Jack Kellogg aka Jackaroo is a day trader who is making a killing with penny stocks. You most likely come across Jack on Twitter, Tim Sykes is non-stop tweeting about his trading profits!  The market in early 2021 is crazy and Mr Kellogg is taking advantage of the bull market. Despite the recent success, the journey to millions didn’t happen overnight.

Unlike your average high school student, Jack Kellogg never had plans to attend college after graduating. He was never top of the class, preferring sports and gaming over academics. Jack wasn’t lazy by any means, he simply didn’t enjoy school – well who does apart from the partying!

Working as a valet attendant since the age of 16, he carefully saved up money with the hope of launching an entrepreneurial venture in the future. He didn’t like the idea of working for someone else and was eager to be self-employed.

After graduation, he briefly worked as an EMT and volunteered as a firefighter. What a guy! As soon as Jack had accumulated $10,000 in savings, he was searching for new opportunities. Real Estate was the first thing that sprung to mind but never progressed with the idea.

As luck would have it, Kellogg bumped into a childhood friend at the gym who was a student of Tim Sykes. His friend advised Jack to watch some of Sykes’ videos and think about joining the Millionaire Challenge program. Once Jack started watching Sykes’ YouTube videos, he instantly became hooked.

In the hope of making some extra money, Kellogg stupidly gave his friend $1500 to trade with it on his behalf. However, Jack’s friend blew up the account and lost all the money. Slightly annoyed by this, Kellogg instead decided to learn how to trade for himself. Jack’s New Year resolution for 2017 was to learn everything he could about stock trading.

With $75oo left, Jack opened up a thinkorswim account and an E*Trade account for short selling. Like every new trader, he struggled early on with the fear of losing money and had inconsistent results. During this time, he was trading momentum stocks with morning spikes but kept buying the tops and selling bottoms.

After a few small losses he quickly realized he needed a mentor. In January 2017, he signed up for Tim Sykes’ Millionaire Challenge. Using his powers of persuasion, he convinced his parents to cover half the cost of the program.

Once he regained confidence he started short selling with a small margin account on E*Trade. Over the next year, the E*Trade account slowly declined, losing a third of its value.

Kellogg didn’t lose hope and kept working as a valet attendant while learning to trade. When he wasn’t working, the majority of his free time was spent studying – some days putting in ten hour shifts. Tim Grittani in particular was another important mentor for Jack. Similar to Steven Dux, the Trading Tickers DVD by Grittani was a huge help.

2018 was when the tide began to turn and Kellogg slowly grew his trading account. The account wasn’t growing as fast as he wanted because broker commissions of 20-40% were eating away profits.

In May 2018, Jack suffered his first big loss – a bad trade on $HEAR cost him $8,000. Wiping out all the profits he generated during that year. By this period, he was down $4,000 overall – a big hit that caused Jack to take a break from trading for three months so he could save up more money.

Jack came back in June 2018 with a new strategy and $29,000 sitting in his broker account. Not long after, he struck up a friendship with a user named MichaelGScott on Profit.ly. Kellogg noticed Michael was banking some steady profits and was interested in learning about his OTC strategy.

In August, Kellogg met up with MichaelGScott (Dominic Mastromatteo) and spent two weeks in Michigan trading with him live. The trip proved to be a key turning point as he made $7,000 during those two weeks. The knowledge gained was priceless and Jack developed a strong understanding of trading OTCs.

Literally in the next month, Kellogg’s effort began to reap rewards with the new strategy. Four straight $2,500 weeks resulted in a $10,000 month for September. October was a slightly better month with $11,000 in profits. To finish off 2018 on a high, he made $11,000 in the final two months. Finally the persistence was paying off and he took the plunge to trade full-time.

He moved to Michigan to team up again with his trading buddy Dominic Mastromatteo. This time on a permanent basis. The move instantly yielded results as Kellogg banked $48,000 in February 2019.

Since then, Kellogg has exponentially grown his account behind all expectations, surpassing $5 million in profits as of February 2021.

