Ricky Gutierrez is a 25-year-old entrepreneur and CEO of Techbud Solutions with a net worth of $2 million. I first came across Ricky on YouTube from the recommended videos list. The title had a click bait headline – “How I made $200,000 by the age of 21” and an eye-catching thumbnail. After watching that video, I learned that not all of the $200,000 was earned from day trading stocks. He made the money through various entrepreneurial ventures and real estate, buying his first property at 20!

He seems like an honest, likeable guy and understands a lot about investing for someone who’s in his mid-20’s. His latest course, Learn Plan Profit is perfect for beginners interested in learning the basics of stock trading within an interactive community.

In addition to following Ricky, Humbled Trader and Steven Dux are other traders worth watching, Dux has over $10 million in verified profits.

YouTube Channel

Over the last 4 years, his YouTube channel has grown in popularity and has built a large following. He teaches newbies the basics and fundamentals of trading penny stocks along with some real estate investing advice.

His channel appeals mostly to young millennials, new to the stock market. Gutierrez uploads free helpful lessons teaching others how to build watchlists, read stock charts and answers questions related to penny stocks.

Ricky is currently mentoring his younger sister, taking someone with zero knowledge of the stock market, giving her a simple framework to follow and teaching strategies to grow her Robinhood account. It’s funny how he avoids revealing her name to avoid creepy guys stalking her!

Techbud Solutions

During his videos, he continually advertises his Facebook group, Techbud Solutions. It’s a group of like-minded individuals who share ideas and learn together. Techbud Solutions has attracted a staggering 283,097 members, that’s an impressive feat!

The Facebook group isn’t very active, but the discord groups are active. There are separate groups for different financial assets such as cryptocurrency, stocks and real estate. While the groups are free to join, Ricky does have a premium course on the Teachable platform for people looking to take their education to the next level.

Learn Plan Profit

After years of producing free content, Ricky finally decided to monetize to his video lessons. Learn Plan Profit provides a solid framework for beginners traders to learn the basics of stock trading.

The course covers:

• Strategies to find hot stocks worth trading.
• Risk management and technical analysis.
• Best indicators and chart patterns to follow.
• Mindset lessons with a strong focus consistency and personal growth.
• How to scan for swing trades and top the six golden rules which indicate the best time to buy.
• How to trade ETFs – talks about building watch-lists, chart patterns and futures.
• Quizzes to help members learn and retention information.
• Bonus content offers advice on real estate investing and reselling exotic cars for hefty profits.

Some people think if they sign up they’ll be driving around in a Lamborghini within six months. To get to Ricky’s level, it will take years of dedication to learning. Ricky’s success didn’t happen overnight. He revealed before in an interview he traded penny stocks for five years without making money.

Is Ricky a Scam?

My initial review of Ricky was negative mainly because I’m a sceptical person. I saw this young guy driving around in a McLaren, talking about real estate/day trading and immediately thought scam artist!

Selling trading courses is a lucrative niche, day traders such as Jason Bond and Cameron Fous make millions every year through selling education to newbies. Low-priced stocks are prone to manipulation so I presumed Ricky’s plan was to build up a large following to sell alerts or pump worthless penny stocks.

Ricky is a savvy online marketer and understands how to build an audience using the power of YouTube. His channel has 780,000 followers approximately and his videos have attracted millions of views. He creates eye-catching thumbnails, with a headline to attract views – “how to make $100 a day in the stock market.”

Recently he uploaded a video where he picked up a random stranger in his McLaren supercar. The video is a clever viral marketing tactic to advertise his service and appeal to a wider audience outside of his normal viewers. More than likely this video will receive well over 100,000 views.

Although I dislike the way he drives around in super cars, advertising this cool lifestyle, the videos serve as motivation for his students. Too many people within the finance industry are so formal and boring, learning about technical analysis isn’t fun.

Ricky is an exception, he likes to create videos to make trading more entertaining. Listening to some online educators talk about resistance and support levels in a dull, monotone voice turns beginners away from the industry.

