Investools/Think or Swim ~ anybody in it?

[VaCollector]

There is an old thread about Investools that is over 720 days old and rather than bring it (the old thread) up again I thought it best to start a new one.....

I have recently delivered a friend/client's tax returns (I'm an accountant) and opted to discuss her investment strategies as they appeared to be quite successful in 2007.

She has gone thru the Investools educational program and (trading with $300-400K) made $75K (taxable) in 2007 and has made $275K+ so far in 2008..........I know it seems too good to be true, but that's WHY I wanted to visit with her and pick her brain a little.

As you might imagine, she is quite a proponent for the educational program and confidently states that it has empowered her and changed her life....she doesn't mind sharing the fact that she stumbled as she learned but also pointed to the Dow -778 point day and the fact that she made $75K that day ~ conveniently asking how I did that one day .....

I have to admit that my curiousity is peaked and that maybe I'm just a little bit jealous of her successes....or maybe just disappointed in my investing failures

Has anyone here taken the investools program and applied that education?? Using the ThinkorSwim platform to trade??

Comments and questions welcome!

Oh, I guess that I should add that the current full program thru Investools is about $16K if taken online and $25K if you want to travel to seminars and experience the "hands on" approach with live instructors.....not sure if there is a less expensive entry point as mentioned in the old expired post.

Expensive - he** yes, but not if an investor can produce 25% of this client's results!

 

[CybrMike]

I did the Investools program. Teaches you to look for technical indicators (red or green arrows) and buy options on individual securities. Your supposed to buy $5K to $10K of options on a security that you pick with the help of their screener site (which is admittedly pretty cool).

Basically its a matter of getting lucky. The first year I used it I made 100% return. The next year I lost a lot of that return.

I finally figured out that its more just taking a guess on which way the stock can go. If your right, your supposed to take your profits early and often. If your wrong, it gets a little harder. Sometimes wait it out. Sometimes bail.

 

[ERD50]

The big question is always - not can this or that person do it, but can one person (me or you, to be specific) reasonably expect to do near as well?

W/o data from a larger sample (survivor bias will be strong here) you can't say. Common sense says no, it's been discussed before on this forum, I won't repeat all the reasons.

Probably not likely in this case, but you would also need to look at unrealized losses. These are not taxable events, so you might not see them. Some 'schemes' use this to make gains look larger than they are.

-ERD50

 

[al_bundy]

i've been learning to market time for 18 months or so and finally started doing pretty well this year until a bad call a few weeks ago. but i'm still beating the sp500 returns by double digits.

so i went back and read some more and got into elliott wave and saw where i made my mistake. still a newbie at it and missed the latest downturn from the friday/monday rally but i'm waiting for SP500 to hit around 885 to pull the trigger and buy in on my play money.

Investools probably teaches you Elliott Wave as part of their course. it was originally made up in the 1930's by an accountant and after he died people did more research on it. most of the work they do now is researching the social/cultural/economic factors at each stage since there is more than enough data from around the world now to look at similarities.

i bet if you talk to your client she'll say we are about to have a nice rally that will top out around 1200 - 1250 on the SP500 which is wave 4 of this bear's elliott wave and then another leg down next year where the SP 500 will bottom out anywhere from 400 - 900, the ABC retrace with maybe a slightly lower low and then the start of the next 70 year bull.

for the current market situation she'll say we are in wave 5 and wave 3 was the crash in the last 2 weeks. the 20% rally from friday's low was the wave 4 rally and if wave 3 is the longest wave like it usually is than wave 5 will be around the same spread as wave 1 which gives us a target of around 885 on the SP500 for the next week or so.

and the above is my 401k plan for the next year. sell around 1200 and see how things look around 900 - 920. the 2000 - 2002 bear followed a similar pattern. some of the EW people say wave 5 will be the worst and that's how they base their SP500 target of 400 and they say we made a multi year double top and that once we break 790 on the way down next year we will lose another 30% or so.

there are 2 EW newsletters i know of. one is at elliott wave technology and the other at elliottwave.com. the latter is supposed to be written by the people who officially took over Elliott's research. the former you can read a week or so after it comes out on safehaven.com. just look for Joseph Russo as the author. they charge $75 a month and it's mostly short term trading signals. most times it's spot on to market changes. or you can buy a few books or search on google, it's pretty easy to figure out. very simple concept.