Tom A.

I participated in the ‚Live Day Trading Room‘ for a few weeks and found no significant reason to disagree with the five-star reviews. (The only caveat is that you have to have a zero commissions account; if you live on another continent and do your trading with a bank that charges 0.5% per trade, your winnings will be too meagre, percentage-wise, to be worth the risk.)

However, I very much regret following the stock tips given in the ‚Verified Investing Alerts‘ (Gareth's swing trading service, predominantly mid and large caps, few trades with small caps; I was a member for four months). Here, Gareth never cuts his losses quickly, but often doubles down on losing trades. He calls it ‚easing into a position‘, but averaging down is frowned upon by quite a few major traders (do an online search for ‚stocks average down disaster‘ and read the first few articles). This is not the strategy you run when you want to maximize overall net profits, this is the strategy you run when you want to minimize the percentage of losing trades (in line with that, he rarely runs his gains, but usually secures them when they're up about 10%). Big difference, as one sizable negative position nullifies several smaller winners. Gareth also minimizes losses by not closing losing positions for a very long time; at the time of writing, there are about twenty open positions from last year, the three oldest dating back to April (more than twelve months ago). This is definitely not swing trading anymore, but long term investing.

There's also the issue of misleading success statistics. For 2020, this service claims a ‚total gain‘ of 1,507.67%, making you think that one year of following these trade alerts would have made you a 15x return on your investments. Not so fast. First, all the open positions are not included. Second, the relative position sizes are completely disregarded. Third, the recommended position sizes are often very small, sometimes as little as 0.25% of your portfolio, but usually about 1%. A 10% gain on such a position sounds nice, but only increases your account by 0.1%, an almost negligible amount. A much more sincere way of doing this would be a model portfolio account of, say, $100K at the beginning of the year, and a definite dollar amount at the end of the year, something other traders/bloggers do.

If you're not an above intermediate level trader, I would still recommend subscribing for just one month, not for the stock tips, but for the daily videos, as you might learn a few things from his technical analysis and find out about some interesting ETFs. There are also several multi-hour courses on ITMS, but my experience with the ‚Apprentice Trading Library‘ video series was mediocre, and you only have access for 30 days.

I'm now definitely done with ITMS. I'm sorry this was a bit on the harsh side, but all these five-star reviews had to be balanced out a little.