Investors Underground Review – Is Nathan Michaud Legit?

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.