Is Profit ly A Scam?
Yesterday, I posted a review of Profit.ly. If you are unfamiliar with Profit.ly, then please read the post that contains information on how I gamed the Profit.ly trade verification system with the intention of becoming the worlds worst trader. In a very short period of time, I was able to create fake account statements and then upload the statements into Profit.ly that showed that I had lost $650,000,000. This loss officially crowned me as the worst “verified” trader on Profit.ly. Since everyone on Profit.ly is trying to be the most impressive trader, achieving my goal was relatively easy.
However the real goal was not to show that I was the worlds worst “100% verified” trader on Profit.ly. The goal was to show that anyone, in only a few minutes could creatively game the Profit.ly verification system. And in addition, expose Profit.ly for what it really and truly is…a marketing platform to sell useless membership subscriptions and educational DVD’s to naive investors.
One Day After My Post
Today, I received a clever email from a high school kid in upstate New York. He prefers to go by the name Young Jeezy. I have no idea what a Jeezy actually is. Anyway, he also notified me that he had also easily gamed the Profit.ly system with the sole purpose of showing himself as a millionaire trader. His motivation was to show “big money” trading, and that the trade results would be used as link bait for affiliate marketing. The idea was that if a high school kid could become a trading millionaire buy purchasing Profit.ly products, then anyone could. The hustle was to use his story as link bait that people would click on, and then once clicked on, a tracking cookie would activate and any purchases made a Profit.ly would earn him a commission of sales.
Executing The Scam
Young Jeezy then explained to me how he created his millionaire trader persona, complete with fake trades showing massive profits…all he did was create demo accounts with the intention of 
uploading fake trades into Profit.ly. How? Create TWO demo accounts at any of the 30+ brokers listed on Profit.ly. Once the dual accounts were created, next you buy 10,000 shares of a popular stock in demo account A, and then sell 10,000 shares in demo account B. The net effect is that one of the two accounts will always show a winner. Everyday, simply upload into Profit.ly only the results from the demo account with the winning trade. After a short period of time, you can now show a Profit.ly equity curve that looks fantastic. Everyone once in awhile, he explained that he would pepper in a losing trade to make it look believable.
Next Create Webpages and Video Testamonials
After he created the “verified” track record, he then created several websites touting his success. He also created several You Tube video testimonials. Young Jeezy refused to give me the web addresses and video testimonials, but he did send me a long list of websites of others pulling the same hustle, and others that had also created fake video testimonials. Example below:
If you watch this video, its pretty laughable. Of course, I don’t expect you to believe me, simply go to You Tube and search the names of gurus on Profit.ly that are selling DVD’s and advisories. Also, the internet is lliterallyclogged up with people attempting to earn a quick buck with this exact same testimonial hustle.
Coming Clean
I asked Young Jeezy why he decided to contact me and tell me about the scam. He explained that initially he was earning about $1500 a month for several straight months but slowly the amount tricked down to nearly nothing. The typical life cycle of a Profit.ly newsletter is only 30 days, and the target might purchase an educational DVD. But nobody would subscribe for more than 60 days. Sometimes they would purchase a Tim Sykes subscription, then another guru, then another, but in the end they would end of cancelling.
In addition to the income drying up, friends and family became aware of the web videos and became concerned that he was committing fraud. He thought about using a fake name and paying for fake reviews from professional reviewers on fiverr. But in the end, he decided to go back to college and finish his education.
Well that’s it for today. Thanks for reading. I understand that when Tim Sykes and the rest of the gurus and affiliate marketers read this post and all of its raw negativity, they will how with anger and attack me. Truthfully, it is easier to just keep my mouth shut and let stupid people just keep being stupid, but just a little part of me say’s “fuck it”. Please leave your comments below. Speak freely, speak liberally.
I read the whole post, my answer ain’t good or bad, just reality, i have the whole sykes course to learn how to trade pennystocks i can assure you that by watching and rewatching and rewatching at least the 30 day boot camp course and the trader’s checklist course, you can start day trade-ing with security and win.
Now regarding the whole profit.ly and many more stuff about sykes success, yes part of it comes from all the marketing stuff, but when he says that he turned his bar mitzbah money in to thousands of dollars, i can tell you guys that its 100% real that can be done, the problem is people doesn’t want to study every day, even weekends, im saying this because i have seen it in person from the daily study and successful trades of a good friend of mine, tradeing ain’t a game and also ain’t a casino because you can actually change the odds by studying, what has happened in the past will always repeat in the future an if you learn to identify basic doji patterns you will part of that 10% of traders who live from tradeing.
Depending on the amount of money in your account and most importantly personal hunger to become rich so you leave behind videogames, social life, everything for a while you’ll successful.
Trade-ing is 100% real, but its engulfed in a globe of lies and scammers that want to profit from the idiots who want things through the easy way…
Everything, every action, every thing that happens in this planet has a relation to the movements inside the stock market, it sounds crazy but it’s real, watch (Pi: the order of chaos) from director Aronofsky
No school, no college will teach the direct way to understand the penny stock and otc market, it seams like if it company around the world want normal people to assume that its 100% a scam, no intermediate salary citizen could live from tradeing from home, look at this stuff like it, study everything you can find and not only make your own answers, make better ones, and you’ll learn with the time if you really under stand it, that you cant help anyone, there are no friends only people you know, many will laugh and many will call you crazy, but believe me that financial freedom they talk about is 100% real but only comes by studying every dam day, by studying i mean investigating new ways to make longs and short trades, watching the daily premarket preps and after market daily gains, everything is on youtube, after 4 im completely free and i can work from any freaking part of the planet.👌
Hustle…
ARE U A FAKE PROFILE FROM PROFIT.LY??
