Value Charts

Today’s review is ValueCharts.Com, a live day trading room that specializes in day trading futures and options.

The futures day trading room operates daily from 9 AM to 12 PM (Eastern Time Zone). The futures trading room moderator is Thomas Wood. The monthly fee of the trading room is $197 per month.

The options day trading room operates daily from 9 AM to 1 PM (Eastern Time Zone). The options trading room is moderator is Dave Aquino. The monthly fee of the trading room is $197 per month.

Value Charts also sells the following video courses:

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Value Charts Indicator Packages, Private Mentoring, Private Consulting

In addition to the online courses, the company sells just about every trading product under the sun. An indicator package at $1497, a smaller indicator package at $997, and a mini indicator package at $597. Of course, sometimes we need professional trader consulting, and this can be purchased at $200 per hour. “For only a small fee, you too can talk with a real life, professional trader!”. 

Honestly, I was a little overwhelmed and exhausted by the time I finally finished putting this list of trading items together. These guys are like the WalMart of trading. They have something for everyone. But what about the quality of the products? How do we judge if any of this stuff is any good? Who is Mark Helwig, Dave Aquino and Thomas Wood?

Weeding My Way Through The Hype

As I looked at all of this stuff. I then started weeding my way through the fancy titles that all three of these guy use, titles like Director of Trading Operations, Full Time Professional Day Trader, Investment Software Developer, Hedge Fund Manager, Award Winning Author, Quantitative Engineer, advisor to thousands of traders world wide, President of Aquino Capital Management, Partner of Supero Capital, Patent Holder, developers of next generation technical analysis, etc. I could go on. For a very long time. But the bottom line, is the bottom line. Do these guys trade?

The ONLY Thing that Matters

As a consumer of trading products, it is very easy to become distracted by “shiny objects” and fancy titles. And in the review of Value Charts, I had to really get focused on what matters the most. And what matters most is the trading room. Every single one of these products and the people selling these products is on full display inside of the trade room. The trading room is the ultimate judge of whether these guys are worth the time. If these guys can show a real time profit inside of the trading room, then an investment in their products would be warranted. All that matters is performance.

The Trading Room Experience

The first thing I noticed about the Value Charts website is that there is no performance disclosure whatsoever. Neither of these room moderators have a recorded history of even a single trade. I found this strange, especially considering that each proclaims to be a full time professional trader. And so going in, I was flying blind. No performance. And so the next step was to sign up and begin screen recordings. My first series of screen recordings began in April, I recorded a total of 4 trading sessions that encompassed 12 hours. The video was then meticulously combed through looking for specific and actionable trading recommendations. Not a single trading recommendation. Lots of talk. Plenty of talk. Massive amounts of talk. But NO TRADING. I was annoyed. But not ready to give up!

From May 11 through May 15, I once again began recording video. I recorded another 9 hours of recordings. Not a single trade. Massive amounts of conversation and hollow talk. No trading. I really could not believe that I had sat through 20 hours of video and listened and watched like some sort of neurotic WW2  enemy signal decoder…I could not find even one actionable trade. Thomas would give every detail on every little economic report and what he thought what was happening on the 15 minute chart, the 30 minute chart, 60 minute chart. I swear, after a few days of listening to this kid, I wanted to reach through the internet and strangle him. What the fuck! Everyone is sitting in the trading room and listening to him just talk about nothing. Of course, my torture must be your torture, you must also experience the ridiculousness of this trading room. And so, I took a big chunk of screen recording and edited out the areas of dead silence. What is left is just a tiny portion of the daily torture that I was forced to endure (to save my fellow traders from torture). See if you can find any trades or anything useful coming out of his mouth…

Another Thing I Found Annoying

In addition to never hearing any live trades being called. Another thing that I found annoying is that Thomas Wood could of easily inserted a trading DOM, from any broker, right onto the screen sharing software.

This Trade Station account is clearly just a simulated account. A real, funded Trade Station account would have an account number, balance, real time summary of trades in the bottom right hand corner. None exists with Value Charts live trading room.

