Investors Underground is a day trading community, chat room and educational business, dedicated to helping others to learn how to trade. Nathan Michaud is the founder and one of the most highly regarded penny stock traders with a remarkable 10 year track record. He’s proven himself to be a profitable trader for the last decade but the real question is, can he really teach his strategies to you? With 100’s of self-proclaimed stock market guru’s selling courses online, you’re right to be skeptical. 100’s of positive reviews from past students claim that he is the ideal mentor while others think he’s a scam artist!

Who is Nathan Michaud

Nate started trading part time back in 2003 and made the switch to full time trading when he graduated from college in 2007. Within the space of 6 months, he started to become consistently profitable and his trading profits helped pay for university. Believe it or not, 6 months is a short time-frame to make consistent profits, it took day trader Ross Cameron 18 months to achieve this feat.

He spotted a gap in the market and decided to launch Investor Underground Chat as a way to supplement his income. The chat room rapidly started to gain traction, so he merged his chat room and blog into one. Nate continued to attract a large following from his blog InvestorsLive.com, where he shared daily watchlists and trading plans. Even the great Timothy Sykes used to visit his blog for a second opinion often and see what tickers he was following. Later this led them to forming a business relationship. Nate routinely spoke at some of Tim Sykes’ conferences and joined Profit.ly for a short period as a guru.

Investors Underground was formed in 2008 with the aim of cutting through all the bullshit on Wall Street and creating the best day trading service. In total Nate has 17 years of experience to back up his service, so luckily for you, he’s made every mistake in the book. Investors Underground is both a chat room and an educational service built-in with three plans available for subscribers. IU Elite is a hefty $297 per month, quarterly is $697 and the annual plan is $1897. The service is pricey, so before signing up it’s best to try the free one week trial offered to new members and if you think Nate is a good teacher use the latest promo code to save money.

Despite Nate’s service having a good reputation most new traders have small accounts and can’t afford to spend hundreds of dollars per month on education as they have other expenses to consider such as software, broker fees and level 2 feeds. There are dozens of positive reviews and testimonials from current members on his site. Any of the complaints from previous subscribers are those who didn’t study hard enough. They expected to blindly copy trade alerts and make money without any hard work.

Inside the Members Area

Once you sign up as a paid member, this is exactly what the member’s area looks like. It’s a simple, organized layout, easy for users to navigate.

Live Day Trading Chat rooms

Investors Underground has three different chat rooms to suit everyone’s trading style:

• Swing Trading chat room – Run by Michelle Koenig from Tradeonthefly.
• Momentum chat room – This is the most active but has strict rules, every post has to add value or the moderators will mute you, this pisses people off, but I think it’s beneficial as the chat is less cluttered with questions Google could answer.
• OTC chat room – Almost no activity in the OTC room, not popular with subscribers.

On average during market hours 500-1000 people are active, about 20% of the chat room are newbies who have no clue what they are doing and are looking for real-time alerts from the top moderators. Members have the opportunity to learn from many well-seasoned traders such as Cam B, Oddstocktader, Offshorehunter, AT09_Trader, Derrick J Leon, Tim Grittani, Emil, Splendores, OzarkTrades, Eric Wood, Will Wagner and Brandon Garretson.y

Be warned that it will be intimidating at first because it’s full of experienced traders using their lingo that will confuse you. It’s advised to watch both Textbook Trading and Tandem Trader before joining to provide a reliable framework. The DVDs are expensive, but IU does specials once every while where they bundle the DVDs with membership plans.

Is Investors Underground a Scam?

When it comes to any trading service, this is one of the most common questions. Why would someone supposedly making six figures per year want to sell me a trading course revealing their strategies? It’s difficult to trust anyone online as there are many fake traders selling courses with over-hyped sales pages, claiming how you can make $10,000 per month following simple strategies.

Nate’s service isn’t perfect but is definitely one of better communities to join. Investors Underground does have negative reviews but that’s expected when you’ve thousands of students. Past subscribers complain because they signed up with the expectation of making easy profits by shadowing someone else’s trades but that won’t work since penny stocks move too fast. Instead, IU wants to create real traders not followers. Rather than being a sheep, it’s better to become an independent trader, the lessons and alerts alerts are only there for guidance.

