T3 Newsbeat Live is run by Mark Melnick, a 20-year veteran trader from New York. According to him, he made his first million at the age of 19 during the dot-com boom back in the late 90s. He claims that his trading room is the fastest growing trading room at T3 and also the Wall Street’s #1 trading room. You can see this in the description of his videos on Youtube. He is a big proponent of reaching the highest win rate possible in trading. He openly shares some of his trading strategies in free videos and claims that some of his strategies are batting over 70% or even 80 %. He also often says that some of the members enjoy a win rate over 90% using his strategies. I will let you be the judge of this. Self-Promotion He makes a lot of videos to attract new people into his trading room. His daily videos are uploaded on Facebook and Youtube almost daily even on Weekends (mostly excluding Friday evening & Saturdays). In so many videos you’d hear him talking about how his trading room has an edge over other trading rooms while bashing other trading rooms as a whole. He often talks about how his trading room bought stocks/options at the near bottom or shorted at the near top using his “algorithmic analysis” which can be applied to all markets (stocks, future, forex, crypto). Piques your curiosity, right? In fact, that’s how I got to give his trading room a try. “Who in the hell wouldn’t want to catch the top & bottom in the markets, right?” So, you would think people in his room and himself are making a killing using his algorithmic analysis? Not so fast… (in fact, his algorithmic analysis is just drawing trendlines and identifying the most probable support and resistance) When it works (of course, nothing works 100% of the time), you are able to catch just few cents off the top and bottom when it works if you follow his trade. However, you have no idea how long you’d have to hold your position. Mark doesn’t know either. So, he usually goes for nickels and dimes and rarely holds a position longer than 5 minutes. Even if he’s good at picking bottoms and tops, you’d often risk more than nickels and dimes just to make nickels and dimes. Make sense, right? ……. ……. ……. Also, because he gets out of his positions fast, he misses out on riding some potentially big trades. Oh, how I wish stay in that position a bit longer. He doesn’t say but one can surmise that he often leave too much on the table. Of course, it’s important to take your profit fast when you scalp but you consistently leave too much on the table like he does, one has to wonder if he has any system for taking profits (otherwise, it’s all discretionary guessing). This type of bottom/top picking is not his main strategy, though. The strategy that makes him the most amount of money might surprise you. I will get to this later. How Mark Trades (Mark’s Trading Setups and Strategies) Mainly, he scans the market in the morning for earnings reports, analysts’ upgrades/downgrades and other catalysts that have potential to make moves in the market. He openly shares his mockery or insult of analysts, calling certain analysts “idiots” or “imbeciles”. He puts on his first trade(s) early in the morning (from 9:30AM to 10:00AM Eastern Standard Time) when the market move is the most volatile. Some of his strategies use market order during this period of volatile time using options. You can see why this can be very risky and especially on thinly traded options with side spread. He does point out this but sometimes you hear people in the room stuck in an options position that they can’t get out. Just like his trades from calling the top/bottom of a stock, he gets in and gets out of a position within minutes if not seconds while going for nickels and dimes while staring at 1minute and 5-minutes charts. That applies to most, if not all of his strategies. (Yes, sometimes he does catch bigger moves than nickels and dimes.) When you trade during the most volatile time in the morning, you’re subjected to wild moves in both directions. If you’re overly prudent or inexperienced in trading, your stop (unless very wide), has a very high chance of hitting. A lot of times it might stop you out and go in the direction that you predicted. So, when you’ve been trading during this time, you’d probably don’t set a stoploss order or a hard stop to avoid getting fleeced. You do have to be proactive at cutting your loss as quickly as possible. Otherwise you’d find yourself scrambling to get out your position while the bid keeps dropping. I have to say that Mark is very cautious and he does get out of trades very fast if he has doubt. A lot of times he lets out exhausting, heavy sighs and even murmurs some swear words when things don’t seem to go the way he wants in a trade. Besides calling certain analysts, “imbeciles” and “idiots”, this is quite unprofessional but no one in the room has the gut to point things out like this. The irony is that he is the “head of trading psychology” at T3 and it doesn’t seem like that he doesn’t have much control over his trading psychology and let alone his emotion. People in trading chatrooms, like a herd of sheep, as a whole exhibit herd mentality. Even in an online chatroom, you don’t often see someone ruffling feathers and say what they really want to say. This is probably because of the certain amount of people believing whatever he says without questioning the validity and quality of his comments. He has several strategies and according to him all of them have win rate over %70. However, he also comes up with new strategies as often as every month. He either comes up with new strategy or tweaks his existing strategies. According to him, the reason is that the market is always evolving and you need to constantly adapt yourself to the ever-changing market environment. What do you think? Does this sound like someone with an edge? And for someone who scalps