Currently Kellogg prefers to swing trade OTC stocks and momentum scalps. Kellogg also is learning a new strategy from Harry Hoss, he likes to use the lower-risk strategy of buying bounces. The key part is getting in and out quickly and risking off of your entry price. If it starts to fail, you can quickly exit the trade.

Low-risk trades remain his main focus as he doesn’t want to risk trading with a lot of capital anymore. Despite the recent success, Kellogg remains a cool humble dude.

He’s even helped his girlfriend Mariana Hincapie get started with trading. Mariana began trading in July 2020 and has already made over $700,000. Wow, mind blown! January and February were also huge months for the power couple as the markets were crazy!

If you want to start your own trading journey I recommend checking out my Tim Sykes review. Although you won’t achieve the same level of success as Jack Kellogg you can always dream!

Tim Bohen is a day trader and Lead Trainer at StocksToTrade.com with a net worth of $1.5 million. The dedicated family man is well-known within the penny stock community due to his success as a part-time trader.

Getting Started

Like most traders, Bohen developed an interest in the stock market at an early age. In an interview with Benzinga.com, he remembers being in fourth grade and waiting for his father to bring home the newspaper so he could check stock prices. Once he was bitten by the trading bug, he never let it go.

His first experience in the business world came via working for an IT startup from 1996 through to the early 2000s. Gruelling 18 hour days were tough but he was able to save up a nice chunk of money and started investing on the side. Back then he traded stocks with strong fundamentals but had limited success.

Finding Tim Sykes

Bohen is an avid reader and in the mid-2000s was trying to read every trading book he could find. In 2007 he stumbled across Tim Sykes’ book – “An American Hedge Fund”. The book really opened his eyes to the profit potential of penny stocks and strategies he could implement. Before reading the book he didn’t even realise there were stocks under $2.

With his new found knowledge he was eager to put it into action and started trading in 2007/2008. These years are known as the glory days of shorting over-hyped penny stocks and he certainly took advantage of the good times. Around this period very few people were short selling penny stocks. Now the space is over crowded, everyone and their mother is looking for shares to short of pumps.

While Bohen hasn’t had any huge three figure winning trades, he has built up some impressive profits through a lot of small wins. Bohen likes to take the working man’s approach to stock trading, he views it as a skilled trade not a get rich quick scheme.

Although he likes to trade volatile stocks, he’s not looking to get rich overnight. Day trading is a part-time venture, a means to supplement his income. Maybe pay for a family holiday or simply put the profits into a savings account, rinse and repeat.

Becoming a consistently profitable trader is about banking those small gains and avoiding large losses caused by your ego. This trading style is perfect for traders with a full-time job, when you’re trying to hit big home runs it will be difficult to focus on your job or school work.

Why Traders Fail

While it sounds simple, the biggest reason why traders lose money is not having a plan. Traders are focusing on too many asset classes – Bitcoin, ETFs and forex etc. Bohen recommends picking a niche, creating a trading journal and focusing on setups that make sense.

In the beginning traders should start off with minimal capital, conduct periodic reviews and track performance data. You might prefer to buy stocks but the underlying statistics could reveal you’re a much better short seller.

Currently Bohen works as the head trainer at StocksToTrade – a stock screener found by Tim Sykes which helps day traders find new trading opportunities. The subscription-based service costs $179.95 per month or $1899.50 annually. In July 2020, Scanz Technologies filed a lawsuit against StocksToTrade naming Bohen as a defendant, this case is still pending.

The family man continues to trade as a side hustle, using Center Securities as a broker and remains passionate about teaching. You can get in contact with him on Twitter and Instagram @tbohen, as well as tbohen.com.

Tony Ivanov is an entrepreneur and day trader from Sacramento, California. Like everyone else, I first discovered Ivanov on YouTube. An intelligent kid who looks about 16 but is 23 years old. He uploads videos educating people on how to make money trading penny stocks and cryptocurrencies.

