Andrew: All right. I’m going to thank my three sponsors before we get started. As you will see in this interview, my work here, my site grew when I got a new design for my website. If you need a quick, reasonably priced design, check out RichWP.com. You’ll be able to edit, customize it the way you want it. So check out RichWP.com, and get a design for your site that will help your site grow the way my site grew. All right. Check out also, Shopify.com, if you need to set up an online store quickly. I’m starting to get emails from people who have stores with Shopify.com, really interesting stories. So far nobody’s going to let me say their stories out loud. I guess they don’t want anyone else to know how they’re making their money. I will say this for you, check out Shopify.com. In a couple of minutes, you’ll have an online store. And then, hopefully, you’ll come back here and let me interview you, and talk about you publicly. Finally, Grasshopper.com, that’s who I use for my phone number. Grasshopper’s the virtual phone system that entrepreneurs love. It’s got a full, robust phone system, with extensions and everything else that you want, except that you could manage it online, and you could use your own phones. So that’s beauty for me. I want to manage everything that I can online, and I don’t want to get a brand new phone. I don’t want a landline. I want to use the phones I already have. All right. Here’s the interview.
Hey, everyone. It’s Andrew Warner, founder of Mixergy.com, Home of the Ambitious Upstart. And I got Timothy Sykes back here on Mixergy. I recently attended. You tell me if I’ve got this right. This is what brought this second interview on. You saw that I did an interview with another entrepreneur, a guy who founded TwitPic. He said on Mixergy that he earned over a million dollars in profit. The whole blogosphere seemed to go nuts for him, for how much money he was making. And here you are, a guy with just a blog, who’s blogging on the side while trading, making 1.3 million last year, and nobody’s giving you any respect. You said, “Andrew, let me on. Let me tell people my story.” What do you think? Did I get that right?
Interviewee: Yup. That’s about right, and I want to point out the fact that it’s 1.3 million, all based on a measly 3,000 daily visitors. So if I had TwitPic-like traffic, I would be a billionaire. These guys are wasting it. They are incompetent.
Andrew: And you’re still trading while you’re doing this. It’s not like you’re a hundred percent blogger.
Interviewee: This is why I don’t have time to shave or fix my hair, or do anything because I’m trading. I’m researching. I’m blogging. I’ve got video watch lists. I’ve got DVDs. I’m just a full-service provider.
Andrew: All right, Tim. I’ve got to tell you, I put on my vest today. I put on a nice shirt. I said, “I’ve got Timothy Sykes on. This is a guy who’s a trader. He’s probably going to come on with this suit, look good. Instead, I see a beard, the hair that wasn’t combed. And what are you wearing?
Interviewee: I took a shower last night to prep for this video. I got my bathrobe. This is my lucky bathrobe. You might have seen it in Wall Street Warriors. I trade with it. I had a decent trade today, but then one stupid trade. So it didn’t bring me luck today, but it usually does. You know, I’m up. I’m up quite a bit in my trading accounts. So you know, I’m real. I don’t need to put on a vest, although that’s a nice vest. If I had it, I would wear it. But I don’t.
Andrew: All right. All right. Fair enough. Let’s get into the story here. Here’s what I’d like to do with this interview. I want to get the story ark. I don’t want to get the, “I’m selling stuff. TwitPic can eat me. Everybody else isn’t catching up to me.” I love that part of your attitude too, but, you know, and your message. But I want to know how you got here.
Interviewee: Hey, you don’t want that? You can hang up now. Bye.
Andrew: I want to know how you got here. We’re going to get to more details on where here is, how you’re making this money, but how did you get here? You weren’t a blogger professionally. Let’s go back to what got you to start blogging.
Interviewee: So, picture Forrest Gump, and mix in penny stocks, and CNBC, and that’s my life. I basically turned $12,000 into 2 million while in college, just trading penny stocks. Luckily buying penny stocks breaking out back in 1999-2002. Then 2003 I started my own hedge fund, senior year of college, was the number one ranked short buyers hedge fund manager ’03 to ’06. But I never really had a strategy that was that scalable. So I started trying to get press to try and grow my business. Didn’t really do very well doing that, but it got me on CNBC. I was in the Trader Monthly Top 30 Under 30. While I was on CNBC, this TV producer was watching me. He created Wall Street Warriors. It’s a hit TV show now in 14 countries, so I was in that show, in 5 to 6 episodes of season one. So that got all these people emailing me, like, what are penny stocks. I want to turn a few thousand into a few million, blah, blah, blah. And as a hedge fund manager, I couldn’t respond to any of them. I was like, you know, I want to. I’m getting literally 50, a hundred, 200 emails a day, just from people asking questions. And as a hedge fund manager, you’re not allowed to tell about your strategy with anybody who’s not a high net worth individual. So I said, “Screw this”. My hedge fund really wasn’t doing much of anything, because I’m trading these small cap names. So I changed my business model. I took advantage of what I’ve learned from the TV show…
Interviewee: from the TV show, what people were emailing me and what they wanted to know. So I wrote a book called ‘An American Hedge Fund’. And then it was like, ‘How do I promote this book?’ So I started a blog, timothysykes.com. The book and the blog started then I created the DVD bit.
Andrew: And now we’ve got to slow it down. What we did until now is just catch us up.
Interviewee: That was it
Andrew: The first site that you launched. Now we’re going to go really slowly to understand how you went from there to here. First site you launched, my understanding, because the same guy who built up your site, Adarsh, built up my website. He said when he first was your site you were on droople?
Interviewee: Joomla
Andrew: Joomla? What did that look like?
Interviewee: I had a family friend build my site for $5K. You know, I didn’t know anything about blogging. I had like all these little slides and stuff. I was just trying to promote my book. And then Adarsh luckily Pallian saw my site and he’s like, he’s like, ‘Man, the website stinks, man. You need a better one.’ And so, yeah. Good luck to your Mechanical Turks trying to put that accent on paper. But that’s really what he sounds like and that’s really what he said. So he designed my new site for a cut of the profits. And so we actually went through 5 or 6 different versions of timothysykes.com. We learned what was needed. This was back in November of 2007. And then I launched timalerts.com which is
Andrew: Again, I gotta slow down even further. We gotta take it step-by-step because I got an hour to fill and I need a lot of detail so we can use this stuff.
Interviewee: It was all, it was Pallian’s idea then we just listened to our readers about what we wanted and I had some fame; thanks to the TV show, thanks to turning a few thousand into a few million. But it was very questionable whether I could build it up because right before I had started blogging the reason why my hedge fund didn’t do well was because I realized that I had not, I didn’t have a very scalable strategy and I had gone for it. Invested in this little ticketing company called Cygnus eTransactions and it basically just blew up in my face. My hedge fund lost 30%. And lots of people think I just lost all my money, but I didn’t. I just lost 30%. But a 30% drop is enough of a momentum killer to ever. You know, my hedge fund was never going anywhere after the 30% drop in basically a year. So I had credibility issues when I started my blog. Right when I started my blog I said, ‘Let me get my credibility back.’ So I went back to my initial $12,415.00 bat mitzvah roots and I said, ‘I’m going to repeat the feed. I’m going to turn a few thousand into a few million again and you’re going to be able to see every single trade.’ So that’s was the basis of the blog. Where I went back to $12,000.00 and I would just build it step-by-step and write about single step. And after two years, I’ve turned $12,000.00 into roughly $116,000.00. Every single trade detailed in over 2500 blog posts.
Andrew: And one of the viewers in the live audience is asking, ‘What percentage of the $1.3 million that you earned with your site is from educational product sales?’ They want to know what percent comes from your profits from trading. The $1.3 is just from the website. He’s blogging out how he’s building up his trading fortune.
Interviewee: Yeah. I mean I trade but again I don’t have the scalable strategy $12,000.00 into $117,000.00 is very respectable. I think a lot of people would want it. But again it’s only $100,000.00. I’ve made 13 times that just teaching other people. This is kind of an interesting concept and I was dead-on about it. I can make 6, 7 maybe even 8 or 9 figures per year teaching others how to make 3, 4 or 5 figures because 90% of traders lose money. And the people who teach trading are frauds; they’re marketers; they’re not real traders. They would never show up on this interview with this hair or a bath robe because they’re always afraid of what they have to hide. You know, people would find out, ‘Oh, what’s your track record? Uh . . . (cough) (cough) I don’t’ have it. Buy my DVD.’ That’s what the industry is full of. And that’s also why I created Investimonials.
Andrew: We’re going to get to what Investimonials is. Your website. I’m making a note to come here to that.
Interviewee: Bring it. Because I have a problem. Once I say the work Investimonials I can’t say any other word than Investimonials for another 15 minutes.
Andrew: I will say the word Investimonials for you. We’re going to come back to it. We’re going to get into this first.
Interviewee: Okay, okay.