Conclusion

There are hundreds of people online selling day trading courses purely to make money off young naive millennials and I hate seeing people getting scammed. I think Ricky is a great teacher for new traders without any experience.

In my opinion, charging $350 is too expensive for the average person. It would be more reasonable to charge a smaller fee of $150 or offer membership for $50 per month.

Steven Dux (Xiuxian Du) is a day trader infamous for turning $27,000 in $5 million in just four years with penny stocks. Born in China, he moved to America as an international exchange student to study environmental engineering. During his studies he opened a trading account and quickly became obsessed with the stock market, reading all the best books he could buy at a nearby bookstore.

In search of a mentor he discovered Tim Sykes online and went on to become one of his top students. At first he was skeptical of Sykes because of his flashy trader lifestyle on Instagram but decided to sign up for Pennystocking Silver. After a few months, he took the plunge and paid $5500 to join the millionaire challenge program. It’s crazy how he managed to finish his degree and at the same time find enough time to day trade volatile penny stocks. His ability to handle pressure must be off the charts!

Dux is now one of Tim Sykes’ most successful students along with Roland Wolf and Tim Grittani. Due to his unique story, Sykes likes to promote him at every opportunity because he’s a prime example of someone who has implemented his strategies to become a millionaire. Similar to how companies use case studies to attract more customers. Sykes has interviewed Dux multiple times on his YouTube channel to share his story and inspire new traders. Since bursting onto the scene with Tim Sykes, young aspiring traders have been bombarding Dux with messages hoping to discover the secrets to his success.

The main reason for Steven’s rapid progression is the extreme dedication and willingness to invest time and money. Although he started off studying Timothy Sykes, he later learned a great deal from Michael Goode, Mark Croock and Tim Grittani, all mentors within the millionaire challenge program. In particular Dux followed the teachings of Tim Grittani and cites the Trading Tickers DVD as a huge inspiration. Similarly to Grittani, Dux is very analytical and claims to have thousands of excel spreadsheets tracking dozens of chart patterns. This gives him the ability to discover what patterns work the best in a specific time frame. Basing trading decisions on data allows him to stack the odds in favor. From the picture above of his trading desk, the attention to detail is immaculate. Steven has notes and drawings of charts on the wall to drill these charts into his brain. Boring repetition is the best way to learn patterns.

He mainly follows three simple chart patterns that have an insane 85% success rate. All of these patterns feature in Tim’s Pennystocking Framework DVD.

• First red day – when a penny stock goes parabolic based on a big news event such as FDA approval, a stock can spike 200% in just a matter of days. You wait until the stock’s momentum slows down and short sell the company on the first day it turns red. This is a significant shift in momentum where those who are long will exit their position causing the price to drop.
• Dip buying huge morning panics – whether it’s an overall market or sector panic, there are always great opportunities to dip buy intraday panics. If a stock drops significantly in the morning and is oversold, it could bounce back strongly so you can capture a quick 20-30% gain. When dip buying panics you should prepare to cut losses short if the trade goes against you. Otherwise, it’s like catching a falling knife.
• Shorting spikes – this pattern is slightly riskier than the first two patterns so it requires more experience.

Since these three simple patterns have an 85% success ratio, Steven places big money into trades that meet his criteria and banks huge profits. This approach to trading is the polar opposite of conventional wisdom on Wall Street. Financial advisers tell people to never risk more than 10% on any investment while this guy during the early stages was putting 80% of his account on one trade. Patience also plays a big part in his success, he waits like a sniper until a setup meets all of his criteria and then places the trade. If the trade goes against him, he cuts his losses early and avoids blowing up his account. Hence this is why his winning percentage on Profit.ly is approximately 70% with an average gain of $3,354.

What Brokers Does Steven Dux Use?

The four main brokers Steven uses are Interactive Brokers, CenterPoint Securities, Cobra Trading, and TradeZero. Based on my experience, these trading platforms are all great choices worth exploring. CenterPoint is a more exclusive broker, they have a minimum deposit of $30,000.