His target market is primarily younger inexperienced traders, looking to trade during their spare time. Although I respect Ivanov’s hustle, I don’t believe he’s fully qualified to mentor others about stock trading. Thousands of people watching his videos, meaning there’s a big chance a subscriber could blow up their account following his advice.

Ivanov’s YouTube channel has grown significantly to 63,500 subscribers over the past three years due to the crypto mania. Thousands of teens hungry for stock picks and advice on how to day trade risky stocks.

I would estimate his net worth to be $250,000, if the growth of his YouTube channel continues, it won’t be long until he’s worth $500,000. Aside from trading, he’s probably making around $10,000 per month from his educational business and through affiliate marketing. On YouTube he promotes stock scanners such as Trade Ideas, they payout hefty affiliate commissions for referring members.

Penny Stock Mastery

Despite his lack of experience, Ivanov released a trading course on the Teachable platform. The course is no longer available but at time cost a staggering $597 or two monthly payments of $397. From browsing through the course outline, it looked similar to the video lessons that Ricky Gutierrez shared for free on YouTube. Penny Stock Mastery covered basic stock market terms, explained how to get started trading, technical analysis and two chart patterns + strategies he used to make consistent profits.

It’s insane how someone who only traded for a few years was expecting people to spend that kind of money. According to his old Profit.ly page before it was deleted, Tony made profits of $5,759.44 out of 99 trades with a 63.64% win ratio. The guy was still learning how to trade a few months before launching an educational course.

Tony currently runs a day trading chat room at tradebuddy.net. For $97 per month – you get daily stock watchlists, pre-market/trade recaps webinars and access to his trading strategies. Most likely, members join to copy his trades which won’t be successful because penny stocks are too volatile. Overall it’s a standard chat room service, nothing special but beginners might find it helpful. The quarterly plan is $237 and annual subscription is $948 – over $1100 after VAT.

Tony also runs a Private Trading Academy that claims to show your “how to start and scale you day trading career”. The academy has 500+ members and will cost $1497 to join, this is apparently a one-time special time. The sales page does need some work and looks average compared to sales pages used by trading gurus. In addition, it’s also challenging to find honest reviews online of TradeBuddy. Out of the 19 reviews on TrustPilot, all of them are five stars which seems slightly unrealistic.

There’s nothing wrong with monetizing your knowledge but charging suckers these types of prices is crazy. In reality, the training is only useful for new traders and worth a fraction of the price. Those with intermediate knowledge would be best served finding a different mentor.

All these youngsters see teaching as an easy way to make money with little effort. They all probably sign up for Timothy Sykes’ courses, copy video lessons and teach similar chart patterns, etc. Sykes makes millions every year from mentoring students but has a decade of experience and $6.2 million in verified profits.

Find a mentor with a reliable track record and has made at least $500,000 actually trading. Mentors such as Steven Dux, Tim Sykes, Tim Grittani and Investors Underground are all good choices.

Tim Grittani is a day trading superstar known for turning $1,500 into $13.4 million within 8 years! He only began trading penny stocks in 2010 after discovering Timothy Sykes while searching online.

At the time, Grittani was studying finance and was keen to use his degree after graduation. He spent the following months studying Sykes’ strategies hoping to learn from his success.

Despite a rocky start, the modest 30-year-old went on to become Tim Sykes’ second millionaire challenge student at the end of January 2014. Fast forward to 2021 and the student has become the master. Grittani is now rated as the best penny stock trader in the world.

Despite the huge trading profits he’s made, Tim remains a cool, humble guy. It’s estimated Tim Grittani has a net worth of $10 million in 2021. Most of this fortune has come from day trading and about 5% from selling an educational DVD – Trading Tickers.

Humble Beginnings

Tim was a finance major at Marquette University and was drawn to stocks from his background in sports betting and online poker. He opened up a $500 account with Sharebuilder but lost 50% within two weeks.

After this, he took some time off to get a better trading education before risking more money. In February 2011 he found Timothy Sykes, this gave more structure to his trading style.

