Yesterday I decided to spend time researching successful blogs. My search started on Michael Dunlops Income Diary blog and a post he had made called Top earning blogs – Make money online Blogging.
This is where I came across a name I was familiar with – Timothy Sykes. I recognised the name because I’m following him on Twitter, but his posts always seemed arrogant and designed to p*ss people off, in fact a couple of times I’d nearly ‘unfollowed’ because I generally don’t buy into all that hyped up American b*llsh*t.
I was stunned to see that Dunlop’s post claimed that Timothy Sykes’ was generating $80,000 per month from his Blog alone.
Now I was intrigued, who was this guy and how was he making so much from his website. I decided to figure out what Timothy Sykes was all about. Was he ‘All American Brash’ or was there more to this apparently very successful individual than his public persona?
If you’ve not heard of him – a very short precise. Sykes turned “$12,415 Bar Mitzvah Gift money into a fully audited pre-tax sum of $1.65 million from 1999 to 2002″. He did this by shorting penny stocks. He has a very vocal dislike of Wall Street, regularly claiming that ‘Wall Street is full of BS’. He ran an ultimately unsuccessful hedge fund from 2006 to 2007, which he is very candid about, before successfully returning to the market using the same principals he used with his Bar Mitzvah money.
He now runs what appears to be a very successful trading business.
Sykes is very open about his successes and failures, a quality you can not help but admire. Certainly being open about failures is not commonplace on Wall St. He is also open about his trading strategy, which is profiting when stocks lose value. He operates in the pennystock arena – a place he claims is still very corrupt. By scanning news sources for information that is purely designed to falsely inflate stock prices, he waits for the surge and then bets that the price will fall (by shorting the stock). And by all accounts it’s a very successful (and legal) strategy.
I watched some video footage of Sykes and there is no doubt that the guy is impressive. He’s been featured on the likes of CNN and WallSt.Net. I watched a couple of his TV interviews. It was clear from these interviews that his strategy did not sit well with those interviewing him. And yet he delivered a compelling and honest case for his strategy.
In one interview on CNN (recorded sometime in 2008) when asked if Wall St had been too greedy, his reply was amazing, he stated that these guys had NOT been greedy enough – and not because he was supporting them, but because he was criticising them! He was criticising them for being lazy, which he stated was the problem with America. Lazy because their strategies to make money were fundamentally flawed, lazy because their research had not been meticulous enough and lazy because ultimately, they had failed.
What Sykes was saying is that greed drives innovation, greed drives our motivation and that ultimately greed was not good but that greed was GREAT!
He was right, but surely stating on prime time TV that Wall Street “had not been greedy enough” and that Main Street had also been to blame for the current economic crisis because they were “flipping houses and taking on leverage” would anger Joe Public?
Apparently not, If Sykes is making anywhere near $80,000 via his blog (which I have no reason to suspect to be false) then that is a serious number of eye-balls and the guy has a big following.
Has he has become the Voice of the Public?
He is clearly a very astute businessman with much more to him than simply his stock picking . His plan is a good one – to take $12,000 (which was the size of his Bar Mitzvah Gift) and use all the same techniques he used before to turn this into $1.65m. Except this time he plans on sharing his success with others. This was another piece of PR genius. Here is a guy who can turn $12k into $1.65m and he is prepared to let us all know how to do it. He’s not suggesting that you need a starting account of $100k, he is saying that with $12k, you can make money on the stock market.
In the first 6 months he was 60% up (the market was 20% down). This may not sound like he is going to make anywhere near the $1.65m he made first time around, but it’s a lot closer than you think. In fact if profits are re-invested and he can make 120% per year, then $12k becomes $1.65m in 7 years (as opposed to the 4 years it took first time around).
Is Tim Sykes the real deal or is he simply another guy selling an unrealistic dream, taking money from the great unwashed in the process. Currently I believe he is the real deal. He is honest and open and more importantly he is making returns. His marketing is great, he hates Wall St and they hate him, but he’s beating them at their own game and at the same time helping the little guy make money too. All the while he’s raking in millions himself!