Online Courses

Due to the large following he attracted, there was strong demand for Dux to create his own online courses. Luckily he listened to the advice but wasn’t too generous when it came to deciding the prices. Dux has two online courses, one daily newsletter and one freedom challenge. Currently, there are no active coupons currently available for any of the courses. To avoid paying full price, people have been downloading DVD’s for free on torrent sites. I’m not surprised as the DVD’s are too expensive for new day traders. Trading Tickers is a cheaper alternative I highly recommend.

Trading Techniques

The Trading Techniques DVD retails for $1200 and covers a wide range of areas. This course is mainly targeted at beginner traders. The content is 10 hours long and contains a lot of filler content, could have shortened down to 5/6 hours.

Trading Techniques main topics:

• Market Basics
• Trading Psychology
• Long & short side trading
• Risky Management strategies
• Statistics Database
• Top Trading Strategies

The Duxinator

The Duxinator DVD also costs a staggering $1200. The course contains the latest day trading strategies to profit from penny stocks. Focusing on high-probability setups that Dux has personally used to bank huge profits.

Daily Dux Newsletters

Daily Dux Tier 1 costs $99 per month, offers access to a watchlist, newsletter and chatroom. Daily Dux Tier 2 costs $149 per month, for an extra $50 customers get access to the strategy statistics database, tracking the strategies covered in Trading Techniques.

Freedom Challenge

Taking a page from Tim Sykes’ book, Dux started a trading challenge to closely mentor students. The Freedom Challenge is a 12 month program costing students $7,500. For that price, you get 2 live trading webinars per week, Q&A’s during a trading session and “personal access” after the market is closed. I don’t recommend joining unless you’re capable of making a huge commitment to learning and have at least $5,000 to trade with.

Starting an educational business was the next logical step for Steven to make extra money outside of trading. Despite the vast amount of money he’s made, Dux remains a cool, humble dude. It’s estimated Steven Dux has a net worth of $4 million!

Steven Dux’s story continues to serve as a huge inspiration for beginners but it’s unlikely anyone will achieve similar profits. While it’s likely some will have success, the average person won’t be able to become a millionaire without an obsessive tendency towards learning. Dux even jokes he reads and takes notes on the toilet. In addition, he re-watches DVD’s multiple times to fully absorb all the information. A typical subscriber will watch it once or twice max. That level of dedication is difficult to maintain for someone working a full-time job or attending college. In the meantime, if you’re interested in learning from Steven Dux, check out his webinars and free videos on YouTube.

Jesse Livermore was one of the world’s greatest stock traders. He made millions on Wall Street yet his story is as sad as any Shakespeare tragedy. He’s a prime example of why money can’t buy happiness. His story starts way back in 1877 when he was born on a small farm in Massachusetts. Jesse’s father was a farmer, and he wanted Jesse to become a farmer. Jesse knew from a young age that farming wasn’t the life for him. So at the age of 15, he ran away from home and went to the big city of Boston to make his fortune.

Jesse got a job at Paine Webber (a stock brokerage firm) as a Board Monkey. This involved him reading stock quotes off the ticker tape and then writing them on the big board so the stock brokers behind him could see what was going on in the stock market. As time went on he started to see patterns in the numbers and was able to guess (with great accuracy) where the numbers would be at the end of the day. One of his buddies told him he was so good that he should be betting on the stocks.

He started going to bucket shops. A bucket shop was a place where you could place your bets on stocks without the inconvenience of actually owning any stocks (nowadays this sort of activity is illegal). So Jesse began placing bets on stock prices and he started making money. At the age of 15 he had made $1,000, which is about $20,000 in today’s money (probably more with all the inflation). Despite his early success Jesse still wasn’t satisfied. He didn’t see the stock market as a way to make money, he saw it as a game that he wanted to win.

Eventually, Livermore was banned for life from bucket shops due to the amount of money he was making. Jesse took all his money and went to New York City to become a stock trader. He became successful and began to create systems and rules for himself to follow so that he would consistently make money in the stock market. Then came the stock market crash of 1927, but Jesse saw this coming and shorted the market all the way down and made $3 million from the collapse. By this stage he was still in his 20’s and was able to retire, but not Jesse he still wanted to play the game.

