Timothy Sykes Exposed

Timothy Sykes Exposed

Even if, like me, you’re not into penny stocks, chances are that you’ve heard of Timothy Sykes. He’s the guy who, while in college, turned $12k into more than $1million trading penny stocks during the dot-com bubble in `99-2000. He then tried to run a short biased hedge-fund, didn’t quite make it and since 2007 has transformed himself into a guru selling various DVDs purporting to teach you how to become a millionaire trading penny stocks.

His signature pitch in attracting customers is to present himself like a care-free trading millionaire: driving a Lamborghini, making videos in exotic locations surrounded by scantily clad women, trading by the pool side and so on. Unlike most if not all the other people charging money to show you their trading secrets, Timothy Sykes boasts his transparency and the fact that he allegedly already has two students who made over $1million.

I normally would not have written about him – I’m not interested at all in penny stocks, and he’s so over the top in all his marketing (he says that he does it on purpose, to motivate his students) that trying to debunk all his claims would be a case of stating the obvious over and over again.

But it so happened that I saw a link yesterday to an article on his blog bashing the Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort. If you manage to get past all the hard selling on Sykes’s blog, you’ll notice that he’s written three pieces over time bashing Belfort. Now, I know that Jordan Belfort is a controversial figure and I’d be the last person trying to defend him. But I found it funny how someone like Tim Sykes, who has his fair share of skeletons in the closet,  has the gall to call Belfort a scumbag so openly. And not once, but three times. So I left a comment to his article and thought nothing more of it.

Today I noticed that the comment still hadn’t been approved (although some other comment had been), so I sent a couple of tweets to Tim, along the lines of : ‘Hey, Mr Transparency, cut the censorship, publish my comment ‘. So what did he decide to do ? He banned me on twitter too.

So much for all his alleged transparency. As the article that I linked to in the censored comment shows, Timothy Sykes refused to present brokerage statements and related documents to validate his claims. That just says it all about how real the alleged percentages and millions in profits made by his students are. Just as real as his transparency.