$7,500 into $8 million

[Guest]

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/24-old-stock-trader-made-063529644.html

 

Look at all you slackers. 

 

Anyone know anything about Sykes?

[Gregmal]

Tim Sykes is the real deal. Hard to believe and seems very scammy based on a lot of his content and layouts, but he s a legit genius. Turned $5k or whatever into a million a few times just for shits. 

[Guest]

18 minutes ago, Gregmal said:

Tim Sykes is the real deal. Hard to believe and seems very scammy based on a lot of his content and layouts, but he s a legit genius. Turned $5k or whatever into a million a few times just for shits. 

 

I heard of him years ago and didn't pay too much attention because he screamed scam to me...but it looks like I was too judgemental. 

[Gregmal]

Yea the only issue with what he does is it’s not really scalable. But it can get you into 7 figures and for most that’s good enough. 

[Guest]

That makes sense. I was watching an interview (from his site) and 2 of his students made "$1 million over a few years" and the other made $200,000. It's interesting because the guy in the article I posted made it to $8 million in just a few years.

[Parsad]

He's shown total gains, but not his actual account value.  He could have $8M in gains and $8M in losses recorded.

 

Cheers!

[Saluki]

Whenever I see stuff like this, I always wonder why the journalist isn't asking for audited account statements to back up the claims.  And if he could turn $7,500 into $8mm, using some repeatable method, not just YOLO calls, then why is he selling 30 day bootcamps for $79? 

 

He claims to have accomplished this feat at 23.  The internet says he's in his 40s. At that rate of compounding, why isn't a billionaire following his own course instead of trying to sign up people with no investing experience. If he's that good at making money, why does he need to sell Facebook ads to Uber drivers looking for a new side hustle? 

[Gregmal]

Pretty sure he had the original Bar Mitzvah $12k into $2M audited. And what he does/did(not sure what he s doing anymore) is totally repeatable, just not scalable. Although the new SEC rules around penny stocks probably make it much more difficult to do. 

[rkbabang]

It seems to me that any such algorithm or formula would only work as long as there wasn't a shit ton of people doing it.  Therefor the only smart thing to do is to keep making millions and keep quiet about it.  The fact that he is telling people and selling online courses to teach people tells me that either it doesn't really work or he's incredibly stupid.

 

[John Hjorth]

7 minutes ago, rkbabang said:

...  The fact that he is telling people and selling online courses to teach people tells me that either it doesn't really work or he's incredibly stupid.

 

Touché!

[Guest]

If Greg is correct, it makes sense if his process isn't scalable.

[Castanza]

There is no shortage of people in a casino that have a fool proof strategy. All it takes is one person successfully employing it to enable the masses. Over on r/wsb there are quite a few people with stupid trading strategies that worked. 
 

There was the infamous Chegg guy. Apparently realized while in colllege that everyone was using Chegg to cheat. So he traded in and out of it with full positions. Used options and margins too. Something like buy when it dips 3% and sell when it goes up 5%. Over the course of a few years the dude was a multi millionaire.

[Gregmal]

A lot his strategy involves utilizing certain resources to identify manipulated penny stocks and then trading the volatility. It’s 100% repeatable. It takes work. But it’s actually extremely predictable when you find them and low risk if you take certain measures to reduce some of the obvious risks.
 

I don’t know why there’s always an instinct to discredit or poo poo or say it doesn’t count. I mean Monish Pabrai is still given credit for like 3 good years 2 decades ago. This guy has twice turned like $10k into over a million in a few years including as a college student. All using the same framework and process. He also shuttered a hedge fund because at a certain size the strategy isn’t viable and he made investments outside his circle of competency. But man, it’s crazy how there’s always a rush to declare “it doesn’t count”. Dude is a self made multimillionaire 100% from trading and now basically does the Instagram life thing. Not bad.

[Castanza]

16 minutes ago, Gregmal said:

A lot his strategy involves utilizing certain resources to identify manipulated penny stocks and then trading the volatility. It’s 100% repeatable. It takes work. But it’s actually extremely predictable when you find them and low risk if you take certain measures to reduce some of the obvious risks.
 