for nickels and dimes, he claims to have the highest Sharpe Ratio that he has ever seen in the industry. I’m NOT making this up. He often utters remarks like “My Sharpe Ratio is one of the highest I’ve seen in my twenty-year trading career.”, “I want to create a of traders with a very high Sharpe Ratio. How can you achieve a high Sharpe Ratio when you scalp all the time? And let’s not even talk about commissions generated from frequent scalping. Who cares about commissions when you can be a scalper with high Sharpe Ratio? Now, I want to talk about something controversial about his most profitable strategy. Chatters According to him, he makes the most amount of money using what he calls “Chatters”. He admits he bets on this kind of trades heavily. His chatter trades are based on the “newsflow” of big funds making a move in certain stocks and piggybacking on the same trade before others catch on. No one knows how he exactly gets his “newsflow” and he doesn’t give a straight answer when asked. Maybe he pays a lot for this kind of information or maybe it’s given to him for free. Who knows? But it makes sense. The name of the room is Newsbeat Live. Without this the name wouldn’t be the same. This is probably the only real edge that he has and it’s understandable that he doesn’t want to reveal how he get this kind of newsflow and from where. By joining his trading room he’ll make a callout on these trades for you to take advantage of. In order to do this kind of trade, you have to be very quick on your trigger finger. Almost always the initial move is done within a couple of minutes, if not seconds. If you get in late, you find yourself a sucker buying at or near the top. Also, because you want to get in as soon as you hear his “chatter” announcements, he advised people to get in within 5 seconds of each chatter announcement and use market order to get in. He said that if he had a small account, he’d bet 100% on this kind of “high-octane” chatter trades and get in and get out fast for “easy” money. This was how chatter trades were done …Until one they when many people got burned badly. Back in September or October of 2019, a lot of people in the room lost a lot money because they market ordered call options contracts on a chatter trade. The spread on that trade was something like BID: 0.5 ASK: 5.00 few seconds after he announced it. I didn’t take that trade. No way, I’m going to buy something that has a spread like that. If you’ve been trading options you know that this kind of spread can happen. Many people that day in the room marketed-in on the trade, taking the offer at ASK. They found themselves buying at $5.0 per contract when someone probably bought the same contract at $0.40 or $0.50 just few seconds ago. Someone walked away with decent profits on that trade. This was the biggest trading chatroom fiasco I’ve ever seen. People in the room grieving and throwing numbers of how much they had just lost. 10K, 20K, 30K and even $60K. Could it be also that someone who lost more and didn’t want to talk about it because it’d hurt too much? And how embarrassing to talk about such a loss. I give credit to people who spoke up about it. People were obviously distressed and what did Mr. Mark Melnick do at this moment? Initially, he didn’t say much. But what he said he was going to walk away from the trading desk to clear his mind. It took a while for him to come back and he mentioned that it hurt him a lot that people lost a lot of money and encouraged people not to hesitate to contact him. I don’t think he ever said anything about that he made a mistake insinuating to load up on chatter trades. No apology since everyone who took the trade did it at their own risk. He advised people to reach out to their broker and do whatever it takes to get their trades annulled because the market makers in that trades were despicable crooks and evil. But let’s get one thing clear. Perhaps the cold hard truth. Since Mark is the one who announces chatter trades. he basically frontruns everyone who gets in on these trades after him. There were times when he doesn’t take his own chatter trades and lets the room have it. But when he does, it’s a guarantee win for him. He has some sycophantic followers in his trading room and these people are always hungry for chatter plays. I can imagine drooling over the idea of next chatter trades. It’s human to naturally seek the least path of resistance and this type of trade requires no skill but having fast trigger finger and a platform that allows fast execution. By taking his chatter trades, you are most likely to make money as long as you act fast to get in and get out. The thing is, you don’t know when it’s exactly the next chatter trade is going to happen. If you take a bathroom break, you just miss it. If you take a phone call or answer a door bell, you just missed it. So, it requires you to be glued to your monitor(s) if you want to make the most of your subscription. So, we went over Mark’s most profitable strategy. But wait we haven’t yet to talk about his overnight swing trades. Mark’s Swing Trades His overnight swing trades jokes. Yes, jokes. A lot of his overnight trades are done just before earnings announcements when implied volatility is at the highest. You’ve ever bought a call option just before earnings, predicted the right direction but only to find out that you still lost money next morning? This is because of the implied volatility crush post earnings. A lot of people new to options don’t know this and get taken advantage by veterans this way. I don’t know if Mark knows or not but I witnessed him buying options this way. I think he understand the concept of implied volatility but why he gets on such trades is a mystery. I haven’t exactly checked the result of all of his swing trades but I wouldn’t be surprised if people lost more money following his swing trades than anything