Busted by the SEC

Surprisingly Nate had to settle with the SEC for his involvement in a penny stock pump and dump scheme that took place in 2006 & 2007. Nate was charged civilly not criminally, for manipulating the price of Asia Global Holdings using illegal techniques such as wash sales & matched trading and distributed press releases touting the company as a strong investment. 10 others were a part of the scheme and he ended up paying a fine of approximately $94,000 to the SEC, Nate commented on the ruling highlighting he was not involved with dumping 54,000 million shares of improperly registered stock. Despite Nate being one of the smaller fish in the case, what he did was incredibly stupid and no doubt massively regrets getting involved with such a shady group of individuals.

Video Lessons 

Nate has put together an impressive library of video content to help answer your questions or help deal with any issues you experience. So members have two ways to learn, real-time alerts in chat and video lessons you can watch at any time. Trade recaps are provided at least three times per week, so you can review the trades he made during the week and explain the reasoning behind them, normally 5-10 minutes long. He’s constantly updating his library, so he does have an overwhelming amount of lessons that tend to overlap a lot.

Monthly Webinars

Every month there are about four webinars for members only, discussing recent trades, trade setups and how to prepare for the week ahead. The best thing about these webinars is subscribers can submit questions live and the material is covered in more detail, in comparison to the video lessons which can be basic at times. Free webinars are given quite frequently to attract new members into the community but are promotional. In total there are four years worth of educational material including power-points, seminars and most recent webinars.

Textbook Trading DVD

Textbook Trading is 8 hours of pure content discussing everything you need to know to start trading. I advise you to have a pen and paper ready to take down notes as you watch, each time you re-watch the DVD’s you learn something new. Nate goes through everything he has learned from day one, detailing his successes and mistakes along the way. Each topic is accompanied by real trade examples and visuals to give clear advice, to better understand his strategies.

He covers his favorite setups, high-probability chart patterns and how to use level 2. The course alone will shorten your learning curve by ten fold and is highly recommended by Tim Grittani. It’s one of the top rated products on Investimonials with 144 5 star reviews which looks unnatural and probably gave members an incentive to leave a positive rating. I’d prefer if the DVD was shipped manually instead of streaming it online and Nate does promote the chat room within the training.

Tandem Trader DVD

Tandem Trader is a more in-depth continuation of Textbook Trading so you’re kind of forced to buy both DVDs. This training contains over 13 hours of live trading examples instead of the usual analyzing charts in hindsight which annoys me. Similar material is covered in his first DVD but in greater detail – how to read level 2, recurring chart patterns and setups that work in any market environment. Other aspects mentioned is the importance of sticking to your plan and controlling your emotions in stressful situations. As a bonus, he interviews other successful veteran stock traders who have made millions following their own unique strategies. If you follow Nathan on Twitter (@investorslive) he often holds competitions giving away free trials and coupons for a select few lucky followers.

6 Reasons Why New Investor Underground Students Will Fail

1. Lack of Preparation

Day trading is not gambling, don’t expect to strike it rich out of pure luck. The first step of preparation is education, to help you with this it’s recommended to start off with Nate’s DVDs. This will help add some structure to your trading, so you come to the market prepared every day, you still might lose money but at least your odds of success are a lot greater. “Fail to prepare, prepare to fail.”

2. Lack of Proper Tools

This refers to using the best brokers, software and charting tools to maximize your chances of success. For international students, finding brokers for penny stocks can be a nuisance and some end up with commission-free brokers such as Robinhood. Using Robinhood is the same thing as showing up to a gunfight with a floppy dildo in your hand.

3. Risk Management

Unless you develop strong risk management skills, you will consistently lose over the long term. Protecting your downside risk is the name of the game, new traders at the beginning focus too much on the potential rewards while they should be doing the complete opposite. For example, if you only trade with 10% of your capital you can never blow up your account. Even if you have a 90% win ratio, you still stand a chance to blow up by going in too big on a play.

4. Blatantly Following Alerts

The most prominent issue with penny stock alert services is they attract people just looking to copy trades from the best traders. As mentioned before Nate wants you to become an independent trader that can think for himself and create their trading plan. The alerts are there for guidance so you can learn how a professional trades.

