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Profit.ly
A venerable housing project for stock trading Guru’s trying to make a quick buck from the carnival crowd. A few good traders do ply their wares at Profit.ly, but far too much chicanery riddled with outright fraud.
User Review
( votes)Let’s Talk About Profit.ly
If you have been around awhile, you have probably heard of Profit.ly. What is Profit.ly? If you don’t know by now, let me be give you a brief overview. Profit.ly is a website where any trader can join for a small fee, and then the trader may upload brokerage statements directly into the Profit.ly database. The purpose of Profit.ly is to find out who can actually trade, and who cannot trade. The original idea was to weed out the shady fraudulent trading vendors and con artists from the honest trading vendors, many I written about on this blog. Anyway, the Profit.ly system is supposed to be a fool proof system where only accurate trading entries and exits are inputted directly from the brokerage company into the servers at Profit.ly, time stamped and irrefutable. No shady stuff! The website was created by Tim Sykes, a pretty famous marketing personality, a guy with deep pockets and a big following of faithful worshipers willing to subscribe to his insider stock tip newsletters.
Nobody is really sure just how much Tim Sykes makes selling subscriptions. But its rumored in the millions of dollars. In addition to Tim Sykes selling newsletters, there are also a few other Guru’s. One of these Guru’s I recently had written a review about is a guy named Paul Scolardi (Superman) www.super-trades.com. Paul is a real deal trader, a real superman trader. However, what I want to talk about is the verification system at Profit.ly.
Can Profit.ly Be Trusted?
If you log onto the profit.ly website and search for the most profitable traders, you will see a list like this…pretty amazing numbers. One has to wonder is someone named Lucky Strike really made $10.94 million dollars. Or another user name ECNC really made $7.33 million dollars. If you drill down deeper, the profit.ly website actually shows an equity curve of each of these traders. The equity curve is amazing with most of these guys on the first page regularly making $50,000 each and every day, without every suffering any losses!
Now keep in mind that just about everybody is selling a newsletter on Profit.ly. Of course, Tim Sykes gets a cut of all of the sales. And all of this makes you really wonder whether all of these profits are in fact real, or just made up nonsense.
Profit.ly also has an affiliate program where anyone with a little marketing saavy can earn a commission for these newsletter subscriptions. Therefore, if you run a simple google search for Profit.ly or many of the newsletter guru’s that you see on Profit.ly, there is an absolute certainty that an army of people will swear how great Profit.ly is and how much they are also making massive profits. Of course, all of these reviews also link back to Profit.ly, complete with an affiliate link and tracking cookie to record sales.
All of this creates one big marketing snowball that picks up speed and is hard to contain or make sense of. Who doesn’t want to subscribe to a $90 newsletter and make $50,000 a month with almost now risk, from a verified Guru, that submitted a brokerage statement? I certainly do!
Sometimes we just really want to believe the Guru. We have a deep need to believe that someone out there can help us solve our problems. And this is the fundamental problem with Profit.ly, the entire website is a Guru platform, meant to dazzle the viewer into believing that profits are only a click and credit card number away.
If Profit.ly A Fraud?
Truthfully, its hard to find a voice that is willing to challenge Profit.ly. That is willing to take a critical view and ask the tough questions, look for smoke that could reveal a fire, find inconsistencies that reveal any fraud on Profit.ly. However, I spent a few weeks attempting to game the Profit.ly system, attempting to portray myself as a Guru. To prove that if I could casually game Profit.ly, then others could also game Profit.ly, with the intention of selling newsletters, trading DVD’s, mentorships, trading rooms, indicators etc.