Grittani followed Sykes for three months and joined Pennystocking Silver. While still in college he studied video lessons and participated in the chat room. Once he regained his confidence back, he started trading again in May 2011 with $3,000 with thinkorSwim.

To help overcome the pattern day trader rule, he borrowed $11,000 from his parents and opened multiple broker accounts. Back then the PDT rule was a significant obstacle to get around and he didn’t have suitable brokers back then, so he was unable to get the best borrows.

He also used Suretrader which are now out of business but now mainly uses CenterPoint Securities as a broker – the account minimum is $30,000!

Early Struggles

By August of 2011, Tim Grittani was day trading penny stocks full time. Despite all the video lessons and advice from guru’s like Michael Goode and Nate Michaud, he was at $3,500 by October.  He foolishly tried following Tim Sykes’ alerts.

Like so many of Tim Sykes’ students, he thought copying his trades was a good idea. Grittani wasn’t able to match the entries or exits on the alerts because penny stocks are too volatile and hundreds of other students were copying trades. He soon realized this wasn’t working and had to begin thinking for himself.

Solution: learn from Sykes’ alerts instead of blindly following them. He would review Tim’s video lessons later that day to understand the reasoning behind his trades. Why he bought and sold at a certain price. Let’s not forget Investors Underground also served as a huge inspiration.

Strategy

After losing thousands in the beginning, he soon realized it was time to develop a strategy to make consistent profits. Grittani made his first million focusing on momentum OTC stocks & pump and dumps.

He made easy money short selling over-hyped stocks pumped by stock promoters. Tim doesn’t care about the fundamentals of companies or what the press releases say because hype is meaningless.

He trades stocks purely from the technical side, using basic support and resistance to follow the price action.

In addition, level 2 and charts are used to time trades to increase the likelihood of profits. It’s well-known Tim is very analytical and doesn’t place trades based on instinct. He has thousands of excel spreadsheets, tracking setups and chart patterns to gain a statistical edge.

For example afternoon breakouts is a pattern he loves to trade. To find suitable setups Grittani will track specific criteria, for afternoon breakouts he will look at stocks up at least 10%, trading above average volume, breaking out after 2:30 pm and no upcoming major resistance levels ahead.

Despite early losses, Tim Grittani recovered and built an impressive track record on Profit.ly. Due to his success in the millionaire challenge program, Tim Sykes heavily promotes him to prove that day trading penny stocks can be lucrative. CNN Money and Fox News even featured him in an article detailing his journey from beginner to penny stock millionaire.

This sparked a wave of attention on social media, with thousands of aspiring traders eager to learn how he achieved this milestone. With all the attention Tim Grittani received from the media coverage, he decided to release an educational DVD to share his knowledge on day trading.

Trading Tickers

Trading Tickers was released in 2015, perfect for traders with limited trading experience. The first four chapters cover preparation and the last eight chapters detail the exact strategies that helped him make millions.

The course is quite dense with 16 hours worth of content showing you how to perform technical analysis, build watchlists and how to prepare for the market every day.

Each chapter covers the different setups he follows. These include – buying and selling OTC promotions, buying breakouts, swing trading and shorting overextended chart patterns.

More importantly, he shows 35 live trading examples applying these strategies in real-time and the logic behind each trade.

Although the DVD is five years old, most of the content still remains relevant in 2021. Steven Dux cites Trading Tickers as an excellent starting point having viewed the DVD multiple times.

While it’s unlikely you’ll come close to achieving this level of success, the DVD will give you every possible advantage. It’s up to you to put that knowledge to work. The course took seven months to create, detailing every facet of his strategy.

Basically revealing everything he wishes he knew before starting. This gives you the chance to learn from his mistakes and help speed up your learning curve.

Trading Tickers is currently one of the highest rated products on Investimonials and retails for $1,797.00. Use the discount code NEXT100 to save $800 off the price. Trading Tickers is also available to purchase on eBay for a fraction of the price and some people illegally download the course from file sharing websites.

In February 2021, Grittani released the long-awaited Trading Tickers 2. The new DVD is a mix of updating the first, as well as introducing a few new strategies. Currently it’s on sale for $997.