‘It’s Easier to Fool People Than to Convince Them That They Have Been Fooled’
What troubles me deeply is the refusal to provide trading records of himself & ‘millionaire’ students – What fantastic national press exposure he would have garnered for himself. The Q you must ask is – Why didn’t he?
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-solin/learning-from-timothy-syk_b_4998799.html
I made a detailed video investigating Tim Sykes and those type of scams. Is long, but worth it to anyone that is considering investing in His program.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATSsnd6tDPI&t=
No guru has time to find loopholes on profitly lol
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
Is there a review of Tim Sykes and his millionaire challenge in particular? This would also be very interesting. If not, what do you think about his services? I think if Profit.ly is fake then he has no validation = no credibility.
Tim Sykes is 1000% a fraud. I don’t know why this site hasn’t been more aggressive in exposing him.
I made a detailed video investigating Tim Sykes and those type of scams. Is long, but worth it to anyone that is considering investing in His program.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATSsnd6tDPI&t=
thank you for this article!
Having read a great deal of the comments here and other reviews I have only one significant thing to add. There’s a great deal of phenomenal, wealthy traders I’ve studied, etc. Yes, the successful ones are in the minority and what does that do? It upsets the majority who — COMPLAIN and find FAULT. There is a path and it comes from work. Not insane, ‘kill yourself’ work — just work. There is a strategy and system which comes from work. I’m positive the wealthy traders pass by these comments and smile. The spoils go to the persistent, hungry FEW. I’m here to tell you the secret is in your face but you have to sweep away the noise and go to the source. If that last sentence is cryptic, then so be it… but think about it. Wisdom cries aloud in the street, in the markets she raises her voice.
Yep. While the internet is rife with information, it’s not with actionable specifics… or is it? It is. But that, again, requires — work.
In my experience people who leave cryptic message to make them sound smart or that they have some secret knowledge usually aren’t and don’t.
Who can confirm that he was deceived by his DVDs? With real evidence related Scam! From someone who just bought them 😐 …many with opinions, but nothing conclusive…
lol, I knew it was all bullshit …profit.ly IS A SCAM , u want a REAL , NO BULSHIT , BAREBONES , HONEST 2 GOD PENNYSTOCK NEWSLETTER ? then I’d suggest that you give FALCONSTOCKS.COM a try . they are honest , trustworthy & you don’t have 2 worry about them ripping u pff .
Emmett,
Did you ever get a hold of Paul Scolardi as mentioned in a September 2015 post? I’m curious to know your thoughts after the meeting/discussion.
This is a big eye opener to me, had no idea how easy it was to upload trades to their site.
Tried it myself, definitely a scam. All their buying and stock notifications are just so bad to the point, it doesn’t even make sense. I lost more money following their stock tips.
As much as i like your site, but the mentors you approve of don’t show real results done by an authentic, third party. They’re showing screenshots and data listed on their own sites, which can be designed by anyone.
this is because this entire website is a reverse psychology effort. Open your mind
The great Time Sykes even conned the Steve Harvey people. I just caught the re run, but did you see his two “best” students ? They were so sheepish, looking down all the time, like they just hated to be involved in this whole mess. I guarantee you, if the FTC gets involved with Sykes, he will be cell mates with Trudeau.
These con men make more money selling the dream than living it. Dear IDIOTS: If you had the secret to making millions, would you sell it for a few hundred dollars ?? And if you did, do you think that system would work after 100’s of people start using it ? WAKE UP !!!
Well, actually, for a strategy to work you need 100s of people to be aware of that strategy in the market. If a breakout happens but no one knows about the breakout strategy and no one plays the breakout then it lingers and dies. Timothy Sykes is not a fraud trader. He really does have transparency, but his DVDs are the worst shit ever and he can’t stand when someone points that out to him. If you really want to learn how to trade go find books about trading and read them. You’ll get more out of a $50 dollar book then you will someone’s $1000 dollar trading DVD. If you’re going to buy these silly DVDs buy them off of ebay or something for 1/10th the price. Or say fuck it and just pirate the shit. Also, if you want to learn about trading for free, go to my blog http://bluestreettradingcommunity.blogspot.com/ All free information, and probably better information than you’ll ever get from some dumb rich assholes $1000 dollar DVD. Something people don’t seem to realize is that none of these traders made up these trading systems. They all learned it or formed it from information that they read from a book. Good day.
Not very good at math are you? Penny stocks he made a few million in a few years, selling DVD’s in example his silver package at a little over 1k$ if he sells 5000 of them a year he made how much a year?
Then add in say 1000 sells a year on his millionaire challenge at 6500 a pop. Now as you said more people doing it it then evolves so he does what? Sells updated dvds(which he has) third or more of his customers then buy more.
Who always makes more? The trainer or the tradesmen?
Truck drivers make 60k-100k with good experience, but a guy teaching new drivers makes that working half the hours.
Programmers make good money but those teaching it are making a killing.
I can give 1000s of examples from farms to industry to everything. Teaching a skill makes more then practicing it.
I just bought a small package and am learning this stuff. Money and sales, and the dark side most people walk by and don’t know exists I grew up with this. Tim is a dumbass genius (Tim u read this don’t be mad it is actually a compliment from me) who is using known sales psychology to understand how to make plays.
Sales teaches lots of psychology and watching his training if you learned that sales stuff you would get it instantly and relate quickly.
I’m going take just 1500 and turn it to 100000 minimum in 2018 using this.