Andrew: understand
Interviewee: okay, okay. Investimonials.
Andrew: okay. So going back to this story. You then had an article written about you in The New York Times where, if I’m understanding this right, where you said, ‘This is what I’m going to do. I’m going to blog my way toward success and I’m going to tell everybody here how I’m doing it and so on.’ And that’s where Adarsh found you. Right?
Interviewee: Yeah. It was Reuters and it said, ‘Failed hedge fund manager tries again on the internet.’ And you know, I’m not afraid of bad press. And that’s basically what I was. My hedge fund did not do very well. We basically broke even after three years but that’s not exactly great especially after the previous success I’d had. So yeah. That story got around. Then I was a big target for
Interviewee: I go into this believing I can convert anybody because I can explain my strategy and will answer any question, I have been doing this for 12 years. One of my favorite stories is about this guy named Michael Goode. He had this blog called Good Value, ‘goodevalue.com’ and out of the blue, this again goes with my hate marketing, out of the blue I see a Google alert with my name, it says ‘Timothy Sikes is full of BS’ is the name of his blog post. He explains why, like 7 points, why he thinks I am full of BS. He never had a DVD or anything. He just said, ‘This is probably why he is full of it’. So we had a whole long conversation, you can still see the posts. I might have been 40 comments long. I said, ‘I will convert you’ and overtime he gradually has been converted. He has all my DVD’s. He is a Tim Alert’s Lifetime Member which costs $2,000 and he is up over $120,000 with my strategy. It is not a strategy to get rich quick and this is the main thing and you see all these commercials, you hear frickin pennystockchaser.com, have you heard of them? They are advertising on Howard Stern now. They are a frickin stock promoters. So there is all of these people that claim big riches on the internet in these trading strategies. This is not a get rich quick strategy, this is a make a little money here and there based on the opportunities out there that are based in the hype and manipulation that exists in the penny stock world. But it all came down to me responding to that blog post and now Michael Goode is not just one of my top students he is also one of my top affiliates and he is also moderating my chat rooms because it’s worked for him within two years or a year and a half he has literally learned everything I have and he is making it and we are working together, so it’s great.
Andrew: This is interesting, Chris Dritt has actually found that post and it’s called, ‘Timothy Sikes is full of Bull Shit’ and he linked to it in the comments, thanks Chris.
Interviewee: That’s it.
Andrew: So you have these DVD’s, how did you create these DVD’s? Was it just you at home with a video camera explaining how to trade?
Interviewee: Back when I first started there was no guidelines on how to make a DVD so I got this really expensive snowball mic and I was going to do it all in my home, there you go, that’s it, Oh my God, that’s all I had. I have that somewhere. I never used it, I never even used it and that is awesome. That is what I was going to do but then you have to remember I am Forest Gump, I am the luckiest guy in the world. I don’t know what I did to deserve such luck. One of the people that was watching what I was doing in the blogeshpere, this guy Chuck. He had a show called Chuck TV on Moguless which is live streaming software. He invited me unto Chuck TV in New York and I was back and forth between New York and Connecticut. When I first started my blog, all I was doing was selling books and a few DVD’s I was making maybe 5 or 10 grand a month so it wasn’t that much. I was basically living at home with my parents to save costs while I was ramping up this stuff. I was traveling to New York for interviews. I was writing for thestreet.com, writing for MSNmoney, writing for AOL; just trying to get my name out there. But Chuck TV really introduced me to Moguless. Chuck TV never lasted, I don’t know where that guy went, I think he moved to Ireland or something. I stayed friends with Moguless so now I use Moguless has changed their name to Livestream. But I film all my DVD’s in their studio here in Soho and New York. I have my own place now that I have some financial security. So they make all of my DVD’s and I now have 22 interns and some of the interns are video people because they love what I am doing because I am honest. So I have a lot of enemies and a lot of fans. It’s very good, I think, for your listeners to create theses kinds of strong emotions. Not just hate marketing, but if you are doing something that is honest. Yeah, I say nasty things, I create haters but I also have a lot of people that are loving what I am doing because I am so honest a
nd because the finance world is so corrupt. So you have both ends of the spectrum and the people that love what I am doing, people like Michael Goode that are working for me. We actually crated a DVD together on how to read SEC filings. You start to find people that you work with and I am sure you have experiences too with Mixerjab; seeing your blog take off. People love what you are doing, they want to promote you, work with you. That’s what you have to do, you have to use the power of the internet.
Andrew: You’re right. The more you put out there, the more people find you who can help you get to the next step. So these guys at Moguless gave you that office, I mean that studio, that explains why your live videos look so frickin good and then they did the videos for you and they found somebody to create them, to cut, to press, to do the whole thing.
The transcript for minute 25 till minute 30 is BELOW this line.
Interviewee: They’ve helped out so much because they believe in what I’m doing. I’ve sent them a few customers and now they’re Liivestream every friday. Tomorrow at 1pm I have my show and it’s really cool, I’m in front of a green screen just pointing at charts and stuff like that, and no one else in the stock market does that. I mean they have screen capture, I have screen capture too, but it looks really good when you’re in the studio and people can see okay, look at this point in the chart right here
Andrew: I was wondering how it looked so good, I said “how did he get that into his apartment?” and now I understand. And by the way, that mogul has great software, they’ve got nothing else going on as far as I know. I hope they contact me and let me know if they got other shows that are interesting but it’s Timothy Sykes, and I don’t know what else is there that’s interesting.
Interviewee: Well it’s Livestream now, they changed their name
Andrew: Same thing. I’m not seeing enough good stuff out of them they way I do out of Justin.tv who’s fighting for the good shows who’s getting – I happen to be with Justin.tv, but you could say the same about other sites like Ustream
Interviewee: Once you lost 30%, your psychology’s all screwed up. So I had the losses on my own, I had the losses on the hedge fund and I had the whole credibility problem. So it was a tri-fecta. It was the perfect storm. So that’s when I said, let me restart from my roots. Not only just to make it so that people can follow along, step-by-step but for me to prove to myself that I could repeat the feat of turning 12,000 into 1.6 million. I didn’t know…you know, once you lose so much after you have a perfect track record, you don’t know if you’ve lost it, maybe you were just lucky the first time. So I wanted to do it by myself. And also, I don’t know if you know this, there’s a thing called the Pattern Day Trader Rule where if you’re under $25,000 in your account you can only make three days trades per five day rolling period. So me going back to $12,000, which is roughly half of…I would need to double my account just to break out of this stupid rule. It was a huge restriction. And so for the first nine months I failed to get above 25,000 with this new rule the which was implemented in 2001 after the first time I had made all this money. So this was a huge obstacle. I basically voluntarily checked myself into prison to see if I could bust out and teach other people to bust out. And that’s what I’m doing.
Andrew: OK. All right. So you’re using Joomla. Adarsh finds you in this Reuters article. He contacts you…and I’ve got to get him on here because I love his hustle on this. He says, ‘I want to help you build a better site. You don’t have to pay me, I’ll take a cut of the profits’ or some kind of deal you guys work out. ‘I’m just going to help you.’ He re-launches the site. At that point, do you start selling or did you sell before then, did you start selling product?
Interviewee: No. Well, I mean I had a DVD and Adarsh… basically I had one sales page when Adarsh took over. Was timonthysykes dot com slash DVD which still exists today and it’s my original DVD explaining all my strategies over six hours. But that was the one thing that we were promoting. That and my book. We didn’t for…you know, this was November 2007 when he really… He really took over in February. I started the blog in November 2007; he took over in February 2008. For the first four months, we just kind of built it up, tried to get more followers, tried to get some of the DVDs. He didn’t want any of the DVD sales. He only wanted advertising. He said, ‘I like what you’re doing. I like that you’re honest. I think that we can get a lot of advertising.’ So his job was to build the website and then also work on the advertising side. And we got some deals. You know, we got a few people paying like 2000, 3,000 a month. And we would split the ad deals 50-50. The DVDs were mine to keep. So enter June 2008 was when we had about…I’ve always had about 3000 daily visitors. I haven’t grown in two years, just my income has grown. I’ve monetized better and I’ve created products designed for what my audiences wanted. So in June 2008 was the first product design based on the feedback from the people that were reading my blog and we came out with Tim Alerts, which were real time trade alerts. Previously I had only discussed the trades after they had happened. They were all verified on Covestor dot com which is the biggest marketing thing I’ve ever done because it verifies all my trades and I’m the number one ranked trader out of 40,000 traders. So back then, in June 2008, they could see my trades by they couldn’t see them real time. So I came out with a real time newsletter where I would email and text message people within seconds of my actual trade so they can follow along right when I’m there. And that was when the money really started c
ompounding.
Andrew: Because it was subscription so you didn’t have to keep reselling the same customer and because it was a new value. You were going to do it for them instead of teaching them how to do it themselves. And people bought that.
