Do Rick’s Picks Subscribers Make Money?

[Rick’s Picks has never promised subscribers that we would make them rich.  That takes hard work and discipline, as well as the understanding that it is impossible to succeed by blindly following someone else’s advice. Our goal is to give people the tools they need to trade confidently and with very tight control of risk.  One subscriber, Dale P., has been hard at it for six years, diligently honing his expertise in applying the Hidden Pivot Method so that, he says, it now produces significant income for him.  Dale, who  work nights in the health care field and trades during the day, talks about the learning process in the guest commentary below. It is actually an excerpt from a recent discussion in the Rick’s Picks chat room.  If you are interested in learning more about our proprietary method for trading and forecasting yourself, click here. RA]

“[In the chat room just now], Johnny asked if anyone was making money here, and I would like to give him my answer supported with facts that, for the most part, you can verify [by checking out trades I’ve signaled in here today].  Yes, we are making money here. Often, subscribers come in to thank Rick for helping pay off their subscription, or a loan or car note, etc.  I have never blown my own horn, but today I will. I began following Rick six years ago when he was posting “black box” predictions on another website. Eventually he went to a fee-based subscription. I had lost thousands of dollars trading options, and my 401k’s were ravished. I had never ventured into the futures markets. I decided that I had to do something to stop the bleeding, so I subscribed to the new Rick’s Picks, and in the first month or two, took his course for $975. It was an eye-opener — the best market decision that I have ever made. Since then, I have made nearly seven figures using his Hidden Pivot system.

“Not convinced? I understand. Lets ‘follow the money.’ Keep in mind, that because JP Morgan’s Blythe Masters and other trading desks have sent their monkeys to monitor this chat room, sometimes I/we don’t give our precise buy and sell points. Nevertheless, just today, I have made several posts, but in particular, look at my posts at [various times during the day]. I don’t reveal the size of my trades, but you can assume they are multiples of one.  The first trade [in June Gold], a short from 1594.5 to 1574.1, produced a gain of $2000 per contract. (See my posts at 03:02 and 03:26). At 03:13, I posted that I had covered my short (from 1594.5) and gone long at 1574.1; I covered the long at 1576.10 (or $200 per contract higher). My stop-loss was posted at 03:51; at 09:10, I posted a Hidden Pivot pattern that I used to get short at 1782.7 and listed targets that were determined using Rick’s system. I covered half for a gain of $410 per contract at the midpoint (posted at 09:32) and was stopped out on the other half, as posted at 09:42. So, on average I netted $205 per contract on that trade. At 10:53, I posted a short on the E-Mini S&P (at 1360) ; I’m still short and up $550 per contract as I type this. At 11:11, I shorted [June Gold] again at 1589, (current price 1580.80). but didn’t get it posted because [conversations in the chat room] had me tied up. So you can see (or should be able to see) that I am up a ‘multiple’ of $3775 [on the verifiable] trades listed above. Do we make money here? Yes.

‘I Tried and Lost’

[In the chat room, ‘Doma’ responded:  “Dale, I must agree. I tried a lot and lost a lot, but trading became safe and find with Rick’s magic Hidden Pivots.” Dale answered as follows: “Rick is a Master. Have a little faith and go for it. You’ll make your entry fee back in hours (days at most). Then make hay until Uncle Sam shuts it down. [Another trader in the room noted that “We are not all futures traders [with plenty of capital], to which Dale replied: “Neither was I when I took the Hidden Pivot course. You can open an account for as little as $5000. Initial margin requirements to trade the E-mini S&P is $4000 (day traders, $1250), Gold is $8500 (day traders, $5031). But the system works for E-minis, Natural Gas ($372 margin), 10-year bonds ($439), lean hogs ($743), Dollar Index ($1197), Corn ($1182), Soy Beans ($1688), and E-mini Crude Oil ($2530).”

If you’d like to join the chat room and ask traders yourself how they’re doing, click here for a free trial subscription to Rick’s Picks.

  • Al Kyda May 18, 2012, 3:07 am

    I’m sure someone makes money. I’m also sure someone loses money. Like gambling, it’s a zero-sum game. There’s an associated bell curve, so there will be a few that appear to make money consistently. However, I wouldn’t bet on their staying there for long.

  • Bradley May 17, 2012, 5:15 pm

    Cam,
    what I’d like to know is how did you forecast the move in gold today?
    Even with technical levels being met, why today rather than tomorrow?
    Options expiration? Sun spots?
    Damn good call!

    • Mario cavolo May 17, 2012, 5:29 pm

      Oh come on Bradley…. It’s a freakin’ dartboard sometimes…don’t idol worship. We,re all intelligent and make calls and sometimes hit ’em right on the mark…why today rather than tomorrow?….because that,s how it turned out today! I,ve had options triple in an hour and felt like a genius until the next time I was wrong 🙂

  • mario cavolo May 17, 2012, 5:48 am

    I’ll make a comment about Rick’s service here.

