Profitly Review: Are These Gurus Legit or Scams?

What is Profitly?

Profit.ly is a unique trading site that serves as a hub that connects visitors to the trading guru’s products, and tracks live real money trading performance. Traders can also interact with a trading community of over 122,000 members.

The performance of the gurus, as well as the community of traders, is listed in a leaderboard style. To access new trades initiated by the gurus, users will have to subscribe to the respective guru’s services that include live chatrooms, text/e-mail trading alerts, and training. Regular users can post their trades and even link to their trading accounts to record performance. The site heavily focused on transparency and won’t tolerate “liars.” Anyone that thinks a posted trade is fake can click the “Madoff” button to note it for investigation. This is a unique funnel that connects traders to gurus and other top performing traders. Users can set-up a free account to get access to the leaderboard and follow the trading activities of non-gurus. While the gurus post their trades in real-time, you need to take a subscription in order to see which stocks they are trading.

Is it worth paying for a premium subscription? Keep reading our Profitly review to find out.

How Much Does Profit.ly Cost?

There are a few services within Profit.ly. For the purpose of our Profit.ly review, we will focus on the platform as a whole. We’ve reviewed individual services from Tim Sykes and Superman in the past.

Profit.ly premium starts at $29.95 per month and goes up to $74.95 per month. The difference between plans is actually pretty subtle. You pay an extra  $20-$45/month for the ability to have a private profile and/or view other people’s trades. I don’t see any plan besides the Novice plan being worth it unless you are extra concerned about privacy.

Who Runs The Service?

Tim Sykes is the founder of Profitly.

Timothy Sykes is a well-known stock trader that was originally featured on a television series called “Wall Street Warriors.” He turned $12,000 into $2,000,000 from trading penny stocks. He parlayed his television exposure to launch education videos, trading rooms, and services with the “Penny Stock” theme. He founded Profit.ly with the purpose of injecting transparency into the murky world of online trading gurus.

Profit.ly automatically tracks and posts the trades linked to participating online brokerage accounts for opt-in traders and gurus to systematically rank and track trading performance. Like a competition, it posts the results for the top traders on its leaderboard categorized by time periods ranging from the day, 30-days, 90-days, YTD, one –year, and all time. The results can be gauged not only by performance but a ton of subcategories, including Biggest Dollar and Percentage Winners, Most Popular Traders, Most “Madoffed” Traders, Most Poplar Trade, and so on.

This gives members the opportunity to review each other’s trades to see who is legit and who is not. Since you can connect to your brokerage accounts, you can verify trades to prove you are a legit trader.

Meet the Profit.ly Gurus

Over the years, Profit.ly has seen its share of different trading gurus. If I recall correctly, the site had upwards of five trading gurus with over a dozen trading courses at one point. It used to be the trading community for online traders, and, while it is still thriving, it doesn’t seem to be as popular as it once was.

Past gurus include Nathan Michaud of Investors Underground, Triforce Trader, Connor Bruggemann, and more.

As of today, the site only features two gurus: Timothy Sykes and Paul Scolardi (Superman Trades).

Each of these guys has their own subscription-based chatroom, alert services, and educational courses. They all tend to focus on small-cap and penny stocks with styles that range from intra-day to short-term swing trading. Profit.ly itself has subscription plans that let users access the platform and participate in the leaderboards as well as track and verify trades. Users can connect their broker to the Profit.ly platform to instantly track and post their trades (similar to TraderVue). The platform plans range from $29.95 Novice plan to the $49.95 Trader plan and $74.95 per month Pro plan, which gives full access to the website with access to other people’s stats and private profits. All plans allow users to follow, message, and comment on other traders and view their stats.

Timothy Sykes

Tim Sykes has made over $5.8 million in all-time profits. He focuses on day trading penny stocks with an emphasis on fundamental stock catalysts, including timing pump and dump promotions, news, under/overvalued plays back with some technical chart patterns. While it goes without saying how risky penny stocks can be, it is also extremely hard to short penny stocks. Tim has a broker that he recommends. The basic subscriptions start at $74.95 per month for Tim Alerts, which includes chatroom access, SMS alerts, and iPhone and Android app-based access. The Pennystocking Silver plan costs $149.95 per month and includes access to the video library that includes over 4,400 videos and weekly video lessons.

Superman (Paul Scolardi)

Superman, with over $3.4 million in all-time profits, has two memberships. The Superman Alerts is $147 per month and provides access to his live chatroom, watch lists, e-mail, and SMS trade alert signals along with access for iPhone and Android devices through the Profit.ly app. The Superman Pro is $247/month and includes access to the weekly video lessons, video lesson library, premium research reports, IPO, and earnings tracker. Superman focuses on swing trades with penny and small-cap stocks based on valuation and technical patterns.

