Timothy Sykes: Tim Alerts

Summary

Despite all the media buzz and ego centric persona of Timothy Sykes that can easily mislead you to believe his produces and services are questionable, the Tim Alerts service is solid. It is educational. It has good picks to trade off the framework provided. The price is reasonable. Overall a good penny stock picking service that I can recommend to everyone.

Review

Whenever people talks about Timothy Sykes we hear three distinctive reponses. First, he is a scam. Second, his stuff is easy and not worth the price. Third, his stuff is good and well worth the money. Let’s see what I find out about Mr. Sykes’ service.

What I did was having one of my non-trader friends from US sign up several months ago so that I can track down the picks Mr. Sykes offer and the performance of his real-time alerts based on his framework. I actually took the time to watch both his free videos and some of the “lessons” he offers in his more expensive services. I am someone who did trade penny stocks when I was young and I did make good money on penny stocks, so I do know a thing or two about the penny stock games. This review is as objective as it can be given my background.

First, the service is designed to handhold someone with absolutely no basic knowledge about trading but has many preconceptions about it from media and books. Mr. Sykes actually has a pretty good set of introductory videos to take anyone from worthshipping Mr. Buffett as a good investor into someone who has a grasp of reality in the penny stock scene. My friend whose life time experience with the stock market is the fixed set of company long term fund offerings actually learned a lot from Mr. Sykes.

This is something I could never do. The educational value is definitely there.

Second, the framework used by Mr. Sykes is different from the penny stock promoters. What he does is very similar to other professional penny stock traders who scan for known setups and then discretionarily choose to participate or not. In contrast to penny stock promoters who just tell people to buy, Mr. Sykes’ framework goes long and short the pennies. He recommends straight money management rules and the style often stay in a trade for several days if necessary. This makes it possible for those who do not have enough money to trade intraday due to the Pattern Day Trader rule in US to actually trade and make money following Mr. Sykes.

The picks or the daily watchlist of stocks are pretty good. They are all reasonable selections that you know actions is coming. The decision to trade which one will depend on the person’s read of the chart. Since Mr. Sykes admitted himself is not great at reading complex charts, his use of a filtered list of stocks narrow down the pre-conditions so that he can focus on very specific breakout / breakdown patterns. From what I see, he is an expert in these setups after years of specializing in penny stock plays.

Hence, the service is indeed useful although it is not innovative because the concept is well known. What Mr. Sykes does is that he open up his automated stock selection to normal people, especially those who are not technical savvy enough to create the filtering themselves. To be fair, there are not that many people who knows what to look for in these penny stocks.

Finally, the subscription rate of $49.95 is not expensive given the service provided. Even if you are very selective with very limited capital to trade these penny stocks, there is a good chance the subscribers can make many times the fee with only a few trades per month. So the value is good.

Mr. Sykes also upsell other higher end services and more expensive products. Those, depending on your budget, are not necessary to start you on the path of profitable penny stock trading.

One thing to remember is that this is not a signal service. It simply tells you where the actions are so that you can pay attention and see if you would jump on it. And this is the part that struggling traders in other markets dissed Mr. Sykes for even though they never achieve the level of success like him.

Trading is all about putting the statistical biases on your side. For traders who focus on a few markets only, the law of large number is mainly applied to the trading setups in combination with your money management. For trading penny stocks, the law of large number is mainly applied to the pre-filtering that narrow down the selection of stocks. Many of the trades on these penny stocks are not going to be big winners or losers which is exactly what trading is about.

In other words, it still takes a lot of work on the subscriber’s side to best utilize the service by trading actively and consistently although the heavy lifting of the selection process is done for you.

All these boil down to one thing – Are you trading to make money or are you trading to satisfy your hidden ego to be a “big trader” or a “professional trader”?

I often recommend people to look into trading markets outside of indices because index trading is hard. And now forex markets are often moving in sync with the major indices, they are now getting more difficult to trade too. I see no reason if you are a beginner in trading or someone who struggle with trading Emini or commodities not to give Mr. Sykes’ service a try. It is less stressful and you can see results pretty quickly once you dump your preconception of what constitute as trading.

I highly recommend Mr. Sykes’ Tim Alerts service to anyone interested in making money from trading.

Disclosure: I like it so much, I signed up as an affiliate. As oppose to sending people to try trading non-index markets on their own, I would rather recommend them to give this a try, especially if they are having trouble trading Emini successfully.

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