Interviewee: Well it was still teaching them. You know, Covestor hadn’t come out with auto trading. Now there’s auto trading where actually they can just open an account and whenever I make a trade, my account automatically updates their account too. But Covestor hadn’t launched that back then. This was just about being able to learn in real time as opposed to, okay, I’m in a trade. Two days later I write about it and they say, ‘Wow! That’s a great trade! I wish I could have seen that happen in real time.’ So real time trade alerts, I mean, it’s just huge.
Andrew: I got to say this. I checked with Adarsh minutes before we got on this call, maybe months before this call, maybe a year before this call. Kept checking in with him saying, ‘Is what Timothy’s saying, is it real or am I getting snowed here?’ Because I don’t have any vested interest in just supporting some guy who’s got BS to spew. And Adarsh and I have become friends. And he says over and over, ‘It’s all real.’ What you say to me too about how somebody gets angry and then they become a customer. If I were just listening to that I would say, ‘He’s just excusing the anger that’s on his website so if anyone went to check on what his users felt and saw anger they’d believe that that anger is potential customers.’ He said the same thing to me. He said, ‘Andrew, if you…’ There were sometimes that I was a little hesitant to do certain things. He said, ‘Andrew, it worked for Timothy. The people who are pissed at him the most end up buying from him the most too.’
Interviewee: I go into this believing I can convert anybody because I can explain my strategy and will answer any question, I have been doing this for 12 years. One of my favorite stories is about this guy named Michael Goode. He had this blog called Good Value, ‘goodevalue.com’ and out of the blue, this again goes with my hate marketing, out of the blue I see a Google alert with my name, it says ‘Timothy Sikes is full of BS’ is the name of his blog post. He explains why, like 7 points, why he thinks I am full of BS. He never had a DVD or anything. He just said, ‘This is probably why he is full of it’. So we had a whole long conversation, you can still see the posts. I might have been 40 comments long. I said, ‘I will convert you’ and overtime he gradually has been converted. He has all my DVD’s. He is a Tim Alert’s Lifetime Member which costs $2,000 and he is up over $120,000 with my strategy. It is not a strategy to get rich quick and this is the main thing and you see all these commercials, you hear frickin pennystockchaser.com, have you heard of them? They are advertising on Howard Stern now. They are a frickin stock promoters. So there is all of these people that claim big riches on the internet in these trading strategies. This is not a get rich quick strategy, this is a make a little money here and there based on the opportunities out there that are based in the hype and manipulation that exists in the penny stock world. But it all came down to me responding to that blog post and now Michael Goode is not just one of my top students he is also one of my top affiliates and he is also moderating my chat rooms because it’s worked for him within two years or a year and a half he has literally learned everything I have and he is making it and we are working together, so it’s great.
Andrew: This is interesting, Chris Dritt has actually found that post and it’s called, ‘Timothy Sikes is full of Bull Shit’ and he linked to it in the comments, thanks Chris.
Interviewee: That’s it.
Andrew: So you have these DVD’s, how did you create these DVD’s? Was it just you at home with a video camera explaining how to trade?
Interviewee: Back when I first started there was no guidelines on how to make a DVD so I got this really expensive snowball mic and I was going to do it all in my home, there you go, that’s it, Oh my God, that’s all I had. I have that somewhere. I never used it, I never even used it and that is awesome. That is what I was going to do but then you have to remember I am Forest Gump, I am the luckiest guy in the world. I don’t know what I did to deserve such luck. One of the people that was watching what I was doing in the blogeshpere, this guy Chuck. He had a show called Chuck TV on Moguless which is live streaming software. He invited me unto Chuck TV in New York and I was back and forth between New York and Connecticut. When I first started my blog, all I was doing was selling books and a few DVD’s I was making maybe 5 or 10 grand a month so it wasn’t that much. I was basically living at home with my parents to save costs while I was ramping up this stuff. I was traveling to New York for interviews. I was writing for thestreet.com, writing for MSNmoney, writing for AOL; just trying to get my name out there. But Chuck TV really introduced me to Moguless. Chuck TV never lasted, I don’t know where that guy went, I think he moved to Ireland or something. I stayed friends with Moguless so now I use Moguless has changed their name to Livestream. But I film all my DVD’s in their studio here in Soho and New York. I have my own place now that I have some financial security. So they make all of my DVD’s and I now have 22 interns and some of the interns are video people because they love what I am doing because I am honest. So I have a lot of enemies and a lot of fans. It’s very good, I think, for your listeners to create theses kinds of strong emotions. Not just hate marketing, but if you are doing something that is honest. Yeah, I say nasty things, I create haters but I also have a lot of people that are loving what I am doing because I am so honest and
because the finance world is so corrupt. So you have both ends of the spectrum and the people that love what I am doing, people like Michael Goode that are working for me. We actually crated a DVD together on how to read SEC filings. You start to find people that you work with and I am sure you have experiences too with Mixerjab; seeing your blog take off. People love what you are doing, they want to promote you, work with you. That’s what you have to do, you have to use the power of the internet.
Andrew: You’re right. The more you put out there, the more people find you who can help you get to the next step. So these guys at Moguless gave you that office, I mean that studio, that explains why your live videos look so frickin good and then they did the videos for you and they found somebody to create them, to cut, to press, to do the whole thing.
Interviewee: They’ve helped out so much because they believe in what I’m doing. I’ve sent them a few customers and now they’re Liivestream every friday. Tomorrow at 1pm I have my show and it’s really cool, I’m in front of a green screen just pointing at charts and stuff like that, and no one else in the stock market does that. I mean they have screen capture, I have screen capture too, but it looks really good when you’re in the studio and people can see okay, look at this point in the chart right here
Andrew: I was wondering how it looked so good, I said “how did he get that into his apartment?” and now I understand. And by the way, that mogul has great software, they’ve got nothing else going on as far as I know. I hope they contact me and let me know if they got other shows that are interesting but it’s Timothy Sykes, and I don’t know what else is there that’s interesting.
Interviewee: Well it’s Livestream now, they changed their name
Andrew: Same thing. I’m not seeing enough good stuff out of them they way I do out of Justin.tv who’s fighting for the good shows who’s getting – I happen to be with Justin.tv, but you could say the same about other sites like Ustream
Interviewee: It’s a bad – Livestream has been very good to me they’re constantly upgrading and they’ve helped me with my DVDs, so I’m loving them.
Andrew: Alright, I’m not putting down their technology, if anything, I think they’ve got better technology than the competition, I’m just saying that for some reason they don’t have more people like Timothy Sykes or Leo Lepore, or some of the bigger names.
Interviewee: Yeah
Andrew: Okay, so now you’ve got your DVD, you and Adarsh decide that you’re going to a membership, it’s you, really, who’s driving this part of the business, I don’t want to give him credit for things he didn’t do even though he was a big influence on you
Interviewee: Well, he’s the designer, you know, I mean it’s – I might be the guy promoting everything and doing all the concept, but he’s the architecht, so I give him full credit for giving, you know, I didn’t even know I how to create like a restricted site, I mean back in June 2008, now there’s membership software, like Wishlist and WP Member and A Member, and there’s a tonne of membership-only sites. But back then, there wasn’t much out there, and so we created this from scratch, we had so many things, you know we did wrong at first, and we’re still doing things that are wrong, it’s still new technology, but the membership site where you have free blog posts on timothysykes.com, and then if you want stuff real time, you want premium stuff, then you have to go to timalerts.com. We’re actually working on integrating timalerts.com into timothysykes.com which has been a headache, I’ve wasted $40,000 and three separate systems, just trying to get it all going because now I have 1600 paying subscribers and I want to protect their you know, PayPal subscriptions, so if we move sites over, and interrupt their PayPal subscriptions, I can’t risk that, that’s half my business. The DVD’s are half the business, subscriptions are half the business, so there’s still a lot to learn.
Andrew: Okay, so then back then without all of the technology to create membership sites, how did you guys do it? You created your own separate site, but technically, what else did you do?
Interviewee: I mean it was WP Member, and I don’t know the technical side of it, that is all Adarsh he just broke WP Member into a billion pieces and then he put it back together and that’s what timalerts.com is, and it works you know, people love it, so.
Andrew: Okay, alright, and I did hear that in fact I saw it on your website, that’s your number one selling product right now.
Interviewee: Yes, because I can promote it you know! Real time trades. The DVDs are better because you can learn, you know I have ninety hours worth of educational material if you don’t learn that then you are just… a brick. And I can’t help bricks, but you know, people want real time, they don’t to necessarily learn Gym preemer which is “BUY BUY BUY!” and is lightning round and it makes you want stuff very quick. And so you have to take advantage of those people, and I try and teach them and I try and say, “okay, you don’t necessarily need to have this picked this second, if you had learned the patterns ahead of time, you could’ve anticipated it,” but you know, my DVDs, I have 2000, maybe 2500 subscribers that I’ve ever had, though some cancel, but out of 2500 subscribers that I’ve ever had, I’ve only sold DVDs to probably around a thousand people. So my message is getting out, but then I sell multiple DVDs to those 1000 people.