How To Hustle Profit.ly And Be A Guru…OR NOT
Have you ever wanted to be a stock trading millionaire Guru trader? Well, it would be nice. But what if I could be the worst performing trader on Profit.ly? Now that is an accomplishment worthy of some sort of award. And that is exactly what I set out to do! To be the worst! So lets review the steps I took to be the verified worst trader on Profit.ly. Step 1, create a trading system and then optimize it to buy at the high and sell at the low. And that every single trade was fully leveraged to lose at least $1,000,000. Since I am a pretty good programmer, this took me about 5 minutes. Next I exported all trades out of my trading systematic trading platform and into a .csv file. Step 2, create an account at Profit.ly and select the broker, I selected a Forex Broker. Enter credentials and upload a properly formatted .csv file into the Profit.ly system. The file has to be correctly formatted to be accepted into Profit.ly. Once file is uploaded into the Profit.ly system, its time to admire the handiwork and fully embrace myself as the worst trader on Profit.ly.
Simply amazing, with just a little creativity and bit of persistence, I am officially a really bad trader. Row after row, page after page of confirmed losing trades, a net loss of $650,000,000. To celebrate this amazing feat of failure, perhaps I should also join the ranks of trading Guru’s at Profit.ly. Sell my own newsletter, or DVD, or workshop, or trading system. I could title it “How To Lose $650,000,000 Trading Only 5 Minutes Each Day”.
Tempting
Admittedly, its very tempting to create a fake internet persona and then magically create a “verified” trading record, with the sole purpose of selling a product. It would be so easy to just go to the dark side, take the fast money, fleece the suckers. Much easier than actually trading.
Well that’s it for now. Sorry if I offended many of my readers with this big letdown regarding Profit.ly. If I could be put one final note into this…I really do believe that Timothy Sykes is a great trader, but an even better promoter.
Please leave your comments below. Good comments, bad comments, please speak freely.
Hello again everyone. Just wanted to inform the community that I have discovered a way to game the profitly verification system and YES I am able to produce the “verified” check mark. I believe there are several ways to achieve this. If you would not mind sharing your methods with me I would like to create a video detailing how this is done. I can give credit to those who provide info or you may remain anonymous. You can contact me on twitter at @TickerCandy or email support@tickercandy.com Thanks, TickerCandy
Hello can you please review Tim Sykes as you did superman? Thank you
I found this article while researching someone who is rugby on profit.ly, and who comments on Seeking Alpha as digger1234 where he brags about trading TNA and other leveraged ETFs. His site is 98percentwinners.com
Does anyone here have any experience with him? His comments on SA appear to be someone who is knowledgeable, but his claims seem unbelievable.
I am curious. I have been following some alerts from Tim and superman on twitter for a little while. I am looking to join but not sure who to pick or both. I am looking to jump in everything but try a few alerts to jump in and out of. Bacially give it a try and play safe for a little while to see what I can trust.
Any feedback on who is better to do with?
Don’t get involved with either of them they are both running scams.
Why would you want to shadow his trades??? Why not try to learn trading yourself???
That is too much work when one wants to “get rich quick” with as little effort as possible?
A question on this is why didn’t you become the best trader? why try the worst? surely you would have more evidence and noise if everyone saw your name on the top gainers listing above tim sykes. This would also cause them to notify the reasons and also close out the potential to post paper trades.
If you posted 650,000,000 profits in a month I would guarantee that you would get more noise from the marketing/trading gurus.
I greatly appreciate your website and dedication to review the truth and shames of trading courses. However with that in mind we should also be questioning the potential of you being biased to certain traders against others.
Profit.ly is down at the moment. I have been trying to sign on to this website, but was unsuccessfully. It has stopped running this past 30 minutes. Anyone has the same problem, please try it!
I saw this complaint on rippoffreport:
”
#12 Consumer Comment
We know Tim Sykes
AUTHOR: scammed by tim sykes – ()
SUBMITTED: Wednesday, April 03, 2013
I don’t know Tim directly but we have a colleague who works with Tim and is a personal friend. Whether this is true or not I don’t know but I do know he is a personal friend of Tim’s as he has show me pictures and parties with him on occasion. Here’s what he told me in confidence:
Sykes doesn’t trade actively himself. When my friend asked Sykes about his trading, his amounts which he trades are so small they are insignficant.