Tim is A decent trader that made money in a crazy market. and mastered the one strategy he is best at and that is shorting pump&dumps/ we will give him credit for that. But over all he is nothing special of a trader and has become a master at another thing and that is marketing. He at the moment traders very low float stocks and has a big subscriber base that blindly follows him on every trade he makes. He sells a bunch of times straight into his students probably even to some of them directly. 🙂 I started of with his school and bought his full challenge cause basically i was a noob starting of trading wanting to FOLLOW, but i admit it. I learned alot every day not only his dvds but many other schools and read alot. Over time i noticed whats going on and left, found Investors Underground and have done more there in a month than at TIMS school in 5. Nate from IU is a master of the markets and the guy in the video above is not a fake review its Timothy Bohen and its not a fake review the guy had a succesfull business and sold it and trades part time cause he likes it. He has 0 profits from doing the videos other than Youtube maybe. SO dont talk about shit you dont know. I think Profit.ly is the one thing TIM is not scaming. Its a decent SN for traders and yeah you can upload trades by using the CSV and writing it your self but its not veryfied. All in all Tim is a decent trader-marketing GURU and promoting a lifestyle that his students are giving him from paying subs not from great trading like NATE. I am and will be in the IU community and urge everyone to join. IF you need help let me know. You can use profit.ly on the side if you want its not that but to monitor yourself.
Hopefully this link works better
http://pbs.twimg.com/media/CgVkS5vWQAAUkB6.jpg
Can’t find this on the county website, can you post the direct link?
What’s a matter Timmy? Can’t pay your rent anymore?
https://twitter.com/Guruleaks1/status/722089477347213312
I was wondering if anyone here has had any experience with a group called Falcon Stocks? From all my research, they seem to be legit, and folks seem to be making bank with their picks. But I’m a little nervous. I would really like to hear from someone who has used their service.
To understand Falcon Stocks, you really should read the review on Jason Bond.
Thank you for posting this article. It would at least make people think twice before falling for Sykes’ lies. His profit chart at profit.ly is similar to the one used by Madoff to lure more victims. Madoff never had a losing day nor does Sykes. I do not know if Sykes admires Madoff, but he does admire Jordan Belfort, the scammer known as the “Wolf of Wall Street”. That should tell you something about his character. And by the way, Sykes, Belfort and Madoff are jews.
And BTW Bonnie and Clyde were Protestant and we all know about the Paris Bombers religion. I could go on for days about various criminals and their religion. Sykes religion is not the issue here except from some small idiot minded person such as your self.
Why is Tim Sykes not in jail?
Tim Sykes, what an idiot !!!! ….disgusting.
How can you have such a guy thing buy ?
Tom
I bought 2 DVD`s from “Tim Sykes” which are complete bulls***! Lerned nothing!
He stands before a camere and talks about crap most of the time, not even concerning the topic. He´s talk is incoherrent most of the time, interrupting himself, not ending sentences, jumps around different subjects, which is wery typical “Tim Sykes” style btw.
It wery fast get´s damn borring listening to him. He made it look like f**ing gif, making me look like a fool for buying his crap.
Now, when I submitted the request for the DVD´s on profit.ly, I then got a message from his associate (the guy that takes care of everything regarding buying sh** from them, a very shady guy), that he wanted to have a chat with me over skype to also help me complete the payment and stuff. I was like wtf(??), but agreed.
So he tryed to act like my best friend for a few minutes, also controlling the conversation in a certain way for the next move. He then asked me if I would start with giving him the number.
I said: what number, what do you mean?
He said: number of your credit card, so I can make that payment for you.
I told him, I would do it myself.
He later wrote me: Whatever works for you. I end up processing your card through the same merchant if you had given it to me verbally by phone or skype and you wouldn’t have had to deal with any of that; just let me know when you’ve paid.
His name is Doug btw, and mail: doug@timothysykes.com.
another video on profit.ly
https://youtu.be/uZdf-TnE4M0?t=10m28s
http://www.tradeunderten.com
http://www.ac-investor.blogspot.com/
Look at these two sites PSilva, they’re free
Hi Emmet, I came across this page researching profit.ly and more specifically, Sykes. I came across him recently on social media, then I remembered him from Wall Street Warriors, got excited about the prospect of making money, got them to call me. But I balked at the $5000. If you can achieve what they say you can then it is worth it, but still. So I’ve been watching videos and learning as much as I can, feeling like I could do this. Even if most of what you say is true, couldn’t someone learn from all the examples and lessons they would give and at least become functional in the penny stock market and do your own research, make your own watch list. You could even aim for stocks that aren’t on Tim’s radar as criteria for picking companies to trade. I’m talking about the $99 monthly package that include video lessons, not the crazy $5000 millionaire challenge tuition. Thank you.
Would you get into a ring with Mike Tyson because you’d spent a few months working out in a gym? Penny stocks are fraud companies promoted and pumped higher to suck you in and clean you out. Sure you may land a punch or two on good ol’ Mike’s chin but he’s gonna flatten you and make key chains out of your ears. Penny stocks will do the same to you. The weird thing is that you don’t have to trade them. Run a scan for stocks $3-$10 with a consistent volume of 1-2 million shares trading daily. Pick 10-15 of these to follow and trade them.
P Silva
I’m also relatively new to stock trading and I’ve recently been using RobinHood trading app for iphone and android…it’s really simple and allows free trades….it’s great for beginners so you can start out small buying 1 or 2 shares of different companies and seeing how it goes all for free until you build up your knowledge base.