    I was a subscriber awhile back but I’m not now because I don’t have the time nor capital to trade, not because the service didn’t deliver.

    What I want to say is that Rick, with his service, doesn’t think in terms of “right or wrong”. There is no such thing in trading. You can say “oh the market will go up today” And the moment it ticks down, you are wrong and that happens approximately, here’s the big surprise, 50% of the time!

    Rick’s expertise and guidance is not about right and wrong, its about managing technical reality and indications of trend. If you do do what the guidance says, then you manage risk, so that when you’re stopped out you have minimized your loss to $1 while when the trade goes in the planned profitable direction you make $3 (for example) . And so in the end , you make money.

    I, for the life of me can’t figure out why my brain is wired such that I simply am repeatedly incapable of being a robot trader like that. My human, intelligent brain second guesses my choices, then second guesses those second guesses, then again, just like even the brightest minded, professional IDIOTS at JPM did to lose $2 billion plus. Hmm, so then that’s a case of getting caught, of biting of more than you can chew and having to eat it. Right, exactly right, because when I have lost on my trades, it also has been consistently because I have entered into a position size or leverage that was more than it should have been relative to the size of my account, risking more than a small percentage of my account on EACH position trade.

    I know what I have said above make sense and is reasonable. Rick is a consummate, experienced professional, yet my comments are not in fact intended as a supportin sales pitch to him, to either praise nor criticize his service. Rick’s trades don’t ever go “wrong”, there is no such thing, they simply get stopped out and that’s the end of it, you’re on to the next trade. Again, I find myself repeatedly incapable of that kind of self-guided control as a trader.

    Therefore I have reached the point where, for example, I would rather give $20,000 to Rick and let him do it for me, while collecting his gravy off the top. Now I think that’s called a managed acount, right? That’s what guys like George Soros do, but only with much larger account balances, right? Well, so Rick doesn’t offer such a managed account. Maybe several of us who know and trust each other through this site for over 2 years should pool our money and consider a private investment club arrangement with Rick that would further improve, spread and control the risk-related issues to Rick’s trading system? I do believe I’ve stated the case here, including my own personal dilemna, quite clearly and welcome the discussion.

    Cheers, Mario

  • Alvaro de Orleans-B. May 16, 2012, 3:06 pm

    Maybe Rick’s subscriber Dale intelligently applies an aphorism written around 1850 by a German poet and philosopher, Christian Friedrich Hebbel.

    It was hanging, nicely framed, behind the desk of an UBS board member in Zürich, and I respectfully submit that we should all keep it in the back of our minds:

    “What a man gains, he pays for dearly, even if only with the fear of losing it again”.

    Maybe that’s why Dale, after a 7 figure gain, prudently keeps his job!

    • Steve May 16, 2012, 4:53 pm

      Yes

  • Mukesh Sharma May 16, 2012, 2:29 pm

    It is heartening to note the Rick’s subscriber Dale has made close to a 7 figure profits by trading the Hidden Pivot method. I wonder when he is going to give up his night shift job in the health care industry.

    • Rick Ackerman May 16, 2012, 6:25 pm

      Being a bit presumptuous, aren’t you, Sharma? If Dale has three kids in college and a wife who likes fine jewelry, he may be barely making ends meet.

  • mario cavolo May 16, 2012, 7:09 am

    I have to laugh my ass off at the markets these days, they are the most psychotic mind f&^%$’! I have ever seen

    Here’s the proof:

    EVERYONE is going SHORT! Its a pile on in the grammar school kid’s playground!!!! Well, we all know what that means, right? The market’s online sites and every guru are all finally smarter than the market and intelligently, analytically in unison see that only a fool would go long now. Everyone KNOWS THIS TIME AND CAN CLEARLY OBVIOUSLY SEE THIS TIME THAT THE MARKET IS OBVIOUSLY GOING TO TANK, SHOULD TANK, IT CAN’T NOT TANK. AND ITS ACTUALLY HHHHHAAPPPPENNNGGG….GO SSSSSSHOOORTTTTTT HURRY HURRY….!

    EVEN BERNANKE HAS THROWN IN THE TOWEL…

    I am an idiot, an idiot who, however remembers that when every human being knows its time to go short and when every HFT computer also goes short, and the volume of inverse ETF’s surges with all that smart short money, that the last thing the market is going to do is go DOWN much more than it already has because there’s nobody left to do any more selling.

    Ahh but wait. Unless, they say, there are actual, genuine economic fundamentals leading the descent into a bull’s everlasting hell.

    So, is that the case or not? Really? I mean really really? There are NOT thousand’s of legitimate profitable worldwide multinational corporations selling boatloads of goods and services across the globe? Earnings, even legit uncooked,, corporate earnings are broadly HORRIBLE?

