My review of Tim Sykes' DVD TimTactics: Buy his other DVDs instead

If you have considered or will consider buying Timothy Sykes’ DVD TimTactics, I have some simple advice: do not buy it. I say this not because I think it is a horrible DVD, but because Tim has covered much of the information in his other DVDs. I do recommend Sykes’ DVD Pennystocking Part Deux and I thought TimRaw was pretty nice (full reviews to come later; I need to re-watch them), but despite this DVD including so-called ‘advanced trading tactics’ I found little in this DVD that was not also in those other DVDs.  The advanced tactics that were only in this DVD were not particularly hard to figure out and I have learned most of them in one year of full-time day-trading. Also, if you are the patient sort, Sykes’ DVD TimFundamentals 2 will be coming out soon; it was recorded during his 2009 seminar in Las Vegas (which I attended) and I think that was an excellent seminar. TimFundamentals 2 plus Pennystocking Part Deux would give you 97% of the information available on DVD about Tim Sykes’ strategy (the seminar would be sufficient to learn his strategy, but Pennystocking Part Deux’s intra-day charts are invaluable).

Following is my full review:

Informational content: 2 of 5 stars. TimTactics is billed as advanced trading tactics, so I was hoping for strategies above and beyond what he showed in his other DVDs. For example, it would have been nice to see how he reads level 2 or time and sales. He did not show that. Also, any student of his who watches Livestock religiously and has followed his blog (TimAlerts or just his free blog) for a year or more likely will have learned many of his ‘advanced’ tactics, such as how the overall market affects penny stocks. This brings me to some advice that I have said and written multiple times: if you are cheap and are willing to invest a lot of time you can learn Sykes’ strategy without buying his DVDs. Of course, buying one of the better DVDs is useful and will save on time and help to speed up learning. And if that helps you to make more profitable trades sooner, it can easily be worth the investment.

A few tactics he had that he has not mentioned before were things I had heard from other traders or figured out myself, such as how to get faster OTC BB executions. Other than the tactic for faster OTC BB executions, the only tactic I had not heard from Tim before (or learned elsewhere in the last year that I have been a day-trader) was his strategy for trading after-hours or in pre-market trading.

Production quality: 2 of 5 stars. The resolution of the video is barely acceptable. All the video was screencast from Sykes’ laptop, and it started life as a webcast. However, there is no excuse for not recording and saving the full screen resolution without much compression rather than packaging the low-quality webcast video on DVDs. Likewise with the sound, it is far inferior to the sound quality on my daily trade recaps hosted by Youtube. Towards the end of the last DVD for a few minutes you can here someone else making noise besides Tim. While the production quality is not good, Tim is easily comprehensible and the viewer can still see everything important in the video, so if you are still interested in this video, do not let the production quality stop you.

Disclosure: I received TimTactics for ‘free’ for signing up to Sykes’ October 2009 seminar in Las Vegas. I have a disclosure policy that provides more details on other Sykes products and services I have purchased and my relationship with him. I have purchased other DVDs of his and I am a TimAlerts lifetime member;  I have now made over $93,000 trading using his methods since June 2008. I am an affiliate of Tim Sykes and make money when people buy his stuff through my links.

17 thoughts on “My review of Tim Sykes' DVD TimTactics: Buy his other DVDs instead”

  1. are you talking in general or for OTC stocks? 95% of time I use IB smartrouting. Sometimes I will direct-route to an ECN; IB doesn’t allow direct-routing to market makers (to the best of my knowledge).

  2. With regards to the general quality of Tim’s videos it’s pretty clear he’s milking it for all it’s worth at the moment, and that’s business which is fine but an increase in production quality wouldn’t hurt. I can see how this happened tho, Tim obviously put a lot of work into the first DVD and it probably wasn’t worth the extra hassle and effort, plus he looked like a dork in a suit and wanted to be more genuine, so the change to a more natural presentation style is welcome.

    If he polished his video’s a bit more and put more effort into logically grouping his ideas which span across his now multiple DVD’s it would be a far more enjoyable experience. You can’t help but think that he’s filled 4 DVD’s and 10+ hours with fluff that could be stripped out and the good content condensed down to maybe 2 hours. I’d pay the same or maybe more for a high quality fluff free 2 hours DVD than a 10 hour one. My time costs money too you know!

    Another poor DVD to avoid would be TIM Fundamentals. This is just X hours of watching two people look at laptops, Tim should have at least put a bit more thought into it and screen cam’ed his laptop so you can see what the websites look like etc, it may as well be an audio book for all the help the picture makes. The only thing you really learn from the pictures (not the DVD in general) is the guy Tim is sitting with likes M&M’s and is blatantly not taking anything in!

  3. Thanks for your honesty Reaper, curious if Tim will make you take this post down 🙂

    I’ve bought 2 DVD’s so far, and this was going to be my last purchase. I’ll take your advise on this one.

    After my second DVD, I could not believe how poor they where produced and not edited. Maybe I was just mad at the price he charged, to have him take phone calls and sniffle through the lessons. Come on, if he is selling the volume of DVD’s he says he is, Tim should have enough respect for his clients to hire an editor.

    Also thanks to post #5, I agree with you and will take your advice on Fundamentals.

    I am a Tim fan and find his trading interesting. I also wish him success in trading and sales. I am just disappointed with the price vs quality.

    Keep up the good work Reaper.

    1. Ha! He wouldn’t try to get me to take it down. If I were seen as having no independence then I wouldn’t be as useful for selling DVDs. 😉

      I really did like the seminar this year in Vegas, so I think it will be a good DVD (it will be TimFundamentals 2). Pennystocking Part Deux of course was fairly well put together.

      Of course, the price he charges isn’t for the production quality but rather for the quality of the information. Considering my success trading his system I cannot complain about that.

  4. Everything is edited, but u guys forget i’m just a poor one man operation…no penny stock promoter here…but i really dont care about how well you enjoy my dvds as long as u understand the infromation in them…the proof is in my students gains..

  5. and yes timfundamentals part deux is gonna rock, its 15 hours of watchlist research, SEC filing digging (nailed NXTH a week before this 60% drop), a live trade, me missing a perfect breakout, guest starts like michael goode and nate and timmy bohen, its my best yet, especially quality-wise

  6. Tim, you make 70K+ a month by your own accounting. The “poor one man operation” schtick doesn’t work anymore.

    You could easily afford to hire some staff. Could and should in my opinion.

    It’s a big step to trust the revenue stream enough to make a staffing commitment…I’ve been there, I know.

    Or maybe you are just a cheap bastard who wants to keep every penny for himself 😉

  7. Hey Tim, thanks for your feedback and look forward to your future work.

    But honestly, you posted how you made 6 figures in 2 months. Please don’t say its “just poor me.”

    http://timothysykes.com/blog/2009/10/06/how-my-blog-pulled-in-128518-in-july-august-2009-yes-i-have-a-new-dvd-to-teach-you-how-to-create-your-own-blog-business/

    That’s more money then Joe the Plumber thinks he’s going to make.

    I still am with #5 where we would like 2 hours of quality info, rather then listening to you take phone calls from your girlfriend on your DVDs. That’s is what my feedback about your editing was about.

    Keep rolling Tim!!
    Wish you the best of luck and I enjoy your other work.

  8. Sorry guys, I do what works for me–being real…I pay several thousand dollars for each DVD to be edited and frankly, I don’t sell enough of them to justify any increase…the bulk of my $ comes from TIMalerts and i’ve spent $25k+ developing a new site and trying to come up with faster alerts…u get the info on the DVDs and you’re all up huge, name ANY other DVD out there with such success rates

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