Timothy Sykes (born April 15, 1981) is millionaire penny stock trader and entrepreneur. He is best known for earning $1.65 million by day trading while attending Tulane University.
Maps, Directions, and Place Reviews
Career
In 1999, while attending high school, Sykes used $12,415 of his bar mitzvah gift money and began day trading penny stocks. The investment would grant him about $1.65 million when he was around the age of 21.
Sykes graduated from Tulane University in 2003 with a bachelor's degree in philosophy and a minor in business. While at Tulane, Sykes routinely cut class to day trade. In 2003, during his senior year, he founded Cilantro Fund Management, a short bias hedge fund, using $1 million mostly from Sykes' friends and family.
In 2006, Sykes was included on Trader Monthly's "30 Under 30" list of up-and-coming traders in the market, a selection which editor Randall Lane later called "our worst pick" among the chosen honorees. Sykes claimed that the Cilantro Fund was "the number one long-short microstock hedge fund in the country, according to Barclays"; Lane later discovered that the rating came from "the Barclay Group," a small research company based in Fairfield, Iowa, and not the well-known Barclay's British bank.
In 2008 Sykes decided to recreate his initial investing success by again starting with $12,415. He named the attempt Transparent Investment Management (TIM). After two years, Sykes turned the sum into $90,368 and was the top ranked trader on Covestor.
Sykes self-published An American Hedge Fund: How I Made $2 Million as a Stock Operator & Created a Hedge Fund in 2007. The book documented Sykes' experiences from day-trading in college to becoming a wealthy hedge fund manager.
In 2012, Sykes created "Miss Penny Stock," a financial beauty pageant among the female representatives for his brand and company.
Best Company To Trade Penny Stocks Video
Teaching and other projects
Sykes currently works as a financial activist and educator.
In 2009, Sykes launched Investimonials.com, a website devoted to collecting user reviews of financial services, videos, and books, as well as financial brokers.
Sykes co-founded Profit.ly in 2011, a social service with about 20,000 users that provides stock trade information online. Sykes said the service serves two purposes: "creating public track records for gurus, newsletter writers and students and allowing everyone to learn from both the wins and losses of other traders to benefit the entire industry."
In December 2013, CNN Money wrote an article on Sykes and his student Tim Grittani. Under Sykes's guidance and coaching, Grittani turned $1,500 into over $1 million in 3 years. Grittani was Sykes's second student to earn over $1 million following Sykes's strategies.
Sykes founded the Timothy Sykes Foundation, which has raised $600,000 and has partnered with Make-a-Wish Foundation and the Boys and Girls Club.
In February 2017, Sykes donated $1 million to Pencils of Promise to help build 20 new primary schools across Ghana, Guatemala and Laos, to be completed between 2017 and 2018.
Controversy
Sykes is not a registered investment adviser, and has declined to provide the necessary brokerage statements and related documents to validate many of his claims.
Sykes has publicly criticized various businesses and celebrities, including Shaquille O'Neal and Justin Bieber, for promoting "pump and dump" schemes, in which an investor purchases stock, hypes others into buying that stock to inflate its price, then sells the shares at a higher price and shorts the profit from the resulting decline.
Sykes has also gained controversial attention due to racially insensitive comments in his materials. Sykes is heavily critical of Chinese companies, even stating "don't be racist in real life, but be racist in stocks" and "don't trust Chinese companies...they all live in mud huts." In one of his seminars, Sykes ignorantly boasts his condescending views on China, followed by a story about seeing a table full of Asian students chanting "Asian Table! Asian Table!"
Sykes has published a blog posted titled "Am I a Racist?" in which he concludes "If that makes me a racist so be it." Sykes then unapologetically states "I am sorry that we live in a world where people complain about anything and everything, mistakenly believing they're special and are entitled to be treated politely at all time."
Sykes had also come under criticism for racially offensive dialogue with Bow Wow during an Instagram feud. Sykes later issued an apology.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
EmoticonEmoticon