I just got the market prep, 8dvds online access to thousands of videos and timalerts. Learning alot so far. His stuff isn’t stuffy it’s laid back some pop need stuffy some need laid back. The relaxed atmosphereis nice. I recommend you do his free trader checklist video(like a lot of stuff for free) https://timothysykes.com/traderchecklist/
That’s free for just giving an email to get spammed with an upsell. I recommenddo all the free videos it’s like 11 hours or more. He has a penny stock trading guide for free too. He gives so much away you could actually just learn that and get it down perfectly and start making money.
This is a great write up Emmett and also some great comments/replies. I just wanted to put in my 2 cents regarding Tim Sykes and Profit.ly as well. First thing is I want to be very honest I am really new to day trading and was looking for a bit of guidance, So I purchased the Tim Alerts Package which includes Instant Message, Chat Room, and Live Alerts. I also want to mention I have watched several of Tim Sykes really really shitty DVD’s I mean these DVD’s are funny but the rest of the information is very questionable and the data is really scattered all over the place. Half the time he is recording his computer screen an Antivirus Screen pops up or the images are pix elated. I mean these DVD’s look like they were made in a 3RD world country and I mean those DVD’s are several hundreds of dollars.
Next point I want to make is I work swing shift so I am off work the whole time the Stock Market is open so I keep one hand on my computer keyboard and one hand on my cell phone waiting for live trade alerts from Tim. Within seconds of Tim posting his Alerts I maybe a few seconds/cents out from when he trades but I have yet to make any money with his alerts in the Month I have been subscribed. Now he does provide a watch list the night before but usually 1 of 6 trades actually moves a couple of cents and the other 5 he usually loses money or breaks even. Most of the time he is always investing a large amount of cash usually over $18,000 and barley makes out with $1,000 – $5,000 maybe. he also trades very randomly.
The next point is half the time he forgets to put a winning trade on the watch list or alert user’s about it until it too late or after he closed his trades and he also misspells Stock Symbols. What’s up with that? As of right now I think Tim is a fraudster and the only benefit of subscribing to his Chat Room is there are a lot of helpful good traders sharing ideas. Also I wanted to add Tim Sykes states he turned $12,000.. into over $ 4 million and profit.ly states he is currently at $4,318,267 But in recent interviews Sykes states he is worth about $15 million. I am pretty sure all included Tim Sykes has made maybe $2 million from penny stocking after Taxes and eTrade Charges and the reset is fluffed numbers and from Selling Subscriptions and those shitty DVD’s.
BUYERS BEWARE!!!!
Sykes ideas regarding shorting promotional penny stocks are certainly valid. However, its darn near impossible to find the inventory to short the stocks that he recommends. This is his bread and butter, but the regulatory landscape has changed so much that he can no longer offer this as a valid service. In all honesty, I cannot really put the scam tattoo on Sykes trading, because I simply do not know.
However, I do know that he runs that shit show of a website named Investimonials. Now that is a complete scam. If you pay to advertise, then Tim protects the vendor from any negative reviews. It reminds me of the official newspaper of North Korea and Tim Sykes is the Dear Leader. Pure nonsense. But hey, Sykes is a brilliant marketer. To bad he has sold his soul to the devil.
I’m keen to sign up to Paul Scolardi’s newsletter so I can access the chat room and learn his strategy. The only thing holding me back though is after signing up to Tim Sykes’ newsletter I found it’s primarily all people shouting stock picks (most which have already shot up) and it’s very difficult to actually learn the strategy itself – I found that you can learn just as easy by watching all his free videos!
Because of exchange rate issues, I don’t want to blow $400 p/m (my currency) on Paul’s service if it’s not actually running through what the strategy is.
In my opinion, a lot of people lose money following these guys because they try to follow them. So I figure I’ll take a different approach and try to learn their strategy itself so I can then go find my own stock picks that haven’t already been pushed up by their thousands of followers.
For the record, I did make about $100 profit (micro account) on a trade using TimAlerts, but then blew my account because I was new at trading and ‘over-traded’ as it’s called..
Hey, thanks for the well thought out comment. However, to keep the conversation on topic and to get the most feedback from the users, try and post comments regarding Paul and Superman trades on the comments section for Paul’s review page. Thanks for helping me keep the blog on topic.
First I am new here, I want to say BIG UP to Emmett for putting out this fascinating website which I never knew about. As a researcher of automated trading technology, I want to inform anyone who maybe interested in these two tools I really like. First, JStock is an open source stock screener you download and hack . This tool could easily save you the $6k you don’t need to pay out to Mr Sykes. Here is a video playlist I have on my Youtube channel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEMH5fWPIOA&list=PLzrMTuGTDsMvN-np-w1bk9DafFyiGnXoE
Also you could use XLQ which Excel based so I did is on my Youtube as well. https://www.youtube.com/user/quantlabs/search?query=xlq
Next is Mr Sykes. I sort of respect him in certain ways where i have some of his stuff. It is very repetitive with about 75% of analysing charts. Personally. I would never focus on penny stocks but short squeezes scare me. I would find it very hard to automate the forensics accounting part but you can easily automate his strategy with Jstock. Just some tips for anyone who may be interested in my POV. Thanks all and Emmett for making this cool site.
Check out this guy http://profit.ly/guru/triforce, on his website he claims that he turned $100k into $600k in 2014, these fraudsters are crawling out from under every rock imaginable.
You need the whole picture. Matthew Owens (Triforce) started with the life insurance from his past mother. Then he lost a lot of that money, after that he used SuperMan as learning method but his real learning was from books, a ton of it. This guy works with a lot of different tools, doesn`t promote too much cause he is not into it. More of a calm guy.
The point is you can be succesfull with your own strategy and plan, and still be in profit.ly selling your newsletter 😉
Is Tim Alerts worth it? or is the entire site a scam? Also did you get back to paul scolardi in the comments? I was thinking about joining his services.