in the room. Final Word Mark offers “free-consultation” on the phone for people who struggle in their trading. He said that he takes a lot of phone calls but often you’d get the feeling that he is distracted, unable to give an undivided attention for his consultation. “How would you like to get on a free consultation with a millionaire scalper who can take your trading to the next level?” Appealing isn’t it? But would you want to get on the phone with someone who is going to give a consultation, even if he or she is distracted? Oh, it’s a free consultation. Ok, why not? What do I got to lose? In his videos, you’d hear him saying that he cares for everyone in his trading room and considers them as part of his family. And he runs the trading room out of his good heart and intention more than making money. Besides he says that he makes more money from his trading than running the room. My suggestion is that you have a look and you’d be the judge. He does hold “open house” for his trading room from time to time. Also, I believe that if you try his trading room for the first time, you try it for a month for about $50. As for me, he’s just another front runner using his trading room to profit with a bad sense of humor and exaggeration that make you cringe. If you've ever been to T3 Newsbeat Live, I would like to hear what you have to say. Thanks for reading
I was in T-3's virtual trading room for about a yr back in 2008-2009 i think it was . Being a trader is lonely at times so i wanted to see how it was. They had 10 different guys that were trading you could follow. To be honest it was ok at best but i got little out of it outside a lot of eyes on different stocks so you might pick up a few stocks you missed .I know Marc Sperling is a great trader but in the end none of us know how any of these guys really do . If there these incredible traders making $3-$10 mil a yr why deal with he headache of training others? The reason why is there not making that and they are making more money training that trading . Its like the gold mining of the 1800's. Providing the picks and shovels( trader education) more profitable than mining (trading) .
I attended the free trial, which is not enough to really base opinion on. I mostly agree with your review. I also agree that the edge is in news trading and the rest is mostly smoke. The thing is, every room caters to its audience. So I never blame the room or moderator for giving people what they came for. I am guessing you are not a scalper or active day trader. The whole point is to take small quick profits and be flat(risk free). Because the opportunities are not as scarce as other methods, these nickels on thousands of shares add up quickly. This gives you great stats(Look at Warrior Trading as example), but it’s a grind. Much more fun to buy an option and make 500% and feel like a genius, which is why most people are in that room(wide brush). As you described, you can get stung, but with experience and proper sizing you should be doing well eventually. In other words, If you can day/swing trade stocks, you should be able to use liquid options as a substitute. I got no issues with that. However, I would use different words to describe them - they are manipulators who represent interests of the clients of the firms they are employed by.
Liquidity in options as compared to stocks is a relative term. I am not convinced since the spread in options is much wider even in liquid options.
You're not the first to complain about that chatroom. You've stated 2 main red flags. Entering options at market and copying scalps. Being a dick and unprofessional isn't a red flag in this industry because a lot of successful traders are arrogant but can be helpful at the same time. However, taking consulting calls when the market is still open is questionable. Placing market orders on options just screams he's taking the other side to me. Or at least being negligent, why not set limit orders a few cents above the price to ensure you wont get slippage?... The main turn off in options for me personally is the spread. Never join a chat room that suggests copying scalps. It's likely you'll get in and out and worse times compared to the person calling the trades. The reason why a scalping guru is successful is because they are figuring out a probable price variance on the 1m chart and sees a the most likely highs and lows within the next 30s-5min. The guru watching the trade updates his initial opinion internally when interpreting the volume and direction. You mentioned warrior trading and at a glance his performance is impressive and his macro strategy of scanning high open stocks to close the gap is a legit strategy. If you analyse over 100 videos like I have you'll find that he doesn't give a lot of time to prepare people, he calls out his trades quickly both in and out. He also poorly implements his entries quite heavily plus gets in a lot later than most traders who implement this strategy. It's easier to learn scalping yourself and it can apply to most liquid stocks. Just read the tape, volatility (compare beta & alpha to its index), 1min bar variance, and proper risk management. However I wouldn't suggest learning how to scalp first. It should be something to monitor and paper trade while learning how larger stock swings conduct themselves vs the market.
I joined NBL room around Feb 2020, and am still in it even though Mark is toast. Its being ran by 2 former members who are doing a good job. I find tremendous value in the room. I always sorta cringed at how much he claimed to care about every single person in the room and all that type of stuff, clearly you want to make more money.
Apparently from Jan. 2018 to Jan. 2020 he spread 100s of false news rumors on stocks to capitalize for his own gain. Sounds like a complaint was made by an individual in his chatroom and that led to an investigation.