Andrew: Alright, what about this, somebody in the live audience said, “is that pumping?” that you’re buying a stock, and then you’re emailing 1600 people, you’re saying go buy it too. That increases the price.
Interviewee: I get that a lot, pumping, or front-running, the weird thing about my strategy is that I’m a short-seller. I actually bet that stock goes down most of the time. Nearly 3 out of 4 of my trade –
Andrew: Same thing though, right? You sell it short, which means you’re betting down, and then you tell everyone else, go sell it short, which means it’s going down further.
Interviewee: So you can call me a stock demoter, instead of a stock promoter.
Andrew: Yes, yes.
Interviewee: But let me just explain, the problem with my strategy which has always been, which is why I teach it, instead of just keeping it to myself and making billions, is because there aren’t that many shares to short. So out of 1500 paying subscribers, only about 100 or 200 will actually even be able to short, they need to prepare ahead of time, which is why they need to watch the DVDs, because when you short a stock
Interviewee: …when you short a stock, you’re actually borrowing the shares from your broker. And in order to borrow the shares from your broker, you have to call them up, or I use ‘think or swim’ and interactive brokers. I’ve added little chat windows, so at 7 in the morning, every morning, I’m on the chat asking for shares to be reserved for the day. So, you actually need to learn ahead of time. So, while people say, ‘oh, it’s just him and his subscribers that are pushing all the prices around’, they don’t understand that most of the people are locked out. And so, it’s kind of an interesting scenario. And then obviously, sometimes, I do buy stocks. But again, most of my traders, most of my subscribers are very dumb, they’re very poor. They’re not even around their computer when the trades happen. And I’m also trying to play liquid stocks. You know, at first, when membership wasn’t that big, I could play in liquid stocks. Now, I want to get more liquid, more volatile stocks, so that, I don’t want to pump a stock, I just want to prove that I’m right. And the cool thing is that, if you watch the DVDs, the patterns are still the exact same. One day, if I’m successful enough, I might implode this strategy. Because if enough people know about it a certain pattern, the pattern will change. As of, so far, two years of me yelling every single day, it hasn’t happened, the patterns are the exact same as the DVDs, which we recorded two years ago. So,…
Andrew: OK. All right. Now, what did you sell the plan for originally, do you remember?
Interviewee: At first, we had the whole dollar a day promotion for ‘tim alerts’, which was $30 a month, or $297 for the annual. Since my strategy really, it’s penny stocks, it’s short selling, it’s kind of weird. I’m never going to have millions of travelers, so we upped it to $50 a month. And now, the other day, I just introduced a few new plans at timothysykes.com/plans, where we have a $99 a month plan, a $500 a month plan and a $1500 a month plan, where you can basically chat with me live during the trading day. There’s different options. So, it’s just about up-selling and giving them more features. You know, ‘tim alerts’, you get a daily watch list of the stocks that I am watching, and at any time that I make a trade. These other ones now have videos, they have chat, there’s all sorts of stuff. So, …
Andrew: All right. Always three plans at a time. Not just from you but from other people who I’ve interviewed here. They say that they’ve advertised three different plans at a time. Why, why is it always three?
Interviewee: I have four plans now.
Andrew: Sorry. I mean it’s usually like a small, medium, large. Are you saying that you have small, medium, large, extra large?
Interviewee: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it just seems from a simplicity standpoint. I was going to try and do seven plans and as we’re building this, I’m like, people are going to get confused. My people are already dumb enough, I don’t want to confuse them. I like ripping on them in public, but I don’t want to confuse them. So, four plans just works, and it’s just about people’s, what they can afford, and giving them the features that they want. I didn’t know that anybody would want video watch lists, but they want that. So, I listened to them. I create products. Lots of people on the blogosphere and the Internet, they just create products that they think people want. And then no one wants it. What I’ve always done is start small, what I’ve always done. I’ve been doing this two years, we’re all still newborn babies at this. What we’ve done for two years is start small, and just build, build, build. And then obviously, more features you can up-sell.
Andrew: All right. People actually missed that…
Interviewee: I didn’t start with 10 DVDs. I started with 1 DVD explaining my strategy. Then people were like, oh, I want to learn more about short selling. So I created a Short Selling DVD. People wanted to learn more about the chart patterns, so I created one for that. So now I have 10 DVDs, all of them were created based on the feedback I got from my free readers.
Andrew: You’re calling the audience dumb. That’s kind of shocking. I was going to ask you about it, and people in the audience are asking about it. Is it, why are your customers dumb?
Interviewee: Well, I wish they weren’t dumb. I wish I didn’t have to call them that. But, it’s true, and again, I’m trying to be real. I’m also trying to be like a drill sergeant. There’s too many people that are nice, and they say, ‘oh, trading is beautiful. Come on in. And there’s rainbows and lollipops and unicorns.’ And investors, this is not the trading world. I mean, the trading world is harsh. It will eat you alive. It’s when I say down, dumb, I really mean degenerate, lazy, undisciplined. There are many adjectives I can use to, that encompass what my subscribers are. But they need to know that these are the risks. I’m not all knowing. I’m not God. I’m not perfect. I’m very undisciplined, but I’ve learned from my mistakes, and I want them to learn from their mistakes, too. And it’s also, it’s just fun, since I’m doing this, literally, 18 hours a day, it’s good to release a little every now and then and take out my anguish on my subscribers. Then, it’s fun to piss off the haters, that are like, ‘he calls his subscribers dumb, he has no respect for anybody.’ So, it’s fun to just like, if you see someone sleeping that you really hate, and you flick their ear, and they wake up, it’s kind of like that. And it ‘s kind of like a dick thing to do, but it’s just fun.
Interviewee: … and it’s like, kind of addicting to do. But it’s just, it’s just fun when you need to relieve some stress.
Andrew: Alright, what else did you do… Now you have a membership site that’s bringing in money, you’ve got DVDs that you’re selling that are bringing in money. What other products did you have? What other products did you create?
Interviewee: That’s it! Just 10 DVDs and 4 subscription plans. It’s all based around the strategy, teaching from different angles based on what people need. You know, beginner, medium, advanced; charts, research, video, whatever, whatever they need to work on. I also do private coaching; that brings in a few grand every month. I do… You know, I coach for 3 or 4 thousand dollars a day. It was 3000, now I get too many requests… And, you know I don’t–
Andrew: I never understand why people do that. That seems like a pain in the ass; to have to go and spend a day teaching somebody what you do. For very little money relatively speaking.
Interviewee:It’s a pain, but again, it’s also about… You know, If you can teach someone directly, and you can really get through to them. Then… If you believe in your strategy like I do, then.. You know, I’ve coached probably 2 or 3 dozen people. And out of those 2 or 3 dozen people, probably half of them have really made enough money to be considered success stories; like over like 20,000 dollars. You know, they dropped 3 or 4 thousand, they made 20,000; that’s a success story, and they can trade on their own. So, me creating super-traders creates super-testimonials, which I can use to further promote my brand. I’m all around testimonials, and investimonials, because that’s what sells. You know, when you see other people have success. Like, I could talk all day long about my own success, and I do. But, what matters is when people like Michael Good, who have these, literally scathing blog posts about me, just totally converted. I mean, I have never been so proud of anything in my life as for converting him. And people like him; he’s not the only one, he’s just one of the most vulnerable.
Andrew: Okay, a lot of your blog posts, at the top, before you get to the actual content, have an alert about what you’re selling, and how people need to move their butts, and how they need to buy before a certain date; you get complaints for that, but, it seems like that’s effective. Can you talk about how that works?
Interviewee: Yeah, you know, you have 2 choices of selling on the internet. You can either be manipulative, and you can promise people riches and lambourghinis and sunshine and beautiful girls in bikinis. Like, what is it, the rich jerk dot com, or something like that; and be very manipulative, and risk FTC… Or, you can just be very persistent. I’ve opted to be persistent. And so some people don’t like it. You know, I wish there was a way to market to only new subscribers. Like, if the website could change. This would be a cool invention; I don’t know if it exists, but, if the website could change, and you’re already a subscriber, then you don’t have to see any of that marketing junk because you’re already paying me. As far as I know, nothing like that exists. So, it’s just about promoting everything, because, I literally have 10 DVDs. Like, let’s say you’re a potential customer; how do you know which of my 10 DVDs fit you? You know, they’re all different topics, they’re all different prices. I need to get to you, somehow. And some people learn differntly, too. You know, some people like banner ads, some people like videos, some people like pictures, some people like testimonials from others. So I just try and do everything; it’s just a massive onslaught of promotion.