Ian Cassel is a professional micro cap investor and founder of MircoCapClub.com. Micro Cap Club is an exclusive investing forum where experienced investors discuss micro caps on US and Canadian equity markets. They also cover some UK and Australian small caps.

A micro cap is defined as a company with a market cap of less than $300 million. Out of the 20,000 public equities in North America, about 50% are micro caps and very few investors follow them.

Cassel developed a keen interest in micro cap stocks when he was a sophomore at college. In high school his parents gave him control of a $20,000 college fund and he opened up a brokerage account. This was in 1997 when the dot-com bubble was in full swing, the perfect time to start trading. Back then it was near impossible not to make money investing in tech stocks. Young Ian rode the wave and made big returns investing in technology companies.

When it came time to choosing a college, he selected a local university that allowed him to work full-time and continue investing. Working for a financial advisor as a receptionist, he experienced the high and lows of the market. When the tech bubble burst, a $120,000 portfolio quickly shrunk to $8,000. During this time Ian was still working as a receptionist and was taking calls from disgruntled clients. This negative experience led him away from becoming a financial advisor towards becoming a private investor and not having the stress of managing clients money.

Later he got involved with micro caps because when some of those tech companies collapsed they became penny stocks. After the crash, his first major investment was XM Satellite Radio which back then was heavily indebted and close to filing bankruptcy. He invested the remaining $8,000 into XM at $1.78 per share, they refinanced their debt and signed OEM agreements with GM and Ford. Over the next 14 months, shorts covering their positions helped it spike to $34! This initial success spurred on his interest in the micro cap space, enjoying the fact he could meet with management teams face-to-face.

Why Invest in Micro Caps?

Historically investing in small high-quality businesses has been proven to be one of the best ways to accumulate wealth. CSRB data from 1927 to 2016 revealed stocks under $114 million market cap significantly outperformed all other market cap classes. These companies are so small and illiquid that institutional investors can’t invest. This gives small astute investors the opportunity to buy early and capture huge returns. Once a micro cap starts executing their business model, stock price increases with liquidity. Later institutional capital can buy shares and that’s where the magic happens. The key is getting in early before institutions.

While the average investor avoids illiquid investments, Ian Cassel embraces them. For example a micro cap worth $50 million on the OTC could trade $20,000-$25,000 worth of shares per day with zero analysts. While on the other hand, a company with a market cap of $500 million would trade a few million shares every day and have a handful of analysts covering them.

How Does he Find Micro Caps Worth Buying?

There’s no secret to finding hidden gems. You’ll need to put in the hours to locate the best long term investments. Some investors use stock scanners while Ian prefers to go through every micro cap from A to Z. Micro caps under $50 million will have no analyst coverage for guidance so investors need to perform their own due diligence – reading SEC filings, financial reports and talking with management. The whole process of going through every company is tedious work but your ability to sift through all the shit to find a needle in a haystack is your edge. When Ian started all the activity online around micro caps was on message boards but that later moved to Seeking Alpha and private investing forums like MircoCapClub.com.

Main Criteria for Investing

• Intelligent Fanatic – company is run by a visionary leader who acts as an owner-operator with intense focus, integrity and intelligence.
• Market leaders – dominate a small niche that is growing.
• Sustainable, profitable and growth – rapidly growing company that can scale their business and self-fund their operations. Share dilution is the biggest fear every penny stock investor faces.
• Little or no debt – debt can impede growth, normally it comes through high-interest dilutive convertible debt.
• Clean Capital Structure – low number of outstanding shares, all common shares and a low amount of warrants/options as a percentage of outstanding shares.
• No Institutional Ownership – discovering great companies early before institutional investors is key to massive upside gains.
• Immediate Upside – invest when the business is fundamentally undervalued to reduce risk and leverage multiple expansion.