    Or, am I missing the point completely, which is that the banking/financial/market system is at its core so completely corrupted and fragile that 2 or 3 particular triggers can cause humpty dumpty to rapidly come tumbling down Argentina / Weimar style except across the world’s three major continents. Now I must say that the corrupt, stuck fiscal irresponsibility taking place in the U.S. govt right now may in fact be one of those triggers. Its like China, a place where no one wants to make a decision because they don’t want to take the responsibility. Well for different reasons and in a differnet, that is what we have in Washington. A bunch of self-serving asses who have run the country into the ground with their self-serving political careers and big boy, elite-serving agendas.

    Then also, I keep reading words like the Dow is going to TANK below 12,000. I have to laugh my ass off. Since when its that a TANK?

    Isn’t it GREAT for Europe that the Euro is going down in value? Won’t that result in increasing exports and other benefits? Isn’t it in fact, not very important whether Greece leaves the EURO? In fact, what does a small, broke country needing to leave the EURO have to do with global markets much, much larger?

    Let me tell all of you something. If and as the EURO sinks to 1.0 with the USD, Europe will then work through its recession/depression and the cycle will go back up again, someway somehow as the fundamentals shift. I know, for example, I WILL GO THERE TO SPEND MY MONEY AS THE EURO SINKS LOWER. Won’t you? Won’t many businesses? Think about that from the broader perspective.

    Rick, I believe, would say, keep your nose out of the news and in the charts. Meanwhile, gold/silver seem like no more than big boy’s las vegas speculation games, they don’t really “indicate” anything to us. They are a reacting asset, not an indicating one and they even change what they are reacting too! How’s that for hard to follow and trade? Looking at changing ratios of stuff , like pricing the S&P in oil or gold or copper, etc is a ridiculous waste of time in today’s world. The financial markets and factors impacting them are NOTHING like ever before, not even close!

    If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.

    If you want to make the markets laugh, go SHORT NOW. It doesn’t occur to anyone that that market will simply trade sort of kind of “sideways” in the S&P 1200 to 1350 band for the next year or more? Why does the market have to be tanking or shooting to the moon?

    Nuts folks. End rant…Cheers, Mario

    • Robert May 16, 2012, 11:40 pm

      “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans”

      I always loved that one.

      Nice rant, Mario 🙂

  • mario cavolo May 16, 2012, 6:07 am

    I find that any and all failure to be profitable as a trader are my own inability to be disciplined, to be clearheaded, to apply consistent risk management practices. On the other hand, I have also found over and over and over and over again that even using stops, it is tough stuff. I would be a millionaire if I could have a buck for every time my stop was taken out and then the trade went my way within the hour or day or week. That’s maddening stuff. The name of the game and the ability to follow the game has to be based on “Rule #1 Protect your capital from losses. Rule #2 Earn on trades. But navigating that middle ground proves a fascinating challenge. I in fact, recently decided I would rather find a qualified person I could trust to do it for me, to save me and my money from myself!!! 🙂 But I’m not actively pursuing that right now….Cheers, Mario

    • BigTom May 16, 2012, 4:34 pm

      ‘…if I could have a buck for every time my stop was taken out and then the trade went my way within the hour or day or week.’ Mario, ever wonder why that happens? Hey, with all respect to you guys out there making money in this market, I tip my hat to y’all. It’s is beyond me, I confess. But ya gotta believe the markets rigged. Did you know those ‘stops’ are out there ‘on the record’ for those in position to use. Do you believe in naked shorts? 5 yrs. ago or so I sold some gold stocks in the $50 range when gold was in the $800 range. Today gold is floating at approx. 2x’s the price and that stock this a.m. is right now $32.38! And those kind of #’s go for most all mining shares today. Is that a free market price or a rigged price? I would be willing to bet a good lot of those mine shares out there are half again rolled over on naked volumn— http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/accidentally-released-and-incredibly-embarrassing-documents-show-how-goldman-et-al-engaged-in-naked-short-selling-20120515) When the jig comes due and losses are recouped I may try and trade this ‘hidden pivot’ method, but until that time I sit and watch and wait and hope for my losses to recoup, and do laugh at the whole thing. At the moment this market is soooooo riggggggged. And on this point I will disagree with Rick. It absolutely is ‘those sleazy, child-molesting bullion bankers at Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan who have been pounding on mining stocks and bullion futures in the last few months.’ Good Luck out there Mario……

    • BigTom May 16, 2012, 4:42 pm

      that web page should read –http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/accidentally-released-and-incredibly-embarrassing-documents-show-how-goldman-et-al-engaged-in-naked-short-selling-20120515

  • erikcorr May 16, 2012, 5:05 am

    Takes time, money, energy and a knack to trade,- Im still learning- right now market is rolling over- I dont think it will crash- but thats possible- Im thinking if DOW goes below 12500 it will dip below 12 then go to 11k.

    Gold and gold miners are very cheap and right now the US dollar is king