Andrew: What about the number of times that you blog? How does that impact the results?
Interviewee: You know, this goes back to when I first started blogging, trying to build my personal income. John Chow was an early influence, and, he came up with the whole–, have you had him on yet?
Andrew: No, no.
I
nterviewee: You should have him on. It’d be a really funny–, he’s got a funny haircut, his haircut is like, square. So I was just ripping on it. We’ll show you a picture eventually, it’s going to create a trend. But, he showed me, 3 blog posts a day worked best, and, so I’ve just stuck with that. You know, and I usually repost my watch-list. The cool thing is what I do with my watchlist, because that’s a premium feature, I give it like, half of it away for free. So, I post it on my blog for free every single day at noon, the premium people get it the night before, and they get everything. So the noon people get half the watchlist; so it’s just kind of a tease, and I get a great many converts from that. And then, you know, in the morning, I like to have some kind of interesting article, that’s actually useful content, and then in the afternoon it’s usually some kind of testimonial. And then when people get too comfortable, with “Okay, I’m gonna to ignore the afternoon blog post with the testimonials,” I flip it, and I put the testimonial in the morning, and the interesting blog post in the after–
Andrew: Does-, doesn’t it annoy your audience that you’re constantly promoting this way?
Interviewee: Probably. You know, but again, if they learn the strategy, and, they can prop it on their own, they don’t even need my website anymore. If someone gets 10 DVDs today, they don’t ever need to see me again, after they…
nterviewee: watch all those ten DvD’s, because ideally, they can learn it on their own. So people that are coming to my site are, again, morons and people that need to learn. So I don’t care what they think, I only care what the people want to learn and want to buy my products think. I will annoy the entire internet to find the few thousand that actually want to learn my strategy and I think I’ve been quite successful at that.
Andrew: Okay
Interviewee: I mean annoying the internet.
Andrew: Alright let’s go over a couple other things. You recently hired a team to fix your site apparently they got you into a little bit of trouble. Why did you even hire them when you had someone else to build out your site, you had Pallian.
Interviewee: I wish I had Pallian, I wish I could use that terminology. Pallian has gone on to fame and fortune. You know he did very well for my site. But his whole plan all along was to build my site and use my success to springboard his career. Which he’s done and now he has a whole office in Vancouver with multiple employees and he has some many projects. You know, I still use him. But he has so many projects, and you know, I’m on the back burner, needless to say. I wish it was better. I wish I had happier news, but that’s just what happens sometimes. You know, and god bless him he did create my whole, my whole enterprise and I own him for that. But now he is going on to bigger and better things. Now I’m trying to find a replacement and what I’m finding is I didn’t know what I had with Pallian. I should’ve kept him in shackles and no let him use his name at all because he was the perfect web designer for the perfect price, the style and getting everything working. Now I’ve tried six or seven different teams and people are too expensive, they don’t do it right, they do it wrong. It’s very dangerous tinkering with websites. Looking back, I probably should have paid Pallian more money to stick around, but now it’s to late for me. All I can do is pass on the lessons to others.
Andrew: Who did you hire to create the new version of your site? It looks stunning.
Interviewee: Well, Pallian still did the design work. It’s just the back-end that’s a freaking nightmare. No, Pallian, the reason why it looks stunning is Pallian did all the design. The back-end is just literally trying to protect all these paypal subscritions and trying to protect certain blog-posts. And I don’t want any lawsuits, I don’t really .
Andrew: I was gonna say, I see that you’re not being as open as you usually are. I’ve got my notes here because I talked to him about what happened there, but you want to stay the details. You just want to say things happened.
Interviewee: All I can say is that Pallian has done very well. No one else has done very well for me.
Andrew: How can somebody avoid Can you describe in generalities the problems that you had by hiring this company and then say how people can avoid them? Avoid problems like that?
Interviewee: Definitely, Definitely. Always, I mean I would always say never just pay hourly. Always have a set maximum and say I don’t care what problems you have at this budget at this time and you figure it out and work with them very closely. It’s also partially my fault because I had so many things going on that I did not give them the proper direction. I just said get all done. They gave me a 17 page .one company gave me 17 pages. One company gave me 12 pages. All these different terms of how to finish everything but I didn’t really understand the technical stuff. So I’m trusting them at their word. I showed Pallian the bills and he’s like ‘Man this is ridiculous. You got ripped off!’ So I was like, ‘Shit, ya, I did.’ But it’s a good lesson learn, so now I think that I’ve finally found some teams. Teams, not just one team and I would always try and say try to have multiple teams working. Always use test sites, I didn’t even use a test site. Literally that’s how .
Andrew: What’s a test site for you, what do you use for a .what’s a test site?
Interviewee: I’m saying like what do you use like test.timothysikes.com and you work on all that stuff in the background. If it works, then you push it live. We didn’t do that. We were just like, with Pallian, since I trusted him and he always did a good job, we always just did it right on timalerts.com. If it worked it worked, if it didn’t, then would spend all night fixing it. With these other teams, that’s not the way it works. Also, the big debate is whether you should go cheap with India, don’t. Don’t. The time-zone, the language barriers, the re-used code, even with investimonials. I want to bring up investimonials not just to promote it but to show you that I’ve had huge design problems with investimonials. We had an Indian team that designed the initial investimonials. It was kind of, it worked, but it was kind of clunky. There were lots of errors. Just trying to build a foundation of .
Interviewee: …you know, put more features, which is hell. So we got rid of them. Luckily enough, again, one Tim Alert subscriber who’s up $50,000 in two months, he emailed me out of the blue. He said, ‘I love your strategy. I love what you’re doing. Let me do some, a little web work for you.’ He didn’t know what he was getting into. Now he’s the main designer of Investimonials.com. I have him shackled down. I’m not revealing his name. You better not reveal his name. I think I blocked off his internet access, too, or that SWAT team that I sent did their job properly. You know, like he’s doing an awesome job with Investimonials. And I really appreciate what he’s doing, so you have to find a team that does it well. And stick with them. And really appreciate it, because I hear so many horror stories. ‘Everyone’, I say, ‘my horror story’. They are like, “I’ve got you beat”. Everyone has horror stories. And I know Pallion did your new site, and I think it looks great. And I think that has a big to do with why your site is taking off now, compared to your old site.
Andrew: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. It was huge. And I haven’t used anyone except him. But I also didn’t do as much as you do. You do, from what I see, you just constantly are tinkering with the site. You probably exhausted Ardage, and maybe even a couple of the other teams, because I’ll see something. You mentioned John Chow. John Chow once talked about something, I think, in the morning, and by that evening, it was up on your site. You were testing it. Three days later, it was gone.
Interviewee: Yes.
Andrew: You’re testing constantly.
Interviewee: Always testing. Always be testing. You know, again, that also comes from my trading background, where you have to act lightning quick if you see an opportunity. You test it. If it doesn’t work out, you cut your losses. You get out. And that’s the beautiful thing about trading. That’s why I wish more people would trade. Not just to make money, but also learn these lessons, and apply them to business. You know, again, we’re so new at blogging. My little $100,000 a month, sure, that’s nice. It pays the bills. It pays for my sushi habit. It pays for my traveling. But again, I’m saving most of it. I’m reinvesting it in Investimonials and other sites, you know. And you just have to try new things, because the internet is going to…You’ve heard it all before, but it’s literally going to revolutionize stagnant industries like finance. Like right now, you have so many newsletters and brokers that are just absolute scams. And if you Google them, sure, you have ripoffreport.com, but you know, most of the bad stuff posted on ripoffreport is like ridiculed by lawyers. There’s no review site, like Tripadvisor, Yelp, for finance. That’s where Investimonials comes in. And the only reason why I discovered Investimonials.com, the whole business model, was because I see so many scams out there. And I’m not talking about…
Andrew: Let’s get back to what Investimonials is.
Interviewee: Wait. Wait.
Andrew: Let’s take a little bit of time. Well, Investimonials is the first site that you created, that you own, that’s not a blog. What is it?
Interviewee: Yes, it’s a review site. It’s like Tripadvisor, Yelp, but for finance. We’ve reviewed over 3,900 products now, brokers, newsletters, websites, blogs, commentators.
Andrew: Who reviews them?
Interviewee: Users. So we have, basically, 1,300 users in the first 45 days since launch. And it’s basically my Tim Alert subscribers, and then some of my blogger friends. I need to build it out. I need to get many more reviews. We had about 3,000 user reviews in the first 45 days, which is awesome. It’s a good base. But we’re going to rank everything. And we’re going to give, kind of, accountability. Like there’s a lot of stock promoters. Let me pick one, for example. Hmm, which one should I rip on? Let’s see. Ooh, there’s so many. You got bestdamnpennystocks.com, pennystockchaser.com.