2. Sykes admits personally he is a promoter and that he fleeces his customers who he refers to as suckers
3. He makes $800,000 on a 3 day seminar. Trading makes so little money for him he has no interest in it.
4. My friend works in the finance industry gives him the picks which he posts on his site. My friend trades these picks before Sykes posts them on his site for easy profits.
5. He admits he is in the training industry / get rick quick industry note the tradingindustry. He knows what’s being said about him. Sykes knows he is a fraud but he keeps his schtick going to maintain his lifestyle.
”
And if you look for other reviews, you’ll just find a lot of “timothy sykes scam” sites which are from his organization which are just counter barrage against all the bad individual reviews of Sykes’ educational services.
What is your opinion on collective2?
I love it.
Since you claim to be able to “game” profit.ly once, you can do it again and leave your handiwork for all to see, n’est ce pas?
The next time you “fake” trades on profit.ly, try to have timestamps on your trades that are chronological in order and vary the amounts. I will give you one thing, anyone that looks at that picture and believes it doesn’t deserve to be anywhere on or near profit.ly! If you’re gonna hate, try to do it without lying. Here’s what your account really looks like: http://profit.ly/user/superfly
Since you can “game” profit.ly
Thank you for giving this review.
Trading seams to be 90% bullshit con men and 5% average traders who realised selling the dream is easer money. The other 5% are professional.
Don’t be fooled by the gold rush. Sell the shovels and the dream.
I’ve given investomonials.com negative reviews on investomonials as well as other negative reviews to Warrior trading and investors underground. All my negative reviews have been removed and my IP address has been banned so I can’t even visit investomonials anymore.. So they don’t like negative reviews and are very selective on what negative reviews they will accept but if you have a positive review your their best friend at least for awhile.
Yes! If you write a negative review about one of the sponsored sites, like TradeWithKavan or Warrior Trading (both scams) then they ban your IP address. Fucking Sykes, what an asshole.
Sykes is the ring leader, this guy has to be the biggest fraud of them all, between Investimonials and profit.ly there is enough evidence to give him 3 life sentences (sarcasm). Take his pump and dump biz along with him promoting shady penny stock brokers abroad to get his members passed the DTP rule and voila, another cell mate for big bubba.
In hindsight, it now makes sense how Investimonials was started to herd more aspiring retailers into the trap nets of the scam sites post 2009 with their so called pubic mission as a “user reviews” site when it’s now nothing but a referral and plant comment “investi-scamma” site.
Darn Emmett, why did this topic die off? I am new to this community and was really getting into these comments for a timely reason. I am recently unemployed and fortunately have a couple accounts with brokerage houses and am actually considering setting aside a day-trading amount to start. Doing some research, I came across Tim and Profit.ly and was really being drawn into the story. Of course I have not invested in any of these programs yet and have only began learning and evaluating. Thank God for your site and the honest (hopefully), impartial and informed opinions. Someone please pick it the topic again and continue this educational debate. I appreciate all the comments and will now continue onto other evaluations on this site. Thanks again Emmett et al.
Emmett,
This is an interesting website. I really like what you’re trying to do, but I have to wonder if you have a few kinks that need to be worked out. On 5/13/2015 you said, “Even the “checkmark” can be gamed”. Have you done it yourself, or are you relying on others who have said that they have done it? If it is true (and you know how to do it), then it seems that doing so would be the logical next step. Because Mike (the technical guy from profitly) has said that what you did back in January wasn’t actually gaming the system because your trades weren’t verified. And Tim Sykes (or whoever is authorized to post for him) said the same thing recently on their blog (read it here: http://blog.profit.ly/2015/06/02/addressing-those-who-try-and-fake-our-verification/).
What’s interesting/funny is that the members of profitly are able to vote for what they believe to be “Madoffed” traders; in other words, bullshit con artists faking a trading record that they don’t actually have. You know who’s #2 on that list? Tim Sykes himself. Although it’s impossible to say if people actually believe that or if they’re just having fun with it, I think it’s still pretty funny.