Some vendors are actually open and honest about their trading performance. Below is another live trading room that I reviewed. Notice how his Trade Station account clearly shows accurate trading information.

Dont Play “The Jesus Card”

I once wrote a positive review for another day trading educator named The Christian Financial Radio Network, I got suckered into believing that Christian trading vendors were more trustworthy than non-Christian trading vendors. Wrong. As I discovered shady marketing tactics about CFRN and attempted to highlight the deception, they responded with scripture about how Christians will always be the persecuted. Drove me nuts. Anyway, the reason why I am bringing this up is because every time Thomas would take a break in the trading room, he would put up the following screen share that included Bible scripture. Whenever I start seeing Bible scripture, I get worried. Really worried. To make matters worse, Thomas is “only taking 2 new students” for his July mentorship program. Total nonsense. Thomas would 200 students for July.

Deceptive Trade Reporting

Of course, I emailed Thomas about the trading room and the lack of performance disclosure with his own trading. He mentioned that he does in fact call out trades and posts these trades live on Twitter and Stocktwits. And so I decided to research this further. The Twitter and Stocktwits posts are the same posts, so you do not need to scroll back and forth. Please have a look at this mess of trading advice…one of my favorites, and a very typical post from Thomas is where he posts an after the fact message on twitter… “a break below 155 10/32 should cause prices to move lower”. There is nothing about Thomas going long or short, or stop loss, or target, just this random tweet event. Finally, a full 24 hours later, Thomas is breaking his arm patting himself on the back. “What a great trade guys! Lets take profits and head to the Red Lobster for unlimited bread sticks and bible study”.

This is the kind of stuff that drives me crazy. Where I have to work really hard and dig though a ton of recorded crap to find the core of the lie.

The more I watched, recorded and listened, it became plainly apparent that Thomas Wood is not a trader. In fact, the very prospect of him giving trading advise to anyone is pretty laughable. He is just smart enough to sound like he knows what he is talking about, but in reality, he is just flying by his underwear.

 Wrapping Things Up

Sometimes when I get to the end of one of these reviews, I get frustrated. Not because I recorded hour upon hour of useless screen recordings, hand reviewed these videos, and sifted through page after page of useless trading advice, but because sometimes the truth is sitting in place sight. What is sitting in place sight?

1. No track record posted Value Charts/MicroQuant for the live trading room.
2. Moderators do not post live trades on screen for trading room members.
3. No evidence that a live brokerage account exists.
4. Clear evidence of fraud by posting after the fact trades on Twitter.

And number 5, and probably the most obvious is that the main trading room moderator is just a kid with very little real world trading expertise. Heck just a couple of years ago, he was working at Genworth as a claims adjuster. And now, only 24 months later he is a “full time professional trader” and “hedge fund manager”. This kid knows nothing about trading professionally, and more than likely does not even have a trading account. The creation of these videos that can be purchased for several hundred dollars each are about as useless as my own personal video on how to be a professional quarterback in the NFL. Sure, I can throw a football, but should I be selling videos and giving live instruction on how to be the next Andrew Luck?

Value Charts/MicroQuant Needs To Get Real

This is personal message to Mark Helweg, Thomas Wood, and Dave Aquino…when you read this review, know that the days of posting bullshit on the internet are over. Its time to stop the nonsense. All of you guys need to either start posting real time results, or go get a job at Starbucks. Stop wasting the trading communities time with these ridiculous multi-hour marathon rambling sessions on what is happening in the markets. If we wanted to listen to a talking head, we can simply tune into CNBC or Bloomberg for free.

Put out a real product. Backed by real time results. No more nonsense.

Well that’s it for today folks. Sorry if I was a little rough on these three nitwits, if you had to stomach hour upon hour of useless ramblings from these bozo’s, you would be irritated as well. On to the next review. Please feel free to leave your comments below. Even the folks that disagree will find that their voices are heard.