Intelligent Fanatics Capital Management

In 2019 Ian launched his own fund – Intelligent Fanatics Capital Management. IFCM strategy focuses on investing in intelligent fanatic-led businesses with a market cap of less than $150 million. IFCM investors have to sign up for an account at Interactive Brokers. They will manage the account on your behalf – this is known as a separately managed account. The fund is seeking only accredited investors with a minimum of $100,000 to deposit. To my knowledge the fund currently has one holding, Biomerica, Inc.

For those interested in joining MircoCapClub.com, you can join by pitching a 2/3 page investment thesis on your favourite small cap idea or pay $497 for 12 months access. Make sure to follow Ian Cassel on Twitter to get some daily investing wisdom, his quotes are very insightful for aspiring stock traders.

The Humbled Trader (Shay) is a day trader and YouTube personality who teaches people how to trade stocks. The petite Canadian/Taiwanese has a straightforward, no BS approach to day trading and offers unbiased advice to those new to the industry. Her approach is refreshing in such a dishonest industry. She despises those flashy traders, portraying a fake lifestyle purely to sell courses to beginners.

Background

She previously worked as a visual effects artist and designer. Through a combination of strong creative skills and technical ability Shay has worked on some well known movies. While working she developed a strong interest in trading and eventually quit her day job to become a full-time trader. As of 2020 Humbled Trader has a net worth of $400,000 and based on income generated from YouTube ad revenue and products, it won’t be long until she’s a millionaire.

YouTube

The growth of Humbled Traders YouTube channel has skyrocketed over the last six months. Like a lot of other channels on the platform, it really took off during the COVID-19 pandemic. People locked inside tend to turn to YouTube to pass the time when they’re sick of binge watching Netflix. Beginner traders in particular seem to really enjoy the tutorial videos and her personality. The production quality of the videos are top-notch and it’s clear she has a team behind the scenes to help build the channel. Since raising money around January 2020, it’s allowed her to produce higher budget videos like ‘A Day in the Life of a Millennial Day Trader’ which has done nearly 3 million views.

Trading Strategy

Shay doesn’t believe in following trading patterns, she focuses mainly on price action. Patterns are the all candlesticks after they have formed in hindsight while price action are how the candles form in real time. Her current favourite setup is parabolic daily charts. Overall Shay is more of a long-biased trader, profiting from dip buying penny stock, mid-cap and large cap stocks. Stocks are her favourite asset class and stays away from trading forex, cryptocurrencies and options. It makes sense to stick with stocks and avoid distractions like crypto even though it’s a hot market.

Trading Tools

1. Trade Ideas

Trade Ideas is an excellent stock scanning tool that is literally the first thing Shay opens every morning when she gets to her computer. It has a very extensive pre-market gap scanner and contains a lot of options to customize based around your strategy.

2. Benzinga Pro

If you took a drink every time Benzinga Pro is mentioned in a video it wouldn’t be long until you’re a raging alcoholic. Benzinga Pro is a market news and research tool built for traders to quickly find all the headlines for a certain stock. The keyword search function in the news feed is a very useful feature.

3. Briefing

Briefing.com is another premium subscription research for news and fundamental research. Great for reading earnings reports for large cap stocks and details about conference calls.

4. DAS Trader Pro

DAS Trading Pro is the trading platform Shay uses, they are an industry leader in direct market access and provide fast trade executions. When it comes to day trading speed matters!

Recommended Brokers

• Thinkorswim is her favourite stock broker at the moment most likely because they included Benzinga Pro’s Squawk Box for free.
• Interactive Brokers is another solid broker, not really for beginners but you can connect your account with Das Trading Pro and use their trading platform.
• Webull – not recommended for day trading but it’s okay if you’re buying and holding stocks for a longer time period. The key difference between Robinhood is that Webull has more to offer to intermediate and advanced traders when it comes to their tools and analysis capabilities.

Free Weekly Watchlist

Shay sends out a free weekly watchlist to those who sign up for her newsletter. Everyday Sunday she emails out 3-5 tickers to watch during the coming week with detailed analysis and expected price levels. Stocks featured typically range from penny stocks to mid cap stocks. Below is a sample of a watchlist.