Andrew: I don’t know anything about these guys. I can’t get into an intelligent conversation with you about that. But what you’re saying is that you want people to be able to go in, and if they have a problem with a promoter, rip into the promoter. Or if they’re somebody like you, who they like, they can come in and give a positive testimonial about it.
Interviewee: Or rip on me.
Andrew: Or rip on you.
Interviewee: Just share your honest feelings of how you’ve done. And, you know, when you have 5, 10, 50 reviews of a product, it’s not very meaningful. But within a few years, I planted the seeds. Me and this guy Greg. Greg is right here. He’s co whatever of Investimonials and…
Andrew: Does he own a piece of it?
Interviewee: He owns a piece. Everyone works.
Andrew: What’s his part in the business? What does he do?
Interviewee: He’s Director of Brand Management, so he helps these brands sign up and add features to their site. I mean right now. it’s all just basic product review sites, you know. So you have, OK, let’s say you own a newsletter. You have a little page for yourself. But soon you’re going to be able to add a feed. You’re going to add video. And we’re going to be able to promote it. And you want honest reviews. A lot of brands, we’re finding, are scared to…
Andrew: Wait. Let’s give it a shot here for a minute.
Interviewee: jump on because there might be one or two negative reviews. And what I have to teach them is like one or two negative reviews doesn’t matter. If you have something that’s real, the good reviews will overwhelmingly, you know, will just annihilate the bad reviews. Just like my own stuff. The problem is, is that most companies, and most people in finance, are absolute frauds. And they know it. So they don’t want their sites necessarily to take off.
Interviewee: …they don’t want their sites necessarily take off. So, it’s going to be a battle. And out of the 4,000 products that we have listed, we’ll probably get it up to around 10,000. We’re adding like TV shows, so that you can be able to review CNBC, Fast Money, if you like it. You’re going to be able to review this commentator like…
Andrew: I need help for investment.
Interviewee: That’s what it is.
Andrew: Except people get to control their page if they pay you. If a brand pays you, they get to control their page.
Interviewee: That’s exactly it.
Andrew: Is that what people in the audience are saying, that you have to pay for, are you paying for reviews? No, right? It’s user…
Interviewee: No, no, no, no, not paying for reviews. We just want to add features for the brands to promote their products. Reviews are all user reviews. We don’t touch them. Every now and then we’ve had a few fake reviews, and we have a whole investigation. There have been a few brands that have posted fake reviews. And they’re such idiots. They’re morons. But you have to deal with the fake reviews and you have to get rid of them. So, we’re trying to get the most honest reviews from the most number of people, so then we can form conclusions. And then after maybe 3, maybe 5, maybe 10 years, I don’t know how long it’s going to take. Out of the 5 or 10, maybe 20,000 products, by the time we get done with it, there’s going to be a few hundred products that everyone just loves. And that’s the products that we’re trying to find.
Andrew: Chris Tritt in the audience is saying that if a brand pays for control of their page, can they delete bad reviews?
Interviewee: No, no, that’s the beautiful thing. They can add features like, add a video from the founder. But this business model, I’m not revolutionizing anything, I’m just using it for finance. Citysearch uses it, message from the owner. YellP uses it, they have that same kind of thing. And then we also have affiliate links. Like if you sign up to a broker that you like, or you don’t know if you like it because you’re just signing up, we get an affiliate commission. And that’s all fully disclosed, because we want to promote good products. It’s kind of just a discovery process.
Andrew: One more question about this. Somebody in the audience is asking, ‘define control page’. What do you mean that the brand gets to control their own page?
Interviewee: They get to add features. So they get to add video, a message from their CEO, eventually we’re going to work it in so they can even take a survey. So, let’s say that we have 600 people who have reviewed their product. They can directly survey those people, and say, ‘what can we do better? What didn’t you like?’ They don’t have control. We’re doing all the programming. We’re definitely not giving them control, but we’re giving them the ability to enhance their pages.
Andrew: OK. Covestor. You brought them up a lot. That’s one of the ways you show the world how well you do. And you say that you’re number one in Covestor. Is it number one overall, or is it number one for certain criteria? And what are those criteria that you’re number one for?
Interviewee: Number one since inception, number one over three years.
Andrew: For what?
Interviewee: Number one, return performance, account performance.
Andrew: Overall performance?
Interviewee: This is my 12,000 account, going to 117,000. So, when you turn 10 times your money in two years, we’re number one out of 40,000 or 45,000 plus traders on the site now. I also have a distinct advantage because I’ve been on the site pretty much since the founding. So, a lot of people, they’re just starting, they might be up 100% this year already, I’m only up 13% in 2010. So, I’m not number one in the first month, it’s kind of like a picture like the Tour de France. You got people that can win these individual stages, but I’m thinking Lance Armstrong. I’m also the most popular. I got 6,000 followers, the next closest guy has 1,500. It’s pretty much because I’m promoting it so much. It’s all about transparency. I don’t even care that I’m number one. That’s just marketing. That’s just helping me promote, look, I’m real. Even if I was number 10 or number 100 out of 40,000, what matters more is that I have over a dozen of my subscribers and students in the top 100. Eventually, ideally, I have all of my students. Not one other newsletter person or guru is even signed up to Covestor. Every single person who writes for thestreet.com, every single person that works for CNBC, and writes for The Fool. Anybody’s who trading or investing and commenting on it should theoretically disclose their stuff. I mean, the SEC should come out with an SEC order and say, everyone should be on this site, or some version of this site. I don’t know if Covestor is going to be the main site for transparency. But I don’t people are going to realize this, and I know people like you who aren’t into finance don’t realize that we’ve come close to economic catastrophe. Not once, but twice now in the past decade because of these hedge funds that can take freakin’ 100 to 1, 400 to 1 leverage, and we don’t know what they’re investing in. And that’s dangerous. I’m all for economic freedom, my whole book in American Hedge Fund ridicules the SEC for the rules that kind of
constrained my small hedge fund. But we also have to protect the economy as a whole. I’m a philosophy major. OK, you need social good.
Andrew: How do you talk so much? How do you do it? I’m supposed to do an interview a day, I’ve never seen this.
Andrew: I’ve never seen this. I can’t talk as much as you. Go ahead. Sorry.
Interviewee: I have all this stuff in my head. I see that we need transparency. I’m on Covester. I created Investimonials. I sacrificed.
Andrew: Because you’re obsessed with this. Because you constantly are working in this space. That you just keep building up ideas, and you keep thinking about them. And you need an outlet to get them out. And the blog is…
Interviewee: And it just pisses me off when you have these stock promoters you know nothing about. It should be ingrained in your head from grade one that pennystockchaser.com gets paid to promote stocks. Their entire B.S. reports, which are like five pages long, with all this research, are meaningless. All that matters is the disclaimer at the bottom that says, we have been paid $500,000. This represents a conflict of interest. We have been paid 500,000 shares.
Andrew: Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hang on a second. What about this? The bottom of the emails that I got from you, and we haven’t exchanged emails in a long time, always said, “Use what I say for entertainment values only.” We all have disclaimers, no?
Interviewee: But that’s to protect me legally. I’m not getting compensated to pick a stock. Companies like pennystockchaser.com, which are advertising on Howard Stern Radio, which is mainstream, they’re saying, “Our track record is awesome. Our picture, awesome, our research is awesome.” They don’t give a shit about research. They give a shit about how much they get paid. So they get paid 500,000 shares of this company for “IR”, for Investor Relations, Investor Awareness. So they pump it up for a week, and then they sell directly into their own pumping. That is stock manipulation at its finest. And the SEC has done nothing. The SEC has halted some of the stocks they have promoted, but they have not stopped them, because, apparently, there is a loophole. And I’m not a lawyer. But apparently, if you put in your disclaimer, we have been paid such and such to promote such and such company. This represents a conflict of interest. It is up to you, the reader, to recognize this conflict of interest. Readers aren’t going to recognize it. They can’t even read the freaking disclaimers. Many of these disclaimers are put into jpegs. So they’re pictures. So they’re not even crawlable by Google. It is very smart. It is very manipulative. And I will crush them like a bug.
Andrew: [Laughs] All right. I don’t know anything about them, and I invite them to come to the comments and respond, or send me an email. And I’d like to hear.
Interviewee: They’re not going to.
Andrew: But I don’t know this company specifically, but I know the companies you’re talking about. I mean I know what you’re fighting against. These guys who clearly are paid by these tiny companies to pump them up. And you get emails. And I know them because when I was in the email business, a lot of them would come to me and ask me how they could get email sent out. Because they wanted to flood the internet with this stuff.