5. Averaging Down

Averaging down is a bad habit new traders use that can magnify losses. When you’re in a losing position it’s best to cut your losses short and move onto a new play; no one likes losing but it’s a part of the game. This, in theory, sounds simple to follow but under stressful situations and down $200 you easily can dig the hole a lot deeper. Remember hope is not a strategy, exit your trade when momentum is going against you.

6. Revenge Trading

Revenge trading is another account destroyer and is a classic problem for gamblers. “I’m down $1,000 but I can easily make it back on my next trade”. If you feel overwhelmed, it’s best to step back and take a break until your emotions have subsided.

Conclusion

After reading my review of Investors Underground, it is clear that if you surround yourself with a group of successful traders, you will become a better trader! Don’t join with the mindset of wanting to make quick money, as you’re guaranteed to fail. Focus on learning for at least the first 6 months not the profits. Investors Underground doesn’t sell a magic formula but they will help shorten your learning curve and give you a platform to improve your odds of success.

Start off paper trading and after at least three months then trade live with real money. Paying $297 per month may seem ludicrous at first but if you master his strategy, you could make back 100 times what you paid. Ultimately your willingness to learn, the ability to bounce back from failure and discipline will determine your success in the market.

Pennystocking Silver is Tim Sykes’ premium subscription service teaching the art of trading penny stocks. The subscription includes everything from the Tim Alerts plan plus access to the 7,000+ video lesson library and weekly video lessons.

Started over 10 years ago, Pennystocking Silver is one of the top newsletters for traders serious about day trading penny stocks. Although the newsletter is highly rated, I don’t think it’s suitable for everyone.

In my review, we’ll cover everything you need to know before signing up.

About Tim Sykes

Tim Sykes is without doubt the most famous penny stock trader in the world. Google the word “penny stocks” and his face or website will appear somewhere.

He first got started trading in the midst of the dotcom bubble when stocks were surging! During this time Sykes turned his bar mitzvah gift money of $12,000 into well over $1 million buying stocks that were breaking out!

Once the bubble burst he was one of the few who managed to keep his fortune. In the years following, Tim built up his experience day trading volatile stocks, finding new chart patterns and strategies to build his wealth.

He set up an educational business, teaching others how to profit using his strategies. Over the years, Sykes has mentored thousands of traders across the globe with the majority of them located in the US.

Some of his students have gone on to become hugely successful, a handful have even become millionaires. These students include Tim Grittani, Michael Goode and Steven Dux who all started their journey with Pennystocking Silver.

What’s included with Pennystocking Silver for $149.95?

Pennystocking Silver is more than just a newsletter that sends out trade alerts. It’s evolved into a learning platform that helps traders become independent thinkers. Rather than waiting for Sykes’ to share alerts you’ll start thinking for yourself and adopting the strategies to become successful.

Access to Chat Room

Members get access to the chat room packed full of experienced traders along with beginners. The chat room is a great place to see live trades, get commentary. At times the chat can become overwhelming. I advise filtering out the noise and only following the top traders and moderators.

Moderators I recommend following:

• Jackaroo
• markcroock
• MichaelGoode
• Huddie
• kroyrunner
• TimLento

Daily Watchlist

Subscribers will also receive Sykes’ daily watchlist of the top 5-10 penny stocks to trade along with commentary. For each stock on the watchlist Tim will outline what the company does, why it’s in play and review the charts.

Based on the research it will help you focus your attention on a group of stocks that could soon make big moves. Typically it’s 5-10 stocks, anything more than that is difficult to follow. After a few months, you’ll be able to perform your own research and find plays before Sykes.

Live Trade Alerts

Anytime Sykes buys or sells a stock, you’ll get real-time updates through text, email or push alerts. The problem with the alerts is members blindly try to copy the trades and can lose money because penny stocks are volatile. The purpose of the alerts is to study Sykes’ trades to gain a better insight into how his strategies work.

Video Lesson Library

Arguably the most valuable part of Pennystocking Silver is the extensive video lesson library. The library contains over 7,000 lessons, covering every aspect of penny stock trading. While the videos are outdated, reviewing historical trades is an excellent way to improve your knowledge.

Previously the video tutorials were very disorganized, which made it difficult for members. Luckily now the video lessons are categorized by topic so you can study certain chart patterns such as morning spikes, supernovas, breakouts and afternoon fades etc.

