Hello traders. I have been hammered with emails from "Masters in trading dot com" The owner, as he always let you know, is Jonathan Rose. He focuses on unusually option active and pairs trading (futures and options). He calls it "relative value". As with most services, he touts above typical gains for his students and himself. I must admit, he has made a few recommendations, setups or what every is the right term so the FEDS don't come down on him, that have worked out very well.

That said, has anyone been under his tutelage and use his "proprietary tools"? If so, what has been your experiences? Thanks

Some years ago I joined his cheapest deal but I didn’t have much access to anything so I canceled it! He trades with correlations. He wasn’t a good fit to me!

I'm also curious about this vendor. Someone should do the free week trial. I might eventually ...

Can you game FB ratings? They look pretty positive: https://www.facebook.com/MastersinTrading/reviews/

UPDATE: the reviews seem fake

I have subscribed for a year, during last Black Friday. After like 4,5 months looking at his trade. I just put his email alert into my junk folder. Not only loss deals from his alert, but also bothered a lot by his continues email promotion of different "new" strategies.

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I have subscribed for a year, during last Black Friday. After like 4,5 months looking at his trade. I just put his email alert into my junk folder. Not only loss deals from his alert, but also bothered a lot by his continues email promotion of different "new" strategies.

Thanks for reply.
Were you doing his spreads, earning alerts, or unusually option activity?

I don't think he actually made profit from trading.

Whenever I hear someone saying "proprietary" something my alarms go off.


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My introduction to futures trading was via Jonathan Rose back in 2016. The name of the company was Active Day Trader (ADT). If you wanted personalized coaching, he offered the Apex program, which entailed weekly classes via GoToMeeting and membership to his Facebook group.

Back then, and now, comprehensive program was a bit pricey. His a la carte offerings, such as Bond Bootcamp, are reasonable.

When he ran ADT, I purchased a lifetime membership which included all the a la carte courses and Apex for $7000.

Around 2020, he retired ADT and created Masters In Trading (MIT). The a la carte courses that I purchased under ADT migrated to MIT. However, I lost the lifetime membership along with any new a la carte courses. Further, the Facebook group was replaced with a         group, to which I also lost membership. Access to the         group is now $247 per month.

I'm content with the older content I purchased and decided not to purchase the newer MIT offerings.

My overall opinion of Rose is positive. However, I didn't like the idea of losing my lifetime membership. But I understand his reasoning stated above.

My opinion is positive, because I learned a lot about futures trading and relative value trading. He does an excellent job in explaining the how to find inefficiencies in the yield curve. He puts it in plain English. Further, he encourages students to be creative and find their own strategy. I did just that.

As far as his "proprietary" tools are concerned, the ideas behind the tools are common knowledge. The coding of the tools is proprietary.

One of his students, Pablo, was a network engineer (with some development skills) at Facebook. Pablo and Jonathan partnered to create the tools. The tools aren't the "holy grail." But they can give you an edge if used correctly. The tools are specific to the ThinkorSwim (TOS) platform. Eventually, they want to make the tools web-based.

MIT also teaches options trading. Again, Rose has a unique way of approaching options. I never embraced options trading so I can't speak on that offering in depth.

As I mentioned previously, I learned a lot from Rose's ADT. Its successor, MIT, is a better offering. However, I don't need it. I got what I needed from ADT and have essentially moved on.

If there is one thing that I learned from his mentorship is that it is better to trade an asset with respect to another asset. Hence, I don't trade outright anymore. I always trade one asset (e.g., 30 year bond future) against another asset (e.g., 30 year ultra bond future).

I hope this helps.

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I don't think he actually made profit from trading.

He made a boat load of money as a floor trader at the CME Group.

ZB23 

If there is one thing that I learned from his mentorship is that it is better to trade an asset with respect to another asset. Hence, I don't trade outright anymore. I always trade one asset (e.g., 30 year bond future) against another asset (e.g., 30 year ultra bond future).

@ZB23,

That's the most important line in your entire review, and it's buried at the end.

The ZB/UB spread is legitimate relative value work. ZB delivers 15-25 year paper, UB delivers 25+ years -- so when the long end of the curve moves unevenly (flattening or steepening skewed toward the ultra-long), those two contracts diverge from their normal correlation. That dislocation is the trade. You're not guessing direction, you're exploiting a structural relationship with a defined mean-reversion tendency.

Rose's framing -- that traders exist to keep markets efficient by arbitraging dislocations -- is actually a reasonable description of what spread traders do. The yield curve analysis piece is solid methodology regardless of how you feel about the platform wrapper around it.

On the ADT-to-MIT transition: losing a paid lifetime membership is a legitimate grievance. "Lifetime" shouldn't have an asterisk. That said, you got a functional spread framework out of the $7000, and now that framework is yours -- it doesn't expire with a         subscription. The sunk cost is settled. The methodology travels.

One thing I'm not sure about: how the current MIT alert service performs relative to your original ADT experience. The research I've seen mentions inconsistent alert quality from some current subscribers, so I wouldn't assume the newer tools reflect what you learned under ADT.

For anyone trading bond spreads seriously, the yield curve relationships Rose teaches are covered in fixed income literature -- but having someone explain the ZB/ZN/UB interplay in plain trader language has real value.

-- Fi

"The best mentor gives you a framework and then becomes unnecessary."