Interviewee: And you have to understand, the reason why I have a few haters on the internet, it is these penny stock promoters. They don’t want me to get my message out. So I treat every single hater as if they are a penny stock promoter, because probably 90% of them are penny stock promoters who don’t want me getting mainstream, who don’t want me, you know, telling this stuff. So if they take me out, you’ve got to continue the fight.
Andrew: All right. My Mechanical Turkers are really earning every penny today. I mean, for them to keep up with how fast you talk, and then type it out for a couple of pennies a minute. Guys, thank you very much. Thank you. All right. So, you built up a successful blog. You’re making money off of it. Do you have any advice for other bloggers? Somebody in the audience, lots of people, actually, are probably looking to create blogs as big as yours. What do they do?
Interviewee: Well, first of all you have to have something worth promoting. You know, if you’re just an average person, and you’re using Twitter to use TwitPics of hot dogs that you eat, don’t waste the precious internet sphere with your junk. You know, like you have run a successful business. You have amazing interview capabilities. You’re sharing what you love. So I would first say, find something that you love. Find something that you’re skilled at. Find something that can benefit other people. And then charge them for it. You know, I don’t know why there’s no Mixergy Pro. Maybe that’s coming up, like where you’d say, OK, here’s an hour long intro, you know, conversation with Timothy Sykes. But if you want these ten amazing secrets, you have to pay $29.95 a month. You know, that’s what I would try. And always be up-selling cheese, cheese, cheese. But then always save something for the premium members. And then give your premium members everything. A lot of people say, you know, only, a lot of people in trading say you shouldn’t tell people where you find shares to short. You’re ruining your strategy. You’re, you know, if I do shut down pennystockchaser, here’s the irony. If I shut down these penny stock promoters, I’m out of business, because I don’t have anything to talk about. And that’s fine. Maybe then I can get a haircut, and shave, and have time to freaking sleep. I’m trying to put myself out of business. If you can find yourself in such an interesting position, where there’s some kind of, you know, misunderstanding or general lack of understanding. You know, I picture the penny stock world. It’s akin to, you know, sex ed in the 1940s, where I’m Kinsey, and I’m educating the entire world about what is a penis. Except I’m educating people about what is, you know, a stock promotion. And obviously, that made Kinsey very famous…
Interviewee: and, obviously, that made Kinsey very famous and it made him very rich. He had many personal problems. You know Kinsey?
Andrew: Yes. I saw the movie.
Interviewee: It was a good movie. That’s where I got this analogy from. But, you know, that was back when I had time to watch movies. But if you can find these kinds of, you know, opportunities where there’s just not a lot of good information. And then you can just put yourself right into that equation and give the good information, that has a value. You know, I would say, don’t even try and compete with anything real time. Obviously, I’m doing real time trades but that’s ñ I’ve been doing it for 12 years. Real time is such a difficult niche because there’s so many technologies and so many companies are investing so much money to give you like the latest sports scores, the latest weather, the latest traffic, the latest restaurant reviews. It’s just tough.
As an individual blogger, you’re fighting an uphill battle. You’re trying to compete against these multi-billion dollar companies that are investing huge because everybody wants to be, ‘Oh, I’m social networking.’ And, you know, it’s tough. So, you need to find the niche ñ When I was at Blog World, I had this question and people were like, ‘What are good topics to talk about on a blog for a premium site?’ One lady who I feel really bad for cause I ripped into her and she probably went home crying, but she needed to hear it. She wanted to give advice to grandmothers on how to better communicate with her grandchildren. And I said that, ‘What the heck kind of business model is that? What are you going to get paid with cookies?’ Like it was just horrific. And so you have to understand that most business ideas are horrific. Understand that most start-ups fail. Understand that you will likely fail unless you have every question answered. If anybody asked me any question, I don’t know if people are asking questions in the chat room. As me question? I am prepared to answer it.
Andrew: Alright. I got a question for you right now. Humdog said he went over to Covestor. He said, ‘Tim is ranked number six on Covestor and he links over to it. And I’ve got to say, when I went to Covestor directly, I saw that you were linked, not at the top, but somewhere towards, somewhere in the top ten but not at the top. I had to massage the numbers to get you to number one.
Interviewee: Those are different timeframes. I’m not number one over this year or last year because, again, now I’m playing with a bigger account. But, since inception which is when my portfolio was created, two years ago, now two years and three months, that’s what matters because that is over time. I don’t care if I’m number one this month. What I care about is the marathon. You know, this is not a sprint. I’m not trying to win stage 15. I’m trying to win the whole freakin’ tour. And that’s what I’m doing. And you can see, since inception, I dominate. And one of my students is number two, one of my students is number seven, number ten. It changes every day. And, again, their system isn’t perfect. All that matters ñ again, even if I was number 1,000 out of 40,000, there’s still value in the fact that I’m proving that I’m making money and I’m transparent. 90 to 95% of traders lose money. This is why there is no transparency. This is why if you go
to motleyfool.com and you see how do their commentators do, I don’t know. We don’t know what their trades are. And Motley Fool just raised $25 million. There’s a lot more money to be made off not being transparent. So, you should shut up, and you should ñ I’m talking to your commentator, not you Andrew
Andrew: Talk to my commentator.
Interviewee: But you should, you should give thanks to me. You should bow down and kiss my toes because I am one of the good guys. Do not attack the good guys. Attack the bad guys. You are fighting for the wrong team and you don’t even know it, Sir.
Andrew: [laughs] Alright. I’ve seen lots of different ñ I don’t think I’ve ever seen a chatboard this active. I’ve seen lots of different things said about you, about your competitors in the chatboard. I don’t want to bring up specific competitors because I don’t know them, I don’t know if people are here just to promote them. I just figured I read a lot of the comments though.
Interviewee: Bring someone else. Come on. Let’s test it out.
Andrew: Okay. Alright. Anyone who has a question in the audience, please bring on your toughest, best question for Tim.
Interviewee: How many people do we have? I can’t even see it.
Andrew: You know what, I think it’s 64 in the chatroom. And, I’m not going into it. I know there are more people who are watching us on Justin TV but from what I understand, those chatrooms are just nuts, especially when you feature us on home page.
Interviewee: Yeah. What I’m trying to say mostly is just to be brutally honest. If, you know, I’m not even 100% honest, I’ll tell you that. A lot of this is a marketing schtick just to be so annoying. If you meet me in real life, a lot of people are like, ‘Wow, you’re not annoying. You’re not ‘
Andrew: So, how do you come up with this schtick?
Interviewee: Um, you know, again, this is kind of my frustration. This is just me stress relieving. Like when someone asks me like a question like that from Covestor, I just let him have it. It’s really just about using like, you know, kind of like a diary but a public diary. And I think that
Andrew: But most people, even ñ most people are afraid to even write in their diaries cause what if somebody catches the diary and reads what their internal thoughts are. People before they publish will sometimes feel, ‘Well, what if my best friend or my worst enemy sees it and laughs at me?’ How do you get past that?
Interviewee: You just stop caring what other people think.
Andrew: How do you get to the point where you stop caring, especially, Tim, when you started out stop caring, your hedge fund was in trouble.
Andrew: Your hedge fund was in trouble. You were losing money. How, at that point, do you stop caring enough that you can just go and let the world have it?
Interviewee: First of all, you need to have self-confidence. A lot of problem with bloggers is that they’re introverted freaks, and they don’t have any self-confidence. And they don’t have any skills or talent. So if you have no skills, and you’re talentless, you should be scared of what you’re putting on the internet, because most likely, it’s not worth anyone’s time. If you are confident that you have something valuable, then you can adopt many different personas, because it’s all about getting the good information out there. If my annoyance has somebody in your audience listening and saying, “You know, that guy, I don’t really like him, but I’m going to check out his site because I remember him.” And then you start seeing, “Wait a minute. I see him talking about that stock AENY.” Right here, on January 28, 2010, AENY is at 385. And he might remember to look back at January 28, 2011, and he’ll see AENY at one cent, or five cents, or ten cents, a drop of 90 percent. And he’ll say, “Wait a minute. Timothy Sykes might be freaking crazy. His beard is all over the place. His hair is all over the place. But he predicted that 90% drop. Maybe he has something. Maybe I should get one of his DVDs.” And so that, yeah, I am going on the record. AENY is the biggest pump and dump in the stock market right now. The problem is, I am not short this stock because there are no shares to short. So I have valuable information, but I can’t use it. If there were shares to short, I wouldn’t be doing interviews. I’d be in my freaking Bali awesome, cool-looking place where I live, and shorting a million shares. And then making 3 million dollars over the next few months. So I understand the limits of what I have. And I understand that I don’t care if people hate me. I don’t care if I offend them. All I care about is getting them to recognize that I have a strategy. And that yes, thanks to 12 years in the business, I can teach them. And I will do everything. An
d they can email me. I have email conversations with people that are like 20 emails long, where people are like, “F-you, take me off your mailing list.” And I’m like, “Hit the unsubscribe button, you freaking moron.” And they say, “I can’t find the unsubscribe button.” I’m like, “Well, that’s why you’re a moron.” So we go back and forth, and you know, eventually, I try and convert them. And I say…
Andrew: I could believe, too, that you’d go back and forth with one person that many times.