Not long after that Jesse began breaking his own strategy and started taking stock tips from other traders. Livermore traded things he didn’t even understand, even commodities like cotton. He lost everything he made and ended up going bankrupt. Then came World War 1, Jesse saw the markets trending upwards and he rode the market up and down again making back everything. Another stock market crash came in 1929 and once again Livermore banked big time, making more than a $100 million, over a billion dollars in today’s money.

Jesse was on top of the world, he owned mansions all over the world fully staffed with servants 24 hours a day. He learnt from last time and protected his wealth putting it into trust funds. Jesse had conquered and won the game, but he didn’t feel like he had won and once again he started losing all of his money. On November 28, 1940, he walked into a cloak room in a fancy hotel, took out a gun and shot himself. A note was found in his pocket written to his wife saying  “I’m unworthy of your love, I’m a failure.” Livermore thought the stock market was a puzzle he could solve and his goal was to conquer the market, but that goal was unattainable.

Yes Buffett did invest in pink sheet penny stocks when he was young, according to the book The Snowball. He loved investing in cheap stocks at discounted prices, which at the time were bargains. He made a vast fortune buying penny stocks and day trading. Buffett was investigated by the SEC in 1974-1976 for manipulating the price of a penny stock called Wesco. Him and Charlie Munger bought  shares at a higher-than-necessary price. Buffett did this as he was buying the company and  had made a promise to a shareholder that he would keep the price above a certain number. He sort of admits what he did was wrong, but it didn’t affect his reputation and one of his companies had to pay a $115,000 fine.

Warren Buffett was born in Omaha, Nebraska on August 30, 1930, the second of three children and the only boy. Today, he’s one of the world’s richest men and in fact his childhood was rather privileged, too. His father Howard was first a stockbroker and then a congressman.

Nonetheless, despite this rather privileged upbringing, Buffett himself always showed an aptitude for hard work and an entrepreneurial spirit.

Early years

When he was 11, he made his first ventures into business by buying six packs of cola from his grandfather’s grocery store and then reselling them for a small profit. It was at this age that Warren buffet investing skills begin to make their presence known, too. He also made his first investment in the stock market at this age.

An early and temporary loss in the stock market also taught him a lesson. After he bought his first three shares in City Service Preferred at $38 a share for himself and his sister Doris, the stock fell to $27 a share. Buffett held those shares until they went back up to $40 a share and then promptly sold them. However, they eventually came to be valued at over $200 a share. It was then that he realized that patience is necessary when it comes to investing. He has never forgotten that lesson.

In 1947, he graduated from high school. He never intended to go to college because he’d already done quite well with his entrepreneurial skills, having made $5,000 delivering newspapers. (1947’s $5,000 would be worth over $42,000 as of 2000.)

However, his father urged him to attend the Wharton business school at the University of Pennsylvania. Buffett did so, but he complained the entire time that he knew more than his professors did. He transferred to the University of Nebraska Lincoln in 1948 and graduated from there in three years.

He then applied to graduate school at Harvard Business School, but was denied admission because he was thought of as “too young.” Undaunted, Warren applied to Columbia and was able to study under the tutelage of famous investors Ben Graham and David Dodd. This experience would change him forever.

Mentor Ben Graham

Ben Graham was a pioneer of his day because during the 1920s, he played the “investment game” very carefully by buying very inexpensive stocks so that this investment was almost completely risk-free. He also came up with the principle of “intrinsic” value as a way to measure a business’ true worth, independent of stock price. In this way, investors could decide for themselves what a company was worth and make investment decisions based upon that information.

His investment principles were simple but sound, and he became an immediate mentor to young Mr. Buffett. Buffett discovered when he was reading an edition of Who’s Who that Graham was in fact the chairman of a small insurance company called Geico. Buffett immediately made it his task to go to Washington, DC to find the headquarters. He did, and was introduced to the financial vice president, Lorimer Davidson. They talked for four hours about various business practices, something that would be invaluable to Buffett. Later, he acquired Geico through his corporation, Berkshire Hathaway.