Tim Alerts are OK. Though I have not written a review yet. Tim can trade. Regarding Scolardi, I have not been to his site in several months, I really need to do a follow up review.
I have lost more money following tim. I have made some money following fellow students in his chat though. They would immediately call out if a stock is spiking and you just gotta follow that pump and dump fast and don’t ever hold for long.
I am interested in becoming a day trader, but was not able to find those who are willing to offer the assistance. It led me to a search on Youtube for self taught and that’s how I come to know of Tim’s Youtube Channels. The next thing I knew I signed on to Tim’s Challenge. A week later, I have received a call from one of his gurus asking if I have 6K for the entire training; I thought about it during our phone conversation, and I took a long pause and responded “no, I do not have the money for the training and so we parted.” After our phone conversation, on that same day, I have decided to open an account of $5000 with Scottrade. I have done pretty well since the opening of the account on October 04, 2016. My account is up 7.9% since its inception. In regards to Profit.ly, I have signed up to join this site and I have followed several folks on that site, but I was not able to confirm or verify those well traded shares and those profits. Just the broker fees alone tells me that there is something fishy about those folks gains; however, I have learned to use Profit.ly to my advantages. The Yin/Yang application. Thank you.
Emmett, thanks for presenting the other side of the story. After trading for about 10 years off and on, I know how difficult it can be to become consistent and profitable. It has to be difficult because otherwise the majority would be successful. This can never happen in the trading world, no matter what anyone is trading. It has to be that 10-15% are successful and the remaining percentage provide the profits. It takes an enormous amount of discipline and patience and commitment to be successful. Most people, by nature, do not possess these requirements. There is nothing wrong with that, as not many of us have what it takes to fly a jet plane either. When it comes to money, and compared to earning it the slower way by working a regular job, the temptations are extreme when it comes to doing the wrong thing at the wrong time. I am sure there are some truthful and trusting stock peddlers out there, but knowing who to give the bucks to is as much a conundrum as learning to compete with highly skilled and talented professionals in the trading arena.
Profit.ly is such magnificent piece of marketing brilliance. Tim Sykes, who actually is a good trader, allows himself to be surrounded by the charlatans. Consumers discover that Tim is surrounded by Charlatans, and then they end up buying from Tim. Brilliant! Crazy simple. Dress in white, wade out into the muck, and then begin wildly waving ones hands.
The orange Lamborghini, the watches, the stacks of money, pure marketing puffer. Eventually the FTC, SEC, or some lawyer is going to file a class action, then the carnival ends. Tim walks away with millions.
I must say, this is a pretty good review. I jump the gun on some of the points I touched on your other review.
Emmett,
I appreciate the kind words you did post after you reviewed my service, as well as the challenges and questions. I would love to have a conversation to discuss all with you but I do not know how to contact you. I put my email in this comment.
Respectfully,
Paul Scolardi aka @super_trades
Emmett – Thanks for taking the time to review you pros and cons of Profitly. I had a chance to read all 3 articles and I agree with some points however I think people lack the understanding of what is the purpose of their service.
I am currently a member of Profitly, brand new to the world of trading.
I do understand your issue with the way they verify trades and how anyone can become a guru specifically with Young Jeezy. But where is the accountability on the people who paid this kid without doing their research on him? These people need to do their research take sure this guru is creditable. You can say what you want about Tims social media schtik but his and Pauls track record is proven and can be researched online through various blogs, websites etc. Do they care more about selling their services now than trading yeah but that’s the idea they can make way more money teaching their techniques and it’s much less risky and sustainable. Who wouldn’t when who have a proven system and track record. It’s being smart.
As for some of the people with comments that state the alerts come after they they already made their trade, what do they expect? The idea is to learn their strategies and techniques to become self reliant. Not wait for them to send an alert so the member can then follow their trade and hold their hand through whole process, it’s to guide them on their thinking. These people need to take off their training diapers and go for it.
Perfect example of benefit of chat room on Friday another member pointed out $SPU ER come out with great numbers and was moving with up with increasing volume I jumped in at 1.28 and then Tim sent alert saying he got in at 1.36 I think. A few minutes go by another Tim alert he is out at 1.47 saying they’re a ton of sellers at 1.50 he sees on Level 2. I stick with it drops to 1.40 before hitting a ton of resistance at 1.45 making a last run up to 1.48 which is when I got out right before bell. Chat room works but you have to do your homework and be ready to pull trigger on own not just won’t around for people telling you what to do.
Great comment. I really appreciate that you took the time to write this much information about your personal experience.
I think for me, I try and be a voice of sanity in all of this marketing puffery. Tim is a great trader! Even better marketer. I have to applaud his success.
Hope to see you back, writing about your trading and helping others traders along on the path to success.
You benefit more from chat room, from other students than the gurus themselves. This is the only thing I can agree on profit ly .
I hope the proper authorities are alerted to this scammer and the snake oil salesman is put away for life. Cheating others does not make you smart or cool or funny. jail will teach you to straighten out and fly right.
Hey Jack,
The modern internet makes it nearly impossible for the authorities to do anything meaningful. Anyone, at any time, can simply create a fake persona and market themselves as the next trading guru earning millions. We really need to self police this industry. I understand fraud and deception at its deepest, on a personal level, nearly 20 years ago the FBI and SEC shut down my three penny stock boiler rooms. At the time, I had nearly 300 people working for me. I was the worst of the worst. You can read about me on my warning page.
