.

At the time of our membership, the market was volatile so no swing trades were posted during a 2-month period, we cannot say how frequently this occurs. The primary focus was the daily-day trading session. The strategy revolves around set levels, like support/resistance if the market breaks these pre-determined levels, it triggers long or short trades.

As such the strategy is rather mechanical, we found it quite arduous to follow and remain focused for 3 hours in the live room each day. This is when it got interesting, we noticed that TheTradingBook.com offers a Managed Service. This was an exciting proposition, why follow-in the live trading room, waiting for the moderator to make trades when this could all be done for you.

We signed up, adding $20k to the required futures broker account.

Unfortunately, the excitement and anticipation was not rewarded apart from 12 months of griding pain. We were tenacious giving the program a very determined 12 months to work, as the moderators at The Trading Book consistently promised an improved strategy. After a full 12 months our $20k account was reduced by over 50% with half of that loss going to fees.

Effectiveness

Real World Live Results

The astute among you may notice that the stated fees are $99 per $10k and the fees for this account over 12 months was over $5k, well there is a $10 per round-trip fee per contract on all trades charged by the executing broker. So whilst not directly charged by The Trading Book this plays a significant role in overall performance and should be factored in. Especially as the Managed Service Strategy appears to be more of a scalp focused strategy, even counter-trend at times with upwards of 10 roundtrips per day

Price

Hard to find much to like about an account getting cut in half, hard to put this down to market conditions or other environmental considerations as the test was conducted over a full 12 month period.

Education

Managed Service no-no education, it is a black box. However, as a on a side not, why wpuld one pay fr the educvation and chat room, if these are the results of that education put into practice in its best possible form.

Support

Support and communication was non-existant and pro-actively saught frustrating. When we sent in communication about a significant loss that exceeded the stated strategy risk parameters there was always an excuse, promising the issue was fixed or improved upon which never materialized in terms of performance. On the hole we found the whole experience poorly managed, lacking communication and it shows in the results.

Risk Management

Cleary cutting an account in half over 2 months is a demonstration of failed risk management. To give deeper insight into the strategy performance see one month's results. In terms of the overall system, the levels and trading in The Trading Book room appeared to be trend following in nature as price breaks through SR levels. Whereas the managed strategy appears to be more of a scalp focused strategy, even counter-trend at times with upwards of 10 roundtrips per day

Summary

The results speak for themselves, the strategy does not work plain and simple thefroe our recommendation would be to avoid both the managed service, trading room and education. This is a classic example of someone who is teaching trading and runs a trading room calling setup yet when they try and create an actual trading startegy based on their teaching, it tanks. This is why it is always our recomnmedation to ensure you are following a proper tried and tested strategy that has backtested, and historical performance benchmarks.

Disclaimer:

Our reviews are based purely on our own opinion and experience during the trial period, they are not an endorsement or critique of any particular service no matter how positive or negative the review. None of the reviews are trading advice or a recommendation to join or purchase any product. Trading is very subjective, based on personal styles, preferences, and lifestyles. As such an experience we have may not be your experience. The market is highly dynamic, reviews are strongly affected by the market at the time of the trial, the results we got might be completely different at a different point in time. Last, trading is very tough all traders no matter how good have ups and downs, it is part of trading, therefore we cannot rule out that any particular review was conducted during a down patch, or at a time when the market was unsuited to that strategy. In short, much like trading, consider this only one part of a larger puzzle, do your own research, and make your own informed decisions.