What happens when his systems starts to fail (as they surely will) will be interesting. Will he jump for cover and disappear off into the sunset along with his investors money, or will he remain open and honest, explaining that all systems fail from time to time, and to urge his investors to keep following his signals?
Only time will tell, but one thing is for certain, I will be keeping a close eye on this guy and will be enjoying his journey in the process. Who knows, the AtticMan may even sign-up to his system!
good post, thanks! I am making around $80k/month and its off only 3k daily visitors…wait til my audience grows….i’ll do a whole followup post on my blog
Thanks for replying Tim. Impressed by those returns on a relatively small following!
Looking forward to your blog post – are you saying you will be sharing the finances of you blog ASWELL as sharing the finances of your trading business?
Surely then, all the naysayers would have nothing on you!
I say, fair play to you, you’ve bucked a trend, and may you continue to make money!
One more thing. You’re just a sheep that deserves to live in an attic. Loser.
$80k sounds believable if you factor in the product sales. He seems to have a pretty large network of sites other than just the blog, so it’s certainly possible. Finance related ads are typically pretty lucrative in terms of pay per click.
Maybe you are right, but I get a good view over London!
Apologies if I’ve offended, I certainly didn’t intend that.
the AtticMan
Yeh, I guess if you factor in product sales, then $80k is very believable. My research suggested $80k in just affiliate sales! If that was the case, then Tim Sykes has hundreds of thousands of followers!
In fact the reason I wrote this blog, was because I wanted to know how Tim Sykes attracted such a following. It seems now that product sales make up a large portion of that revenue, but his audience is only going to grow!
If you turned 12k into 1.65M you’d have a large following as well. Getting television airtime probably didn’t hurt either.
I’ll admit that I haven’t read much about what he does other than your post about him and a quick glance at his site, but he seems like a one trick pony. Kind of contradictory to his mantra of continuous learning. He must be pretty good at hawking his product though, since he even says in his video that you get stuff “straight from his blog”. Why someone would pay $300 for something that’s already available online is a bit puzzling to me. Maybe there’s actually something worthwhile in his DVD’s. I’ll have to see if I can pirate it.
Sykes is a huckster. He represents the one hit wonder. Who are they? So called traders that hit it big, right place right time and they can never replicate it.
They can’t replicate the trade, but they now have a reputation that they can sell, and they sell it well.
The trading education industry is loaded with them, John Person and Larry Williams to name two more. Then there are those who have never successfully traded like Steve Nison and Martin Pring, they are just good writers with a gimmick.
How do I know this? I have met ever single one of these people in person, including Sykes. Trading is the last thing on their mind, the “sale” is all that matters.
A real trader will not waste their time hawking. Trading is way too lucrative when successful, for that.
Trading is hard work, long hours, dedication in sweat and capital. It can take YEARS to become a proficient trader who can live on his own profits. It takes 6 years of school to get an MBA and 10 plus to be a doctor. People who think they can trade in a few short weeks or months are fooling themselves. That type a trader is a rare bird.
These guys make a fortune selling a dream that is not ever going to happen for 90% plus who enter the game.
Unfortunately, in bad times like these, hucksters and snake oil traders do even better as desperate people flock to them for salvation.
In the end they spend they money on education and loose what little is left over trying to replicate something the author can’t even do. But then that’s pretty much all of Wallstreet. And thus the mess we have today.
P.S: For a great explanation of such wonders read Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Hardcover)
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
You will come to clearly understand the right place right time hypothesis.
Gotta love the comments from all the bitter trading degenerates, quite the industry, will have a blog post on this soon, thanks again!
The trading community is an interesting place, full of characters with lots of different views and opinions.
Personally, I have no issue whatsoever with a trader looking to add sales channels to their trading business. Sure there are traders out there who spend their trading lives in the shadows, quietly building their fortunes with no interest in the public eye at all. And then there are guys like Timothy Sykes, who develop their business in more public ways.
Sure there are guys out there who can’t trade and make money selling systems that probably don’t work, but if Sykes is prepared to share all his trading records (current and historic), how can he be a a huckster?