At any rate, as things stand now, they seem to be at an impasse. You say that their system is easily gamed and they say it’s not. Unfortunately, up to this point you haven’t offered any proof (unless I missed it somewhere) to back up your claim. And believe me when I say that I say this very respectfully; as I said, I think you have good intentions with this website. But unless you can prove that the ‘checkmark’ can be faked, from where I’m standing, it looks like they have successfully defended themselves against your accusation. And I don’t say this because I want to defend them; many/most of them come across as carnival barkers to me.
Excellent question…let me provide an example. A trader can import trades directly via .TXT file, these trades are “not verified” and will not receive the check mark. Only the trades that pass through a screen that Profit.ly deems reliable. Unfortunately, that screen is easy to game. For instance, suppose you have a prop account with SangLucci Trading, which is deemed to credible by Mike and Tim at Profit.ly. But here is the rub…all of the trades at SangLucci Trading use a third party company named PropReports.com. All you need to do at PropReports.com is use a simulator, or import your trades via smpt, or alter the data within the output report.
Another way to game reporting is through iBoss, another prop firm “trusted portal”.
Tim Sykes should hold a contest that pays anyone that has gamed the system. And he should pay one dollar for every person that can do it. Guess what? Tim and Mike would been broke in a week from paying out one dollar bills.
The facade of Profit.ly being an unbiased and hack proof system is about as credable as Tim Sykes other marketing wonderment to society….Investimonials. Where we can find the holy grail of honest and unbiased trading reviews on the internet.
That is very interesting. The way you’ve described it, it sounds like only people using prop firms are able to game their verification system. Does this mean that the verifications through regular brokers (Fidelity, TD Ameritrade, etc.) are more trustworthy? Or are you aware of ways that those can be spoofed as well?
I would be interested to hear their response to this, but unfortunately they decided to turn off comments on their blog post. It seems that they don’t want their community to be able to talk about it. Which, considering the circumstances, doesn’t really surprise me.
Create two accounts at TD Ameritrade. Each account at Ameritrade can use either paper money or real money. Choose paper money. Buy 1000 shares of Apple. On the other TD Ameritrade account, simultaneously sell 1000 shares of Apple. Close both trades at he end of the day. One account shows a winner, the other shows a loser.
Now go to Profit.ly. Import the results from the account with the winning trade. Repeat.
Now go create a $495 DVD on how to trade, find a ferrari dealership and get some photos taken of you sitting in the front seat, find the biggest nicest house in your area and take pictures of you standing in the driveway. With your credit card, go out and buy 10 huge monitors. Place monitors on your desk with official looking charts, then take some pictures.
You understand how this works now?
Holy camoli !! Is this an industry standards?! There are so many “gurus” popping lately that I wonder if the whole trading industry is even worth getting into?
I would say though that like anything else in the world of technology, persistent people will find a way to game the system. I know I have seen Tim call out a few shady traders for not verifying their trades. He will also contact them directly to work out verification if they are worried about his system. If there is money to be made, someone will find a way though. I don’t believe that it makes Profit.ly crap though. The free service is very useful for tracking profits and trades and it also helps traders analyze their trades. If people rely on it simply for finding Gurus to tell them what to trade then I would say their site is no less reliable than your site which could be as biased as any. All of the Gurus that I find reliable though teach self-sufficiency over relying on them for trades including Sykes.
And one other thing, I have never withheld any of Mike’s comments. That is pure nonsense. Everyone can comment here. Even that lunatic that posted the hateful, bigoted “jew” comments about Tim Sykes got his voice heard.
Does anyone have a screenshot of Nathan Michaud’s trades? From Emmet’s earlier review of Profit.ly and Nathan, it would seem Nathan is a fraud and was cheating the Profit.ly system. But if his trades were verified with a checkmark, then that would be proof Profit.ly can be cheated.
