Make millions with penny stocks
Photographer: Andrew Hetherington for Bloomberg Businessweek
Tim Sykes features some advice for anyone which desire to be because wealthy while he is. These days, the chubby-cheeked 33-year-old has a characteristically odd suggestion: self-harm. “I want everyone to take your hands, ” he says into the camera lens of his laptop, “and smack yourself in the face!”
Sykes is seated alone on dining area table of a $3, 000-a-night collection during the Gansevoort resort in downtown Manhattan. Facing their computer system in only a bathrobe and spectacles, he looks at the stock chart of a little-known safety business known as Technical Communications, up 30 percent today on news of a contract to present encryption toward Egyptian army. In addition examining his display screen via a live flow are some hundred of their many dedicated consumers. Sykes runs a social community for dealers labeled as Profit.ly, that has about 50, 000 users. A subset of 6, 000 pay to get everyday e-mail recommendations, once a week updates, and usage of several thousand videos for instance the trading webinar he’s only started. They're individuals just who didn't correctly guess the solution to his hypothetical—“Which stock am we taking a look at today?”—and therefore necessitated that punch on face.
“Smack yourself if you don’t get that you must be looking at the day’s biggest percent winner, ” Sykes says into the camera. “Over the next two hours this is my No. 1 trade.”
Photographer: Andrew Hetherington for Bloomberg Businessweek
Sykes will be a lot of things: a penny-stock investor, a Web business owner, a failed hedge investment manager, as well as perhaps the absolute most unashamedly press-friendly individual in finance. Exactly what he's first and foremost is a student of hype, the sort which makes the inexpensive shares he prefers spike and tumble and the kind he manufactures. Before several years he’s showed up on a small number of reality-TV shows; made parody movies of top-40 tracks together with his 21-year-old design girlfriend; antagonized CNBC by posting an unflattering picture of its then-top anchor; and bought a $200, 000 low rider which he does not enjoy driving, all in title of promotion, both bad and the good. He’s quite available as to what he’s doing: “I have fun with the part associated with rich douche bag.”
For Sykes, every single day brings an innovative new opportunity to phone attention to himself. He additionally preserves timothysykes.com, in which he offers how-to-trade-like-me DVDs for as much as $1, 500. In November, to gin up curiosity about a new disc, he asked their social networking followers to go out of a comment below a photo of his Porsche, that he said he’d give away towards individual he believed had been most deserving. “I get to embrace my weirdness, ” he claims. “The weirder i'm, the greater amount of viral it goes.” The post has actually significantly more than 20, 000 Facebook “likes” and 3, 800 Instagram responses; he still hasn’t distributed the car.
Sykes courts interest so people will see his internet sites and spend him for guidance. After very first trading along with his very own cash during Internet trend and then operating a hedge investment that moved bust in 2007, he refashioned himself as a guru, informing supporters how they may profit by buying and selling penny stocks. He says he’s made $4 million on such trades—and he can teach you just how to read market habits, also, if you’ll just enter your bank card number.