Triforce Trader (Former Profit.ly Guru – No Longer Active)

Triforce is a former student of Superman and has amassed over $1.4 million in all-time profits. He has three tiers of subscriptions. The Triforce Trader is $99.95 per month and includes chatroom access, daily commentary, watch lists and stocks, options, and futures trades with video lesson library accept on iPhone and Android through the app. The Triforce Planium includes all the basic Triforce Trader features as well as investor and active trader indications included. The TriForce Training is a yearlong membership for $3,497 and included all the features in the prior packages in addition to webinars, graded homepage, and Trading Around Equilibrium DVD. Triforce tends to lean more towards technical analysis over the news.

Connor Bruggemann (Former Profit.ly Guru – No Longer Active)

Connor Bruggemann has $376,000 in all-time profits as a part-time trader. His subscription plans started at $147 per month for Connor Alerts, which included premarket watch lists, chatroom access, weekly video lessons, and video library access, all accessible through the iPhone and Android app. The Connor Pro plan is $247 per month and included a weekly question and answering session with Connor and his Penny Stock Bible program. Bruggemann specialized in trading penny stocks for intraday and swing traders and turned $9,700 to over $300,000 trading penny stocks. Technical analysis and news are both used in his trades.

Trading Courses

Each of the four gurus offers trading courses included in their subscription plans. Sykes offers the Millionaire Challenge program, which users have to apply for and get “interviewed.” If approved, it gives yearlong access to everything as well as homework, day trading DVDs, and access to his trading community for $6,500. Superman offers a mentorship program but doesn’t provide much by way of details, but claims to have produced many millionaires.

Triforce focuses a lot on education and provides the yearlong TriForce training option that is heavy on education with full access to all his services. Bruggemann offers his Penny Stock Bible training included in the $247 per month Connor Pro subscription plan. Profit.ly has an online store that sells various DVDs and courses for immediate checkout at prices ranging from $297 to $1,797 for the “Trading Tickers” DVD course.

Chat Rooms

The chat rooms utilize the Profit.ly platform making them pretty much identical to each other, with the exception of the guru and moderators. Members are warned not to piggyback on the guru’s trades. If you expect to simply copy Tim Sykes, you are unlikely to find success.

Instead, every member should be well versed in the individual guru’s methodology and should decide for themselves to take on the trades. Of course, I’d say a good chunk of the members would just pile into every trade, which tends to make a large market impact on these types of stocks.

Each of the gurus has its own style in terms of operating their rooms and dealing with members. The swing traders like Superman tend to be more laid back and not as active with their posts, while intra-day heavy gurus like Sykes and TriForce tend to be more actively engaged in their chatrooms. Any trades taken by the gurus get updated on the Profit.ly platform feed as well.

What Type of Trader is the Service Best for?

The Profit.ly platform has a lot of products and choices for traders to choose from in terms of signals, training, and education. Although most of the products are catered to newbies, I would have to say this service is best suited for more experienced traders that are familiar with the risks involved in trading penny stocks. Since the majority of the gurus tend to specialize in day trading and swing trading risky penny stocks and small-caps, it’s important to go into any of these programs with a healthy dose of skepticism and preferably a methodology ahead of time. To their credit, the gurus try to segment the trades on stocks with high relative volume, but when the smoke clears, the liquidity and volume can vanish quickly and leaving the newbies stuck in a position that continues to erode away.

Semi-skilled momentum traders and experienced swing traders (with over five years of experience) are best suited for this platform. Most importantly, the platform is best for traders who have the discipline and prudence to take their stop-losses before they grow too large. For intra-day traders, you should be able to commit at least the first few hours of the day and have an account well over the $25k PDT rule, but unfortunately, those who play penny stocks tend to fall well under that threshold and severely undercapitalized. The limited number of round trips also contribute to the “bagholder” effect since traders are limited to just three round-trips on a rolling five day period for U.S. accounts. This is why newbies should be very cautious in this realm, as most of these stocks are wrought with fraud and are not investment-grade companies worth holding. Newbies should really focus on the training materials before ever putting on a trade. This is obviously easier said than done, especially when those first few trades result in quick profits.

Is Profitly Worth Paying For?

For those traders going into the program with eyes wide open with a healthy dose of skepticism will be able to find great ideas. The basic to mid-level guru subscriptions tend to be a good value, especially if they include a video library of lessons and webinars. The gurus are talented traders, as evidenced by their validated performance results. Users that want to evaluate the gurus first should start off with the basically Profit.ly platform subscription to observe the guru performances before choosing a guru. Results will differ between traders significantly based on experience, training, and bankroll. 

Pros

• Transparent Leaderboard to Track Guru and Member Performances
• A One-Stop Hub for Traders to Learn and Trade Penny Stocks
• Various Subscriptions Levels To Meet All Types of Budgets
• Accessible Through Desktop/Laptop and Mobile Devices
• Growing Community of Traders
• Options, Futures, and Small-Cap Alert Signals

Cons

• Too Many Overlapping Products and Services
• Penny Stocks Are Extremely Risky