I don’t know why there’s always an instinct to discredit or poo poo or say it doesn’t count. I mean Monish Pabrai is still given credit for like 3 good years 2 decades ago. This guy has twice turned like $10k into over a million in a few years including as a college student. All using the same framework and process. He also shuttered a hedge fund because at a certain size the strategy isn’t viable and he made investments outside his circle of competency. But man, it’s crazy how there’s always a rush to declare “it doesn’t count”. Dude is a self made multimillionaire 100% from trading and now basically does the Instagram life thing. Not bad.

Not saying his strategy doesn’t work. Just saying there is a lot of people out there looking to sell you subscriptions for their strategy or “insider knowledge.” Hard to parse through all that noise imo. 

[whatstheofficerproblem]

"I don't think people need super fancy indicators to make money trading. I'm just using basic trend lines, support, resistance, volume, and those are all my indicators."

"I think if you overcomplicate the indicators, it will actually throw off your trading because then you're trading more on the indicators than the actual price action."

 

Someone, please put the guys at RenTech, AQR, Two-Sigma and other Quant and HFT firms on the phone! They are losing money by overcomplicating things!

 

What a joke, does this genius trader even realize that the other side trading using complicated 'indicators' is what creates the price action. The course should speak volumes, if I had a method to make millions, I wouldn't stop at 8, neither would I teach it to strangers.

[Guest]

 

 

$100,000 to $1.3 million in 8 months (allegedly). 

 

He's been teaching for 15 years and has....20 millionaire students??? I think he said it's "quadrupled in just over a year" so he had 5 students before that?

Edited June 2, 2023 by stahleyp

[LC]

Show me the audited records

 

Explain exactly how you’re using “basic trend lines” “volume” to trade.

 

Nobody ever seems to publish those two.

 

Not calling out these folks in particular, but my guess is these guys spend more time on their digital sales funnel than anything else.

[Parsad]

4 hours ago, rkbabang said:

It seems to me that any such algorithm or formula would only work as long as there wasn't a shit ton of people doing it.  Therefor the only smart thing to do is to keep making millions and keep quiet about it.  The fact that he is telling people and selling online courses to teach people tells me that either it doesn't really work or he's incredibly stupid.

 

 

Yup!  He's probably making more in net profits/gains by selling courses and scaling that business up.  Cheers!

[rkbabang]

Even if it doesn’t scale, he’s still dumb to tell people. If I could reliably turn say $10K into $1M after tax every year. I’d live on $300K, put $700K into something simple like BRKB or a cheap S&P500 ETF and do the same thing every year. After 20 years you’ve lived a good upper middle class lifestyle and have dollar cost averaged $14M into the market. You’d have a nice little nest egg to retire with.

[Parsad]

3 hours ago, Gregmal said:

A lot his strategy involves utilizing certain resources to identify manipulated penny stocks and then trading the volatility. It’s 100% repeatable. It takes work. But it’s actually extremely predictable when you find them and low risk if you take certain measures to reduce some of the obvious risks.
 

I don’t know why there’s always an instinct to discredit or poo poo or say it doesn’t count. I mean Monish Pabrai is still given credit for like 3 good years 2 decades ago. This guy has twice turned like $10k into over a million in a few years including as a college student. All using the same framework and process. He also shuttered a hedge fund because at a certain size the strategy isn’t viable and he made investments outside his circle of competency. But man, it’s crazy how there’s always a rush to declare “it doesn’t count”. Dude is a self made multimillionaire 100% from trading and now basically does the Instagram life thing. Not bad.

 

Wait a sec!  Mohnish might have poor results, but they are audited and available for everyone to scrutinize...and his ideas are available to scrutinize like Fiat which if you kept the Ferrari shares would have been a 20 bagger.  Mohnish has a few of those over 25 years.  But it's there...out in the open.

 

This guy pops up on a Yahoo article, no account statements for proof, and he's selling courses.  Really, you're going to use Mohnish as the discredited one and this guy as most likely legitimate?  Greg, you are a whole hell of a lot smarter than that...and normally you dig in deeper when scrutinizing something.