Weekly Video Lessons

Every week Timothy Sykes posts recap videos to the members’ area reviewing trades and technical analysis. These videos are later categorized and added to the video lesson library. Ideal for traders looking for the real-time analysis of hot penny stocks.

Reviews

To find more reviews of Pennystocking Silver from current subscribers – Investimonials and TrustPilot are both excellent websites to use. Reddit is another useful site for brutally honest opinions.

Coupon Code

Don’t fancy paying full price? The coupon code BLOWOUT will save you 30% on the yearly plan – the total cost would be $907.90 for 12 months.

Unfortunately there are no discounts or free trials available for the monthly plans. Sykes does tend to have sales around public holidays – Christmas and July 4th are the best times for discounts.

Timothy Sykes is a well-known penny stock trader and entrepreneur. The self-made millionaire has become synonymous with the world of penny stocks and day trading. A large part of this is down to his non-stop marketing and how he promotes himself on social media.

Hopefully in this review, I can help you decide if signing up for his service is worth the time and money.

Background

Born in Orange, Connecticut, in 1981, Tim began trading at a young age when his parents gave him full control of his bar mitzvah gift money! Thinking he would lose it all, his parents wanted to teach him a lesson about money.

Little did they know, they created a monster! Tim would later turn that sum of $12,415 into $1.65 million trading 100’s of penny stocks during the dot-com bubble.

Due to his success, family and friends wanted him to invest their money. This led to Tim starting a hedge fund (the Cilantro Fund) during his last year at Tulane University.

At its peak, the fund only had $3 million under management because short selling penny stocks isn’t a scalable strategy. It’s possible to make $1 to $2 million per year shorting penny stocks not tens of millions.

Sykes was listed in Trader Monthly’s ”30 under 30” in 2006 as one of the top traders on Wall Street. As you would imagine his unique story got a lot of media attention which led to him starring in season 1 of Wall Street Warriors, a popular reality TV show.

When the series aired, hundreds of people emailed him wanting to learn about penny stock trading. Later this inspired him to write a book titled “An American Hedge Fund: How I Made $2 Million as a Stock Operator & Created a Hedge Fund”.

After Wall Street Warriors, Sykes continued day trading and later launched his blog timothysykes.com. Due to strong demand, he created multiple newsletters to cater to every trader from beginner to advanced.

As of now, Sykes has three subscriptions – Tim Alerts, Pennystocking Silver and the Millionaire Challenge.

Click Here to Sign Up For Plans! 

Tim Alerts

Tim Alerts is the most basic plan. For $74.95 per month Sykes offers access to the chatroom, daily watchlist of 5-10 stocks and real-time alerts via SMS and email. The only problem is the 4,400+ video lesson library isn’t included with this subscription.

If you’re new to stock trading, the training videos are a big loss. Most people also join thinking they can just copy alerts and bank easy profits. This won’t work because penny stocks move too fast. Don’t copy his trades as some gullible followers have done before.

The alerts are there for guidance to help people become independent traders and thinkers. Learn by yourself how to do technical analysis, scan for stocks and build watchlists.

Pennystocking Silver

For new penny stock traders, Pennystocking Silver is the most suitable plan. It includes features from Tim Alerts plus access to a massive library of 4,400+ video lessons and new weekly video lessons.

While it would be time-consuming to watch all of the lessons, the lessons are full of wisdom. This is why Tim recommends studying the past to profit from the future! The patterns he teaches can be predictable and tend to repeat themselves a lot.

Millionaire Challenge: Is it Worth the Price?

The millionaire challenge is Tim’s premium course, designed to provide more advanced training to students serious about investing in their education.

Be warned though the challenge is pricey and costs a whopping $6,000. Before joining, you will need to apply for an interview to assess if you’re suitable for the program.

For $6,000 you receive:

• Millionaire Challenge DVDs: access to all of Tim Sykes DVDs, (14 last time I counted) and a copy of Trading Tickers, a highly rated DVD created by Tim Grittani.
• Weekly private webinars from millionaire students such as Mark Croock, Tim Grittani, Tim Lento and Michael Goode. The webinars and chatroom help minimize the learning curve, as opposed to going it alone.
• One year membership to Pennystocking Silver which contains 4,400 video lessons, his daily trade alerts and watchlists.
• Private chat room just for challenge students which isn’t full of beginners asking simple questions.
• Lifetime discounts on any other product purchases and conferences.