Even the “checkmark” can be gamed.
The first couple of years that Profit.ly was introduced to the trading community, it was a revolutionary idea. However, like most systems…people quickly figured out the flaws and began using it post bogus trading results. These fake results were then leveraged and used as marketing fodder. The entire profit.ly system is rotten to the core. Even worse is Investimonials.com, a absolute sham. Tim Sykes talks about exposing shady vendors, yet look at the header banner on Investimonials, its one of the biggest hustlers out there…Picks That Make Cents or Trade With Kavan. Pure fraud.
The $1m trades you posted are not verified. It is true anyone can manually type in a trade or do it how you did it. But if you actually imported from your broker, there would be a check mark by the date and time, which means that the trade is truly verified.
Emmett,
If there is no ‘checkmark’ on their they are fake, period. Thats how Tim created it to verify demo v. real accounts. Done, case closed. Check marks equal real, no check marks equal fake.
If Profit.ly supports the brokerage download, a check mark next to the trade indicates a real and verified trade.
However, if there is no check mark, the trader has the option to upload proof of the trade. Traders will upload proof of a trade if Profit.ly does not support the brokerage download feature. It is impossible for Profit.ly to support every broker out there.
For those who upload trading transactions for unsupported brokers, you want to see clearly dates transaction details, trading codes,, commissions,, fees and NET P/L, not gross P/L. If you just see a bunch of transactions with no specific details, it may be a demo account and that person may be learning.
So verified trades on Profit.ly can be both check marks and uploaded account transactions with specific details.
Well, there is a definitively a few ways to game profit.ly. This is just a fact. Has Tim taken more efforts in removing some of the pond scum? Yes. So I have to give him some credit there. However, the irony is that Tim needs scammers to upload fake trades because it just brings in more readers and more buzz.
At PT Barnum once said, “there is no such thing as bad publicity”.
You need to also allow my comment to show here on this page or else you aren’t being transparent.
Hi Mike,
Your comments will always be posted. I do believe that Profit.ly and Investimonials are a useful tool, but a few bad apples threaten the core legitimacy of your product.
You can clean things up, but doing so means that you will lose a lot of money in advertising and educational product sales.
In short, you guys have slipped away from your original intent, and become part of the problem. Sorry to write this, but I am only saying what many are thinking but too afraid to express.
Emmett
My original reply still says awaiting moderation… It shows that you didn’t really game anything.
Emmett,
You’re a shady character yourself. But first, you cannot game profit.ly if it has a checkmark its real. Just because you lost money in trading doesn’t mean you need to be bitter.
Hi Emmett (and Mike) –
Thanks for bringing up this subject. I have recently discovered Profit.ly and I think it is important for users to know it is reliable.
It seems this issue is not resolved one way or another. Emmett – if you are interested in clarifying this, I think it would be a big help to the community, but in that case, I would think you need to give Profit.ly (and Mike) a fair attempt to convince you that they are legit.
If you are interested, I would think it would be fair to let Mike’s comment get posted, then to further investigate whether their “verified” trades can be gamed. See if you can created a “verified” account and game their system. I think you may be able to – but would love to hear more.
If you let this slide, then I think it would be a shame for all involved…
Just the thoughts of an observer – thanks.
What they need to do is link the live trading accounts of any operator to pro-fitly ( no demo accounts permitted)
. This is currently done at i think fxstreet.
Wow, Profit.ly looks easy to fool. Maybe you could review the profit.ly live trading room. Thank you for the review. There other sites that have better trading records that I think are correct. Future Truth Magazine – reviews mechanical trading systems. myFxbook for forex trading. It logs directly into your forex account. You need to give it passwords for your account. Collective2 is a site of gurus and they have active accounts. I saw one guru on Collective2 with a very negative account. I think he did not bother to hide it as people are searching for the best systems, not negative systems. Thank you again
sorry i meant myfxbook as craig states Collective2 need to do that also as I have no confidence in their systems which are based on demo accounts.