I currently work for a financial forensics firm that digs through complex financial frauds and provide expert testimony on civil and criminal cases. Its interesting work. I started Trading Schools to just put everything out there and attempt to deliver something valid and useful, and hopefully get close to the truth. Unfortunately, as Mark Twain once wrote, “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes”.
Regarding Profit.ly, this fraud is so blatant and obvious that any person of minimal intelligence should not need me, nor anyone else to spot how this scam works. With that being said, Tim Sykes is brilliant. He is not a fraud, he really does trade. But he makes much, much more from the marketing side of the business than the actual trading. And good for him!
Best,
Emmett
No , if he is making money selling subscriptions based on false trading records he is scam and he should be arrested for fraud. If he did make all this money trading why even do a “Guru” site . To help people? I call bullshit. He is a liar and a thief. I mean wtf how do the FEDS not shut this guy down?
Wow look how Mike just stopped posting and went silent, Shows just what a scam profit.ly is. So in short their verification system can be gamed and thus was set up with the sole intent to scam people,
Profitly, as well as Investimonials are wonderful marketing platforms. But anyone, and I mean anyone can be millionaire trader by simply importing fake trades. You can create DEMO accounts with nearly all of the listed brokers on Profit.ly, all fake trades. Only import the winning demo accounts. Also, they have this importing feature for something called a “secret broker”. Seriously? A secret broker? Amazing stuff. Pure fiction.
Understand that these sites do not cater to real traders. These sites cater to the naive, looking to hustle the sale of a DVD, or an advisory service. Pure nonsense.
Uhh, I haven’t gone silent. I’ve been muted. ALL of my comments aren’t being posted and are being filtered.
Mike, your comments are always welcome. I have never muffled a comment. Even the nutty jew hater got to spew his nonsense.
My only gripe with Profit.ly is how easy it is to game. A lot of these clowns use the platform to import fake trades, then drive the traffic to their main marketing site. We both know it. It is, what it is.
Emmett,
I’m not sure what profit.ly was like when you posted this review, but I can tell you about my experience. I personally just tried to, as you suggested, verify papertrades through TD Ameritrade. As I said, they may have fixed this since your first review but the point is this…. NOTHING came up. As I have not done any trades within the actual account, just paper trades. Secondly, with regard to Tim, I have not signed up for any of his services but I can tell you this. Tim is open about the fact that his strategy isn’t scalable simply because of the types of trades that he makes. Due to that the only way to increase income is to use his knowledge to try and teach people. Is he audacious in his marketing? Sure. But that has no basis on his ability to teach, which to be fair you never really questioned. Finally, as I posted on your review of Paul’s service, I am presently using that and would be happy to speak with you or anyone else regarding my experience with that.
Keep up the good work!
Robert what about us trades that trade outside of US the i verify all my US trades but can not verify my trades from my country? but i still want to keep them on profitly ?
I fully understand what you say and want to do but i guess the most ones that are bad talking aboput all the gurus is the guys that only loose money and might have blown up their accounts.
i trade in sweden 90% of the time and have been adopting the strategys to sweden from US and make so much more money with the brokers in sweden that i trust and their software always work .
i did talk to my brokers in sweden but they can not allow outside companys to view my accounts so if profitly remove the manual tardes how can i then post my trades? i dont make millions either but a few 100 dollars on and off as this is not my full time job yet.
so how do you say we fix that then?
I must tell you that this blog fascinates me, I never leave comments like this but I felt this time I had to. Your research and attention to detail is 2nd to none and I applaud you for that. I have been in the trading biz for some time now and have seen so many of these snake oil salesman come and go that it is about time someone like yourself steps up to show the truth. Other sites claim to show real reviews but they are so flawed its laughable, especially the sites owned by the snake oil salesman themselves who delete any negative review about their product. oh and btw..so called “gurus” are leaving profitly all the time.
Hello there. I am the technical guy behind Profitly and wanted to address this personally.
You did NOT verify any trades on our platform by using our broker connect feature. You simply created a fake spreadsheet of trades and uploaded them. Even an idiot could see through this.
You can see verified trades on our site. Click around. See the little check mark that says verified? None of your fake trades have this.
Furthermore, we do not allow demo accounts to verify trades.
I’d say you get 0/5 stars on truth.
Hi Mike,
Thanks for taking the time to write. I appreciate that you are trying to remove a lot of the BS from the trading education community, unfortunately a lot of guys are figuring out creative workarounds to your reporting system, an example would be the very popular Investors Underground chat room.
For the past year, Nathan has been reporting average profits of around $200,000 each month and using this as marketing material and sales bait. He is also listed on your website as a recommended “GURU” which implies credibility. In fact, just in the past few days, Nathan’s performance on Profit.ly made a dramatic improvement. Apparently $200,000 a month in profit was no longer good enough. He is now showing a profit, in the last month, of $9,000,000. And one never knows what will be reported next, when I come back to Nathan The Guru Of Profit.ly, his numbers change and he is never a loser on Profit.ly.
Look for yourself…http://www.investorsunderground.com/about-us/ But you better hurry, because it might change once again, in the next 15 minutes.
Its time that you guys remove the BS from Profit.ly. And its time for you guys to remove “secret broker” import option, and manual importing of trades.
Once again, I have a lot of respect for your opinion. And I believe my review has been more than fair. Especially considering that I have not written 1/100 of the dirt that has arrived in my inbox regarding Profit.ly.
Can we please separate the two issues.
1) Our verification system can’t be gamed. People can manually upload but that doesn’t mean it is verified. We connect directly to the back end of most brokerages where the trade is reconciled.