I recommend signing up for Pennystocking Silver first because it’s more cost-effective for new traders starting off. It doesn’t make sense to spend $6,000 without even knowing the basics of penny stocks.

Timothy Sykes DVDs

Tim has made $6.1 million from day trading alone but now earns the majority of his income from running a trading education business. The DVDs are expensive but mandatory if you want to learn the strategies.

Check out his store for discount codes and it might be worth searching eBay to find old students selling DVDs. In the past, DVDs could be downloaded for free on torrent sites but are no longer available.

List of Tim’s best DVD’s to buy on Profit.ly:

• Trader Checklist Part Deux
• Pennystocking Part Deux
• How to Make Millions
• Spikeability
• Read SEC Filings
• Learn Level II

What is Tim’s Strategy?

Sykes main strategy involves short selling over hyped penny stocks and profits when they fall in price. A strategy that can be risky unless you know what you’re doing because these stocks are volatile.

Tim uses technical analysis to identify chart patterns that improve your odds of success on trades. An example of a chart pattern he likes is the first red day pattern.

If a stock has been green for several days and then closes the day red, many traders will soon sell causing the stock to fall. If you short on the first red day, it has the potential of multiple red days meaning more profits. The key here is waiting for momentum to shift before you make your move.

Sykes also likes to profit from buying breakouts, he runs a special newsletter ‘Supernova Alerts’ to focus on this strategy. Overall his techniques are more suited for smaller accounts, not those with millions of dollars to invest.

Is Timothy Sykes a Scam?

As you would expect there are a lot of traders skeptical about his story. Over the years Tim hasn’t had any trouble attracting haters because of the way he advertises online. His Instagram account advertises this extravagant lifestyle, flashy cars, stacks of money and exotic vacations. A lifestyle, everybody wants to live.

People often wonder if Tim is legit? Are his stock trading profits fake? Does he only make money selling products? I personally don’t think Timothy Sykes is a scam. Just because he makes more money teaching instead of trading, it does not make him a fraud. Business is indeed booming for Sykes as he does have a net worth of $15 million!

He has helped create multiple millionaires through his teachings, while he’s not solely responsible for their success, he played a big part in getting them started.

Successful Students

• Michael Goode – started off as Tim’s first hater publicly criticising him online but then later became his first millionaire student.
• Tim Grittani – Grittani is a day trading superstar who has turned $1500 in $13.4 million in 8 years.
• Steven Dux – Dux is a very intelligent trader with an analytical mindset that has been crushing it for the past four years. Dux has turned $27,000 into $9.3 million in 5 years, this guy is a machine!
• Mark Croock – Croock has gone from student to teacher and is now a part of the Millionaire challenge as a mentor.
• Tim Bohen – the lovable rogue was an early case study in how trade successfully as a side hustle. Bohen is now the lead trainer at StocksToTrade.
• Roland Wolf – Roland came out of nowhere back in 2017 when he turned $4,000 into $170,000. Another awesome story that inspires you to study harder.
• Kyle Williams – one of his latest success stories to pass the six-figure milestone, Kyle has been on fire lately and will surely reach one million dollars within the next two years.

How Much Money Will You Need to Start?

It’s advised to start off with at least $2,000 because broker fees will kill your profits. To avoid the pattern day trader rule you need to deposit $25,000.

To get around this rule most people open up multiple brokerage accounts to place more trades. Splitting $10,000 into five different accounts and you can make 20 trades in five business days. I would avoid using offshore brokerages as they’re not reliable.

E-Trade and Interactive Brokers are the top two brokers Sykes recommend to students. Ultimately it doesn’t matter what broker you pick as long as you get solid trade executions and cheap commissions.

Conclusion

Timothy Sykes is the real deal, he’s been interviewed by the likes of Larry King and Steve Harvey. His trading profits are real and have been verified on Profit.ly.

He can have $1,000 days, but the real question is can he teach you to make the same kind of money? Your overall success depends on how determined you will be to learn the strategies inside out.

Join for the education and not to get rich quick. Surround yourself with experienced traders and you will become a better trader yourself.