Christian Financial Radio Review

Can Christians be cold blooded traders?

Updated Review  April 22, 2015 ***CLICK HERE***

The following review is for the Christian Financial Radio network, which runs a live day trading room, moderated by Michael B. There is also another partner named DeWayne Reeves who is basically the promoter and giver of the Christian gospel.

Now I have to be honest, I am not a Christian, though I was raised a Christian. And experience has taught me that anyone that is actively selling something and attempts to attach some sort of Christian doctrine should be given a double helping of scrutiny. I have found that the preachers of gospel are usually the grand high lords of hypocrisy. With that being said, lets jump into this, and we begin with the owners of CFRN.net.

DeWayne Reeves

The first week in the trading room, this guy really irritated me. His combination of southern twang and sort of goofy comments I found way too distracting. By week number two, DeWayne started to grow on me. I slowly began to realize that this guy actually cares about me. Kind of hard to dislike someone that actually cares about you. By week three, he sort of felt like the uncle I never had. Can DeWayne Trade? Probably not. But let me be honest…the guy is a real sweetheart. If you can look past the preaching, the down home southern drawl, he will just grow upon you. In truth, after awhile I started to enjoy hearing his voice in the mornings. It made me smile.

Michael Borque

For the first couple of weeks, I had no idea what Michael B’s last name was. I found it odd that he never used it. Actually, I found it unsettling and it gave the impression of a person with something to hide. Later I found out his last name, but I will let you discover it for yourself. Michael B. is the lead trader at CFRN. He is the main guy in the trading room, calling trades and giving commentary. I found him to be clear and direct, however, some of his trades were so fast that I had to chance to understand the set up and my attempt to emulate was missed on many occasion. More on that in main body below…

The CFRN Trading Style

Let me be really clear about this day trading room. It operates two hours a day, 6:30 am PST to 8:30 am PST. And the trading style is very fast paced. Michael B is scalper. In fact, the CFRN trading style can best be described as ultra fast scalping. I never saw a trade go beyond 8 ticks profit. The usual trade was for a tick or two ticks and then stop out. Michael B does not mess around with a trade. Once the trade is 4 ticks profitable, he quickly moves a stop to break even, and sometimes even sooner. And then he will attempt to move the stop for another tick profit, and then hope the trade runs to the average winner of 8 ticks. Michael B is a technical scalper using some really basic indicators and simple set ups. The key point that I want to make is that its important that you understand that this is a scalping room, with plenty of trades and action. Make sure you are paying a very low commission, or the only person getting rich will be the broker.

CFRN currently trades the emini Russell, Gold, Oil, and Soybeans. And so you get a pretty diverse range of non correlated markets. What is nice is that each chart is standardized and replicated. What does that mean? Each chart is a 4 tick range bar, regardless of the market. And the indicators match each market. Its nice and uniform. After a couple of weeks, you can begin to understand the WHY, and appreciate the simplicity of the set ups. Actually, the set ups are so simple that began to wonder why I never really attempted this type of trade before.

A Basic Difficulty

One of the things that I found difficult were the limitations of screen sharing with CFRN. What do I mean? There is a lot of CFRN indicators and market information packed onto a very small piece of screen space. Very limited real estate. Most of us are used to watching large, sweeping charts, that have a nice interaction with our indicators. But the CFRN screen is midgetized. You will only see 4 little charts. Each chart usually only shows a few bars, which can create a lot of confusion. Keep this in mind, especially if you are older and your eyesight is challenged.

A Deeper Difficulty

One of the things that I found difficult and irritating is that the trades can happen pretty quickly. And since they happen so fast, you are not shown Michael B’s trading DOM, which gave me plenty of suspicion on whether Michael B’s was actually taking trades. As many of us know, talk is cheap, but a clearly displayed trading DOM does not lie. With that being said, I recorded over 30 days of live trading with Camtasia screen recording software, and I closely scrutinezed the recordings. The major problem that I have is that Michael B calls out the trades and say’s, “I am getting in a XYZ price”. After his gets filled, he will then put up his DOM to show the fill price and where he puts his stop. This can happen pretty fast and I found myself chasing trades, and of course chasing is never good.

A Solution They Should Utilize

I emailed Michael B and told him that I was having a difficult time following along and wished for a clear, unobstructed view of the trading DOM for all markets at all times. He simply replied that there is just not enough screen space to show charts for 4 markets, all of the indicators, and a full price ladder for each market. And you know what? He is absolutely correct. I have a possible solution, and I hope that Michael takes my advice. They currently use GoToMeeting as the primary screen sharing software, a possible solution would be to use a separate screen sharing program such as Any Meeting or Omnovia. This of course would require us, the user, to have 3 trading screens. Screen A would be the main indicators and charts, screen B would be the constant diplay of Michael B’s trading DOM’s, and screen C would be our own trading software so that we can replicate the actions of Michael B.

The bottom line and the real reason why we attend a trading room is that we want to just make money, and as quickly as possible, and lesson the learning curve. This is possible with CFRN. However, without a constant display of the trading DOM, you will find it difficult to keep apace of this style of scalping. I have been trading since 1996, and even I had a difficult time keeping pace. I can only imagine the mess a newbie would create for himself.

My Individual Results

In total, I attended one month of the CRFN trading room/experience. I also accumulated nearly 50 hours of screen recordings using Camtasia screen recording software. Each of my screen recordings has each trade that was called in the room marked and organized. In total, I recorded nearly 200 trades. Of the 200 trades, approximately half were called within a time period that a person could actually copy the trade of the moderator. During the first week, I was very frustrated that I always seemed to miss the winning trades, and always seemed to catch the losing trades. At the end of week one, Michael B has generate a profit of $1250, while I had actually lost $400. But things got better.

During week 2, I began to internalize the setups a little quicker. On a few trades I jumped in a little early and actually caught a few winners that even Michael B had missed. It was nice to actually learn what was happening and how I was supposed to react. I made a few mistakes, but at the end of the week, I was able to close the gap on Michel B. He made a profit of $1600, while I managed a profit of $600. DeWayne also started to sort of grow on me a little.

During week 3, I got a little too aggressive and took a few trades that were not supposed to be taken. Specifically, on a Tuesday morning, I got sloppy on an emini Russel trade and instead of taking the loss at 8 ticks, I decided that I was smarter than the market. After the market kept running against me, I finally managed to take my loss at -34 ticks. Yes, that little trade was a bitter pill to swallow. And while this trade ran against me, Michael B had taken a winner in soybeans, and a winner in gold, which of course I did not take because I was waiting for the inevitable rebound in my Russel trade. Oh well. Long story short, at the end of the week 3, Michael B made another profit of $800, while I actually lost $200.

During week 4, I came in disciplined and I promised to stick to the plan. I was very unemotional and just took the trades and resigned myself to being bored. Which I was. And it payed off. At the end of week 4, I actually made a profit of $600. Michael B made a profit of $700. I was mighty proud of myself.

What can you realistically expect?

In my opinion, the most important take away and lesson learned is that the CFRN trading style is a scalping style of trading. Most trades only last a few seconds, with the exception that last 30 seconds. So you need to be very, very fast. You need to really move quickly and pay attention. And not chase a missed entry. In fact, most of my losing trades were late entries where I got stopped out while Michael B got out with a tick profit, or break even. But this can be expected from this type of trading.