2) Nate hasn’t posted trades since Sept. See here: http://profit.ly/user/InvestorsLive/trades
We can’t force everyone to show their trades but those with the most trust/karma will alert in realtime. Showing all trades helps individuals be better as traders and most importantly the community weeds out fakes thanks to our reporting systems.
mike, so remove the option of manual uploading and ensure that absolutely all trades are verified.
Your verification process is flawed by you allowing trades to be verified individually and not collectively you should have only one option when someone is verifying trades and that is from beginning of the month until end of the months for the months that has past!
U should not at any circumstance have any other options to upload trades in your system period !
Also you should crete separate page which will show not verified trades under “Paper trades” page! this is easy to do and it could be done fast if you have will to do it ,but you don’t and you will not do it this way because you have different agenda for your service.
I hope that my commentary will be helpful in resolving this mater.
Thank you
Your missing the point M Gordon. Profitly exists for one reason only, to further Timothy Sykes’ internet marketing efforts. And it appears it has been a successful tool for him, especially after the failure that is Investimonials.
Allowing people to upload anything means more users/visitors as well as bullshit claims of success by the “gurus”/”teachers”.
And why would anyone want to upload anything to profitly anyway? What do I care if Joe or John makes $X,XXX more or less than me? Unless Joe or John having something to sell of course…
Ah, yes it certainly can be “gamed”. I have been verifying my trades with a demo account for the past 2 years. Nothing new about this tactic.
If you want me to embarrass you Mike, I will gladly setup a new account and provide proof that this can be done.
Please stop lying to protect your flawed product Mike. Instead focus your efforts on making it better.
Profitly…I rather expect the FTC is going to take it down. The financial regulators could care less. The Profit.ly site is really more about consumer fraud. Like selling boner pills that are made of herbs. Or a book on how to get free money from the government. In a lot of ways, Tim Sykes reminds me of Kevin Trudeau. Another guy selling worthless financial DVD’s and is now sitting in prison for 10 years. You can only fleece the consumer for so long before the government starts hammering away. I have absolutely zero doubt that Profit.ly will be shut down. Just a matter of when it happens.
The FTC will call in the DVD authors that will describe how they gamed the system in order to create the false impression of trading success. The DVD authors will of course turn on Tim and everyone will be ratting on everyone. It will be ugly and messy when it happens.
It will be a beautiful scene if and when that happens. Seeing Sykes in handcuffs would be the ultimate vindication for the 10’s of thousands he duped and scammed of their life savings.
One thing, Emmett, I noticed you being a little contradictory and I thought I’ll point it out, in your above comment you compared long time con man Kevin Trudeau to Sykes which I agree with, in another comment you referred to Sykes as a ‘good guy’ ‘brilliant and not a fraud’?, did you know if you’re a paid member on Investimonials and someone writes a negative comment about your service then it ends up somewhere in the last few pages? that my friend is the work of a slimy con man, this is not heroic or brilliant. If you want to see brilliance learn about the works of Nicola Tesla, the irony is that we can compare Sykes to Edison who was also a con man who used the mind and work of Tesla and then threw him under the bus. Just sayin….
Sykes is definitely a fraudulent marketer. But he is a pretty good penny stock trader. And yet he is an excellent salesman. Sykes is a closer mold to PT Barnum.
He drives me nuts with his BS about catching frauds, but then he makes huge money by allowing the fraudsters to advertise on Investimonials. That site is rotten to the core.
My personal opinion is that he probably started out with good intentions, but simply surrendered to the pressure of the easy money. He sold his soul.
Sykes is a fraud all around, the last time I heard he had something like 400 lemmings in his chat room, do you really believe that 400 people are going to be able to short some cheap garbage penny stock? of course not, there are no borrows for that and Sykes knows it yet he’s still selling chat room memberships.
Unfortunately Sykes knows that white collar crime pays in the US, that’s why there are so many of these guys all over the net. If someone steals a used TV they get 20 years in solitary confinement…smh
Hello there. I am the technical guy behind Profitly and wanted to address this personally.
You did NOT verify any trades on our platform by using our broker connect feature. You simply created a fake spreadsheet of trades and uploaded them. Even an idiot could see through this.
This is what a VERIFIED trade looks like: http://profit.ly/1MqLwL See the little check mark that says verified? None of your fake trades have this.
Furthermore, we do not allow demo accounts to verify trades.
I’d say you get 0/5 stars on truth.
I can mark verified trade myself
hi mary
did you make any money for the 6 months you were in the chartroom.
I was a member of Paul Scolardi (Superman) chatroom for 6 months after going through his Bootcamp training. I paid $5,000 for the Bootcamp which was extensive training vi webinars once a week for 10-12 weeks. I have to say that Paul’s background as a CPA and CFO was apparent in the subjects covered. He knows how to breakdown a company’s financials and can scan a press release within minutes and decipher whether it’s positive or negative. He also has a very simple charting / indicator strategy which even a new trader would have no problem grasping. Do I think I received my money’s worth? The short answer is no, not entirely. The basics of setting up an account and how to get around cash settlements, etc were never covered. For a new trader like myself, this simple mistake ended up being learned the hard way. Also, Paul was not very responsive to questions via email. (and believe me, my questions were legitimate and only asked after seeking the answers myself online) Although he advertised the classes as “working aside” him. Anyway, the chatroom at first was great. A pretty light atmosphere with tons of trade ideas coming from all directions. It soon became flooded with new members asking questions which the moderators refused to answer. And then would gag them for speaking out of turn. There are some great investor / trader minds in the room, no doubt. But, there is an element of pumping daily. Mostly by one or two of the longtime moderators; as well as Superman himself. Paul will say over and over, “Don’t follow me.” and “Do Not chase.” Followed by, “Maximize your profits and Minimize your losses.” All well in good, yet he never gives a detailed explanation on how to do that effectively to a new trader who is trading the small float stocks alongside a self-proclaimed superhero. With that said, Paul does call some Super swing calls. He does have a knack for finding great setups before the crowds. The question remains is how much of the increase in share price is do to that very crowd coming to that particular stock in response to him buying it.
