I saw today from the Seattle Times that Wade Cook Financial is "significantly behind" on their payments due to the customers ($millions). They were ordered to pay back this money by the FTC last year. The COO of WCF says they "are making, and continue to make, headway towards satisfaction of the consumer redress program." Thank Goodness, another snake oil sales company in the toilet. I am sure that no one here has been caught up in this trap, but we have had dozens of people come to us asking about such things...and I think they may still be in business...does anyone keep up with these people??
They have a penny stock that was rejected to be listed on the NASDAQ or NYSE big boards. It was trading around .08 a year ago not sure where it is now. I do know his selling calls/puts strategies produced a -$800,000 trading loss for his company. All of their income came from customers. Not sure how bad he did in 2000?? Considering what the market did, I would assume it is rather ugly. I still get at least one piece of junk mail from him every other month. I do like the postcard though with sign bull market ahead. Rtharp
It appears that we may agree on the "snake-oil" aspect of this Wade Cook nightmare. According to the paper, he owes literally $millions to the people he sold stuff to. It really is bad, stuff like that is bad for the entire industry, and worse yet, the people who may want to become serious traders lose all their money with these silly ideas. Have you had any experience with the others out there? The "click if green" "click if red" guys from Utah, et al?
Don I'm sure you have read some of my father's research on systems. I tend to agree with him. There are profitable systems being sold but the problem is they don't fit the trader who would be trading them. A lot of the systems sold were negative expectancy. They had a high probability of making money in the short term and right the majority of the time but when they were wrong the losses were a lot worse than all of the gains combined. Robert Tharp
I've probably bought my fair share of "snake-oil" books over the years. The biggest scam I fell for was the Larry Williams "Money Tree" course. Not only was there virtually nothing beyond the basics covered but many of his "trading systems" simply didn't work or were "statistically insignificant". He in particular promoted his 15 or so S&P systems based on patterns with high reliability (as part of the money tree). When I coded them all up in my software I found that several of them only had traded 7 to 15 times over 12-15 years of SP history. Very likely a case of data mining with no real insight. That being said, I have the basic rule that anything that looks interesting and cost less than one trade gone bad I'll get. Good ideas are few and far between and you just don't know what you're going to pick up reading even a bad book. Don't get me started on Jake Bernstein
Don Do you have a link to that story? Why does he have to pay money back to customers? Is this for people who bought his seminars? I've kind of followed this story, but I thought that he was vindicated in some way and didn't have to pay back his customers.
if wade cook goes under then good ridance.. another interesting thing.. teachmetotrade apparently isnt doing so well either.. i got an email from Brandon and Toni saying that things didnt work out and they are opening a free room on the net.. guess i wont be seeing their adds on cnbc at 2am telling the world how easy trading is.. -qwik
I think it is ridiculous that he needs to pay back any money to anybody. Everybody should be responsible for their own actions. If you paid money to Wade Cook to teach you how to trade and later on lost money trading I don't see why should Wade Cook pay you back. If it continues like this we will see people suing NYSE and Nasdaq for their losses. "I was eating ten big macs a day and got so fat that nobody would hire me" Lets sue McDonalds for lost wages.
Ah, this is probably the area of my biggest mistakes in trading. How much snake oil have I bought? Lets just say in my beginning days that I could have saved at least a small trading account worth of money if I had known better. The list is long and covers many varieties of snake oil...(and this is only a small sampling) Wade Cook...the books, not the other crap, thank goodness Larry Williams...books, Money Tree course (although of all the snake oil, this was the best for me, since it did cover the basics pretty well, and I got it just as I was starting out and knew absolutely nothing)...however, I love his money management stuff and use it to this day. Welles Wilder's Delta Phenomena...moon phases anyone? (the only $175 book I've ever bought) Larry Pesavento's astro/planetary books...man, I fell for a lot of "secret order in the universe" garbage Jake Bernstein...just a lot of books here, but when I saw his infomercial that showed a soccer mom confidently calling in an order to buy pork bellies while on her way out the door to take the kids to school, I finally woke up to reality. I don't know why it took me so long to learn that there was no magic formula. I think I just had the "holy grail" syndrome longer than most. That is why I am so outspoken against vendors in this business. Maybe I'm too hard on some of them, but to a newbie, there is no way they can tell the difference between the good and the bad, so I just tell them to stay away from them all. Everything I know about trading today I could have learned through my own research and a few rare well-written books. I have bought a ton of books, most of which are no good, but like vikana said, sometimes you will pick up just one little thing that might improve your trading, so I am still a sucker for new trading books. Only now I usually browse them over a breve at Barnes and Noble before deciding if its worth purchasing. So, its no secret what my advice is to anyone thinking of buying any expensive stuff. Don't fall for promises of easy wealth, expect to work hard, and save your money for the inevitable losses you will have to face...they teach you so much more than any course, website, or book ever could. Kirk
<b> guess i wont be seeing their adds on cnbc at 2am telling the world how easy trading is.. </b> Its pretty simple, but its not easy.