After graduating from Columbia, Buffett briefly worked for his father’s brokerage firm and then for his old mentor Ben Graham. During his time there, he began to search for investment opportunities. Warren’s approach was to find out how a company worked and how it was superior to competing companies. In 1950, he started investing with $9,800 and ended up with over $140,000 by 1956.

In 1956, he gathered up seven limited partners, including his sister Doris, and created the first of the Warren Buffett companies, Buffet Associates, Ltd. By the end of that year, he was in charge of about $300,000 in capital. Over the next five years, his partnerships made an amazing 251% profit, this when the Dow was only up 74.3%. By 1962, he had more than 90 limited partnerships across the United States with capital in excess of $7.2 million. $1 million of that was Buffett’s personal stake. Eventually, he liquidated that fund and took control of Berkshire Hathaway, a textile company.

Berkshire Hathaway

Buffett eventually ended Berkshire Hathaway’s textile involvement, but kept the name itself for what became his portfolio of companies. He began to invest in majorly undervalued companies such as Coca-Cola, the Washington Post, and American Express. Today, Berkshire Hathaway owns large holdings in many previously undervalued companies that have become major players in the market.

Philanthropist and humble man

In spite of his incredible wealth, Buffett remains a humble man who still lives in the house he bought in 1958 in Omaha, Nebraska. He has and plans to continue to give much of his wealth away to charity, much of it while he is still alive. Most of this money will go to the foundation friend and fellow billionaire Bill Gates has set up.

Sir John Templeton is one of the greatest ever investors not many people know about. Templeton was born in 1914 into a working class family in Tennessee. A young, bright student, he received a scholarship to attend Yale University, graduating in 1934 with a degree in economics. Two years he studied for a masters degree in law at Oxford University, England. When he returned to the United States, he worked in New York City for a brokerage firm, Fenner & Beane, which later became known as Merrill Lynch.

In March 1939, Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, causing the outbreak of World War II. During the war, Templeton borrowed $10,400 to set up his portfolio. Borrowing money to invest wasn’t the most prudent approach to investing but paid off handsomely in the long run. Templeton used the loan to purchase a hundred shares of in 104 companies trading under $1 per share on the NYSE. By the end of the war, his portfolio was up 400%, despite 34 of the companies going bankrupt. This capital acted as a catalyst that later helped him become a billionaire!

During the Great Depression he co-founded an investment firm, Templeton, Dobbrow & Vance. The firm was incredibly successful and grew to $300 million in assets with eight mutual funds under management. In 1954, Templton moved to the Bahamas and started the Templeton Growth Fund as a hobby. He multiplied its value by twenty fold in as many years using a contrarian approach, he was one of the first individuals to invest in Japan in the mid 1960s.

Back then if you invested $100,000 into his fund, it would have been worth $55 million in 1999. From 1954 to 1992, the fund had an impressive annual return of 14.5%. In 1962, he sold his stake in the Templeton, Dobbrow & Vance firm and retired.

Achievements

Over the next 25 years, Templeton created some of the most successful international investment funds. In 1999 Money Magazine named him one of the “greatest stock pickers of all time.” In 2007, he was listed in Time’s Magazine 100 most influential people due to his generosity. During his retirement he set up the “John Templeton Foundation” and gave significant donations to scientific and spiritual research.

10 Investment Rules he Followed

• Be an eternal optimist.
• Be a global investor – he made a fortune investing in undervalued Japanese stocks.
• Crisis investing – Templeton’s timing was always perfect, investing at the start of the second World War was a strange tactic that led to him being labelled as the “penny stock billionaire.”
• Invest like a contrarian – Templeton was the ultimate contrarian and took advantage of crises to purchase shares at bargain prices.
• Understand how to find bargains – be greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others are greedy!
• Be patient, invest for the long term – there will be cycles of bull and bear markets but Templeton believed common stocks would perform well in the long-run, despite temporary downturns.
• Recession is a happy hunting ground.
• The four most dangerous words in investing is “this time it’s different.”
• It pays to be a great student.
• Always be humble.