 

I read that article last week, and then went and read a couple of other articles on the kid.  He did turn small amounts into a significant amount early on, including trading meme stocks, but the $8M number is not audited and is reportedly gains he's show on account statements.  Not net gains...gross gains.  He did not show his gross losses.  That's why I didn't post it.

 

Cheers!

[Parsad]

1 hour ago, LC said:

Show me the audited records

 

Explain exactly how you’re using “basic trend lines” “volume” to trade.

 

Nobody ever seems to publish those two.

 

Not calling out these folks in particular, but my guess is these guys spend more time on their digital sales funnel than anything else.

 

Yup!  They are all going to courses, because it is recurring income, scalable, with zero work after you write it.  Why do original podcasts weekly, or actually run a fund...take two years worth of results and call yourself an expert.  There's like hundreds of them on Youtube...showing off their trades, houses, cars, etc and then write a course and keep raking in daily sales to suckers! 

 

The smart ones are creating entire curriculums with multiple courses.  Nothing new...the Stephen Covey's and Tony Robbin's have been doing this for decades regarding self-help...why not business or just about any other subject! 

 

Cheers!

[Spekulatius]

4 hours ago, rkbabang said:

It seems to me that any such algorithm or formula would only work as long as there wasn't a shit ton of people doing it.  Therefor the only smart thing to do is to keep making millions and keep quiet about it.  The fact that he is telling people and selling online courses to teach people tells me that either it doesn't really work or he's incredibly stupid.

 

Or it did work and but does not work any more and that’s why they try to make money teaching classes. If they really had a way to make money easily, they wouldn’t tell other people about it for very little money and even teaching these classes would be a relatively unproductive use of time. It just does not pass a smell test.

[Gregmal]

8 minutes ago, Parsad said:

This guy pops up on a Yahoo article, no account statements for proof, and he's selling courses.  Really, you're going to use Mohnish as the discredited one and this guy as most likely legitimate?  Greg, you are a whole hell of a lot smarter than that...and normally you dig in deeper when scrutinizing something.

I’m talking about Sykes. I don’t know much of the 24 year old kid. But what Sykes did was pretty crazy and he had audits done and if you actually look at what he was doing is was very repeatable and intelligent. But often with value investors, there’s a tendency to dismiss or besmirch those who do things a little different. Like look at the assumptions being made even above. Uh no he is not competing against renaissance and quant funds, he s trading against retail idiots and stock promoters who are notoriously sloppy. Pretty sure the quants can’t even trade $50m market cap OTCs lol. Think Canadian miners and US small cap biotech, not Netflix and Google. 

 

All I said is I know for a fact that Sykes is 100% legit. Now he basically

just runs a media company. Probably because he has made enough money that he grew out of that sort of style of trading. I knew the guy a bit some time ago. Remember seeing him like triple his money in a couple months on LEXG, Lithium Exploration or some shit like that in 2011 on the way up and then the way down. So if you’re asking me to dig in I would 100% assure you I have more knowledge of the guy and how he does it than the armchair comments. 

[Parsad]

1 minute ago, Gregmal said:

I’m talking about Sykes. I don’t know much of the 24 year old kid. But what Sykes did was pretty crazy and he had audits done and if you actually look at what he was doing is was very repeatable and intelligent. But often with value investors, there’s a tendency to dismiss or besmirch those who do things a little different. Like look at the assumptions being made even above. Uh no he is not competing against renaissance and quant funds, he s trading against retail idiots and stock promoters who are notoriously sloppy. Pretty sure the quants can’t even trade $50m market cap OTCs lol. Think Canadian miners and US small cap biotech, not Netflix and Google. 

 

All I said is I know for a fact that Sykes is 100% legit. Now he basically

just runs a media company. Probably because he has made enough money that he grew out of that sort of style of trading. I knew the guy a bit some time ago. Remember seeing him like triple his money in a couple months on LEXG, Lithium Exploration or some shit like that in 2011 on the way up and then the way down. So if you’re asking me to dig in I would 100% assure you I have more knowledge of the guy and how he does it than the armchair comments. 

 

Apologies Greg!  I thought you were talking about the kid.  Cheers!

[Guest]

I'll trust Greg on this. Unlike Pabrai, he isn't a bs-er.