Below are my monthly profits (keep in mind this includes $6,234.16 in losses from my super-secret trading strategy, for which I do not report the trades on this blog; those losses all came in March and were it not for those losses I would have made $4,703.21 in March):
January | $9,938.76 |
February | $11,146.07 |
March | ($1,578.95) |
April | $17,548.72 |
May | $16,191.05 |
June | $4,123.12 |
I have become far more consistent compared to last year.This is primarily as a result of relying less on my super-secret trading strategy, which generated essentially zero net profits last year while giving me tons of volatility. (In 2008 and 2007 that strategy generated significant profits).
January | $27,740.09 |
February | $29,477.44 |
March | ($21,774.65) |
April | ($50,199.34) |
May | $60,484.79 |
June | $10,165.92 |
Unlike last year, most of my profits this year have come from trading OTC pump & dumps rather than listed stocks. I have netted $15,861.46 from my pump longs strategy (going long the pumps being something I have learned from InvestorsLive of the InvestorsUnderground stock chat, with a weighted average profit margin of 2.89% and a win rate of 53.71%. My revived long-term short strategy, which has been hampered by the psychological difficulty I have in holding long-term shorts after the disastrous forced buy-ins and resultant losses I suffered in mid-2008, generated $3,629.18 in profits with an average weighted profit margin of 6.80% and an 84.2% win rate. All but one of my 19 trades in this strategy were of AMEL (the other was ANTS).
For my TimAlerts-related strategy, $32,228.80 in profits have come from trading OTC stocks (almost exclusively short) while only $12,103.73 in profits have come from trading listed stocks. The total profit attributable to my own trades (mostly shorts of OTC stocks) was $28,733.40 with a 1.82% weighted average profit margin, while the profit attributable to me following TimAlerts was $16,382.83 with a weighted average profit margin of 1.43%. Contrary to popular belief, I have made relatively little money this year scalping TimAlerts, with my total profit attributable to that being $2,853.38 and an average profit margin of 0.92% (note that this is not a weighted average profit margin; I just averaged each trade’s profit margin).
Disclosure: No positions in any stocks mentioned in this post. I own many of Sykes’ DVDs and I am a lifetime subscriber to his TimAlerts trade alerts service and I have a subscription to his PennyStocking Silver service. I receive a commission for every DVD bought through my affiliate link to Sykes’ web store. I am also an affiliate (and customer) of InvestorsUnderground. To see more details on my relationship with Sykes and InvestorsUnderground, please see my terms of service, which is incorporated by reference into this post.
You are an asset to the TimAlerts Chatroom ! Learn’t a lot about OTC markets from you. Keep up the good work.
man running super secret strat must be stressful. April 09 must have like a hard kick to the groin.
Think it’ll will ever work again? Been awhile now since it seems to have done much for you.
Considering the sums of money I have thrown at this strategy, I am not worried about the tiny losses I have suffered over the last year and a half. I have continued confidence in it. I have modified the system somewhat and unfortunately it has given me fewer trading signals than in 2007/2008.
Hi Michael. Why did you decide to revive your long-term short strategy? Thanks, Andrew
Simply put, I revived the strategy because it is a good one. 99% of all pumps will drop significantly over a period of weeks and because I have the capital it makes sense to use this strategy. The reason I had abandoned it was of course because I had suffered several disastrous forced buy-ins in the summer of 2008. As long as I try to avoid the stocks most likely to have forced buy-ins, keep my position sizes low, and stick to stocks with good volume, I should be okay.
Back in 2008 when implementing your long-term short strategy you shorted more “legitimate” companies (such as Noble Roman’s), in the view that they were over-valued, based on fundamental analysis. Will you be doing that style of short selling again?
Noble Roman’s was really a one-off. I prefer much easier stocks. Even considering that it wasn’t a pump & dump, it was clearly overvalued after I performed a basic analysis. Most of the other stocks I short sold back then were true pump & dumps. Remote MDX and Lighting Science Group were not but were horrendously overvalued.
Great work Mike…As usual I beat all those numbers trading here on the beach in Hawaii…Le De Da