I actually feel like I will be back in the room after I get my chops. But, only then I will know ahead of time how to weed out all the noise.
And as far as Profit.ly is concerned, I do believe Paul tries to be as accurate as possible with his verified trades. However, I’ve noticed how one can simply “skip” their losing trades with just a click of the mouse.
Wow. Great comment. I really appreciate that you have taken the time to write.
Hi Mary, I’d like to speak to someone who’s taken the super trades bootcamp. Please contact me at @groundedtrader on twitter
Mary, what indicator/ charting strategy does he use?
haha. Definitely will let the board know exactly how it went. I’m hoping the red days will be due to me chasing or not respecting my stop. I’d really like for the experience at Superman’s site to work out, but the numbers won’t lie. I’ve already read some members at investimonials that received the ‘alerts’ after the stock had already ripped +.20. Maybe they were members of a newsletter. It would be very disturbing to get his long positions in a chatroom after it had already took off. We’ll see.
Have heard the same thing with Tim’s picks. He makes the trade, and then the unwashed masses rush in, and there are a lot of them! I believe this is the reason why he is coming out with a swing trading product. At Tim’s core is a good guy, not this BS “Big Money” persona. In my opinion, the BS persona is insulting to our job as speculators, and feeds into a fake narrative. Best of luck.
Thanks for taking the time to put together this write up Emmett. I appreciate all the info you post. I read your review of Superman (Paul Scolardi). I was going to sign up because of you positive reviews you had for him, but noticed he’s also on the profit.ly website. Do you still think he’s legit, considering he’s on that profit.ly website?
Thank you,
Derek
Scolardi is real. I can only comment on what I was able to record in real time. I recorded trades in real time. But let me give you three considerations:
1. In the past few days, a lot of people have reached out to me and disclosed some really clever ways to upload fake trades onto profit.ly. This new information cracks the very foundation of what Profit.ly represents. It can be fixed, but Tim Sykes would be taking a massive hit on sales because he is making millions of dollars selling products. The simple way for Tim to clean up this nonsense is to have a single person sniffing for fraud, which would be easy and inexpensive to implement. In my heart, I hope he makes these changes. But I doubt he will, he has known about the fraud for a very long time, nothing has changed.
2. Now that we know Profit.ly can be gamed. We have to now call into question whether Superman is really so super. Is he really making millions of dollars each year? I so badly want to believe. But since the profit.ly house is so obviously full of smoke, we cannot ignore that a fire exists.
3. One final consideration regarding Scolardi. If you want to ride with that cowboy, prepare for one hell of a crazy ride. If his trades are in fact real, he is a wildman on a whole different level. Analogy: I have a friend that likes to party in Vegas once a year, we go, and we go wild. But once a year is enough. Twice a year would be way too much. Same with Scolardi, he likes to get wild and ride the edge of the knife, has no attachments to losing money, unlike the rest of us that have to fight and scratch for every penny.
Ultimately, you need to decide. If you decide to pull the trigger on Scolardi, you are going to need a prop firm for leverage. Tomorrow I am putting out a comprehensive list of prop firms where newbies and pro’s alike can review and find a home without wasting hours crawling through google searches.
Best, Emmett
Thanks again Emmett. I’ll join up with Paul Scolardi and will post results here to let others know how it went.
Derek
Going to hold you to that Derek! Good or bad, win or lose, you have to come back and create a guest post. We will title it “I am Derek Ruben, I flew with Superman, this is what happened”.
Indeed! Will definitely be back to share my results…win or lose, green or red. Hopefully I’ll have more green days than red days!
Going to hold you to it! And you have to be brutally honest. Especially if you fuck up and dont take trades, or miss trades, took profits too early or deviated in any way.
Derek,
Can you provide us with your review of Paul’s class and how would you rate him?
Real or not, people generally still lose money with this guy, I was a paid subscriber, and the way things work with all these furus is; they send out alerts, sheep (yes, I used to be a sheep) buy the stock, furu sells on spike and sheep end up holding the bag. Only two out of 10 so-called pro calls turned out to realize. I am actually doing better trading on my own instead of following people like this.
I appreciate the info here (a lot of it is very good), but it doesn’t reflect everything that goes on with ALL these trading “gurus”, including this Paul guy.
Greg
Good point, they give you like 20 stocks to watch, 99% are trashes then they brag about the one that was a winner and how great they were blabblabla
Greg, could you point me in the right direction to start learning about trading on my own? Thanks!
TIM is a jew, jews are borned to be scam artist and pathologocal liar. They are not human, really. His website was not mean to be the truth, it was a MARKETING website to sell his shitty DVDs that teach people how to short pump and dump that he pump himself through his silver subcription trash.
Because of PTD rule not everybody can short or GET available share to short, most broke simply does not allow to short pennystock. One can but is oversea . . . smell scam . . . smell like your money oversea will never come back.
You are entitled to your world view. And certainly free to speak your mind, however offensive. But before you start throwing around racial prejudice and bigotry, you should read my “Warning” page. You will quickly discover that i am one of the worst penny stock, investment scam artists during the entire 1990’s era. Truly. I am not a Jew.
I agree with you. They learn such tricks from the Talmud. Every rabbi knows that chutzpah refers to that commandment of the talmud that states “thou shall fleece the goyim.”