Interviewee: Again, that one person, and the one person I was ripping on TwitPic in that Alley Insider, this one guy said, “Stop spamming the message board.” So I found him. I looked him up on Facebook, and I said, “I’m not spamming. If you look at my stuff, you know, you’ll see that I’m actually real.” And so it’s one person at a time. If I’m not willing to help one person, I can’t be willing to help a thousand people. It starts with one. That one guy will remember my name, and he will remember me when he sees my stuff. And if I have good stuff, none of this stuff matters. This interview does not matter. All that matters is what I preach in the stocks, and what I can teach people through my DVDs and seminars and stuff like that. Because that is what’s valuable. The only reason why I’m doing this seminar, or this interview, is because A, I like you, or B, to get the word out, to try and get new customers. And try and share my story. And try and share success, because I think that you should learn from success and failure. And too many people, far too many people, are scared to expose themselves about their failures, and stuff like that. And I don’t think that’s, I think that’s a big problem with the world. So I’m doing my little part to make the world a better place.
Andrew: All right. All right. Let’s leave it there. I’m looking at the questions.
Interviewee: That was the short explanation. Let me get into my long explanation.
Andrew: [Laughs] All right. Yeah, I’m looking at the questions. The people are saying what really happened to you in Pallion. And I know what happened. I actually called Pallion up. I said did something happen with the two of you. Goes, “No, we’re working together. I just don’t have that much time.” And like you said, he’s moved on to bigger and better things that move on.
Interviewee: I’m cheap. I’ll tell you exactly what. I’m not going to pay Pallion’s ridiculously prices right now. He is too popular. He has too many projects. And for the money that he wants, he cannot devote that amount of time. And I understand that. He’s running a business. God bless him. But I want the Pallion before he was popular. And I can’t go back in time, because if I would, I would work him 50 times harder. I would have him design seven sites for the next seven years. I would even youth him just to get him to do his magic.
Andrew: [Laughs]
Interviewee: But this is what happens, you know. When you become popular, and this is one thing where I differ from Pallion, where he’s gone on to bigger and better things, and I’m still fighting the fight one person at a time. I love fighting one person at a time. And I know that it’s not good in a business sense. Pallion is probably right. He might be running a billion dollar website design firm in a few years, and I’ll still be pulling in. Remember when I was the first blogger to make a million? And I’ll still be doing a million or two, you know. It doesn’t even matter. Once you get to a certain point of money, all that matters is if you’re happy with your life, and if you think that you’re doing good. And I think that I’m helping people. I think that I’m bringing up all these sorts of interesting points…
Interviewee: …all these sorts of interesting points that they don’t understand. And I’m doing it in a unique way to make sure that they remember me. Remember the fist of Sykes in your face, you freaking and degenerates. What are you doing watching this in the middle of the day? You don’t have jobs? What’s wrong with you? You know many of you people are cubicle mind…
Andrew: I know. I could say the same thing for you, too. Here’s the thing. In the middle of the day, instead of trading, you’re doing an interview with me. Two plus two…
Interviewee: I have no good trades right now. I would have rescheduled if I had a good trade right now. This is the beautiful thing about my strategy. And again, this is not a prepared remark. This is…
Andrew: Yes.
Interviewee: actual reality. I cannot find shares of AENY to short right now. I tried all freaking morning long. If I had shares of AENY right now, I’m sorry, Andrew, but I would ditch you like Daily Candy did. You know?
Andrew: Ha, Daily Candy, three times. I’m sorry. It looks like there’s somebody at the…
Interviewee: What is that? Daily Candy, you suck. You suck. You shouldn’t have been bought out for 125 million.
Andrew: Ah.
Interviewee: You should have been bought out for 125 cents. That’s what you’re worth. You’re only worth your word.
Andrew: Well, you know. What could I have done at that point? Three times she stood me up in these interviews. Three times she didn’t show up and didn’t email. What would you have done? Here’s a guy who, Mr. Personality, would have come up with something on the spot. What would Timothy Sykes have done?
Interviewee: Again, I don’t mind making enemies, so I probably would have written a much nastier blog post, which probably I would have regretted in my old age, but I would look at it right now as being 100% real. I think you did a good middle of the road kind of thing. You let everyone know, but you weren’t nasty about it. You know, things do happen. You know, maybe she has an excuse. People do have.
Andrew: That’s very possible.
Interviewee: People do give birth to three babies within a few weeks.
Andrew: [Laughs]
Interviewee: You know, they might. There’s accidents that happen.
Andrew: Tim, let me, I’m sorry, one second. There’s somebody here at the door. Nobody ever comes to talk to me here because I don’t even speak Spanish. But let’s see what’s going on.
Interviewee: It’s pennystockchaser. He’s going to kill you.
Andrew: Hello, hello. Yes? Si, oh hi. OK, let me. I’m going to finish recording this, and then we’ll do it. I’ll come over to your office.
Interviewee: You’re being too loud?
Andrew: Sounds good. All right.
Interviewee: What are you in? Are you in like a Regis mobile office?
Andrew: Yes. Yes, I’m in a Regis mobile office.
Interviewee: Are you serious? That call from like…
Andrew: They’re awesome.
Interviewee: I’ve used Regis before. They’re good rates.
Andrew: I love it.
Interviewee: I need to join their affiliate program. Are you part of their affiliate program?
Andrew: No, I’m not. I should.
Interviewee: They have one. You should.
Andrew: And start turning up. I love this place so much. These people are taking incredible care of me.
Interviewee: You should have a Regis shirt on. They should give it to you. You should be like, “Look at all these freaking tweets, Regis?”
Andrew: I don’t think they care. I don’t think they care that I keep telling everybody how much I love it here. But they do take really good care of me.
Interviewee: They?
Andrew: All right. Let’s wrap it up this way.
Interviewee: OK.
Andrew: How can people contact you? Before I let you answer, I’m going to suggest this. People wherever, if you have a chance to comment and use his name, try it out. Don’t stick it like spammy comment in somebody else’s post, but where possible, try it out. And let’s, I’m telling you, this guy will jump on it like you wouldn’t believe. I think it’s impressive that you will jump on all these comments, considering all the other stuff that you do. So that’s my suggestion. No spam, but where possible, just stick the name Timothy Sykes in a comment. And just see what happens. How else could people connect with you?
Interviewee: I will bring my group of degenerates to your blog or to your website, and we will ransack the place.
Andrew: What about this? Can people tweet to you? Someone in the audience is saying, “Don’t even bother.” It’s pointless to tweet to you?
Interviewee: You can tweet to me, Timothy Sykes. I respond to tweets. What is that? Don’t ever say that it’s not worth it. You go to TimothySykes.com/contact. That way I can track everything through my Zen Desk. Do you use Zen Desk?
Andrew: No.
Interviewee: It’s good. It’s good. It creates tickets, so I never miss an email. Before I would miss emails. So this way, never miss it, and you go to TimothySykes.com/contact, I’ll answer any questions, good or bad. If they’re really entertaining emails, I might make a blog post out of them because I love making hater blogposts. They are my highest rated. So, if you’re a penny stock promoter, I wish you good luck in hell. And I, you know, I don’t want you necessarily to stop right away. Pennystockchaser, keep it up. Keep advertising on Howard Stern. You freakin’ idiot. You’re disgusting, but disgusting in a beautiful way. And thank you for your predictability.
Andrew: I’ve got to find out about this company. All right. I want to make it clear. Do not spam with the name Timothy Sykes in people’s comments. I’m just saying if you see somebody else use his name in a comment, look at the response. Come back a day later and check out the conversation afterwards. If there’s an opportunity where it makes sense, do it. It is the most entertaining. He jumps on these comments within seconds. It’s unreal.
Interviewee: And, and if there’s anybody’s in finance in here, leave some reviews on Investimonials.com. If you don’t like me, comment on me. If you don’t like E-Trade, comment on it. If you think their name should be E-Turd, call them E-Turd. You know, say whatever you want. But just try and be honest, and let’s try and make the internet a better place. Stop making it about these sales sheets. It’s disgusting. It’s polluted.
Andrew: All right. I’m going to support that, too. Check out his site. He’s been good. He came on here, entertaining, useful interview. Go check out Investimonials if you want to see what he’s talking about. Or if you just want to say thank you. All right. For me, I’m going to say, guys, send me an email or add a comment. I want to hear your feedback on this interview. Thank you all for watching. See you in the comments.
Interviewee: Thanks, Andrew.
