Got another sales letter for Hugo Lawrence’s “PentaTrade Profit System” this morning from Streetwise Publications.

They want to give me a “cast iron” 30 day money back guarantee so I can:

“Tear open the packaging , watch the DVD, listen
to the audios, read the beautifully produced
full-colour training materials…”

I did notice that they have changed the sales letter to remove the strange comment about other trading systems. You can read more about that particular sales letter here:

Hugo Lawrence and the “Pentatrade Profit System”

I have received a lot of letters about this particular opportunity so I decided to have a root around the web to find out more about Hugo Lawrence.

As I mentioned in the last blog post about PentaTrade, Hugo Lawrence was advertising in the national press earlier this year. I mistakenly said it was the Sunday Times but, looking back at my records, it was actually the Mail on Sunday.

His first advert was printed on the 5th February 2006 and it advertised two websites – bcfpublishing.co.uk and 2busy2trade.com – both of which are now offline.

The first site (bcfpublishing.co.uk) offered a trading course called “Secrets of Financial Trading” for £97, quite a lot less than the £2000+ needed to buy the PentaTrade Profit System.

In the sales letter for this course Hugo states:

The fee for my home study course is just £97.00.
Why is my course priced so low? Because I know
there are people who charge exorbitant fees for
trading information

The second site (2busy2trade.com) offered a more expensive trading course called “Trading for the Long Term” for $425 (discounted from $895).

It was quite interesting to see that this course focused around trading a “Window of Opportunity” – just as PentaTrade does.

The second time Hugo advertised in the Financial Mail was on Sunday the 23rd April 2006 where his ad only contained the BCF Publishing website.

By this time Hugo had changed the website so that it advertised his “Private Protege – Mentoring For Success Program”. This was priced at £695 and involved a trading course in Devon limited to just 10 attendees.

The site contained several testimonials from past students who praised Hugo’s teaching methods as well as the same photo of Hugo in front of dual monitors which is present on the PentaTrade sales literature.

It looks like Hugo Lawrence has put his BCF Publishing websites on hold so that he can concentrate on supporting the PentaTrade students…

If you haven’t heard of Matt Shaw, here’s a little history.

Matt runs the Fixed Odds Trader service which offers recommendations on bets to place on BetOnMarkets. These are specifically fixed-odds bets on financial markets.

Basically, you sign up for Matt Shaw’s service and he emails you with details of each new bet he places, why he places it and where he puts the stop loss.

Matt apparently used to work in a warehouse but quit when he found he could make more by betting on the markets – especially since his winnings are tax-free.

Recently a subscriber to the free business opportunity email newsletter sent in the following review of Matt Shaw’s Fixed Odds Trader service:

“Further to your bizopp letter I have been doing Matt Shaws fixed odds betting on a virtual (paper trade) account.

IT WORKS! but it has taken me 2 weeks risking £160 to £180 per bet to win a £85.00 in total.

I must admit it is very safe but in betting there is always a risk and you will need to bet lots of indices every day to make real money.

However it is worth the money but I suspect I will never have the balls to stake in thousands which one will have to make big money”

Another A4 envelope through the post today and again it is from Streetwise Publications’ John Harrison.

You can always tell before you even open it – the “if undelivered” address on the reverse gives it away…

OK, this time around it’s another offer of the Pentatrade Profit System for just £1947 + VAT (£2287.72) and the sales pack is very thorough.

First of all there is an opening letter from Mr Harrison who was says:

“Shock Confession… I Was Wrong!“.

OK, but what on earth were you wrong about?

It seems that John has known about the Pentatrade Profit System for several months but was sworn to secrecy by the creator Hugo Lawrence.

Hugo is a perfectionist and would not allow the course to be released until everything was perfect which was really frustrating for the Streetwise boss. But… he was wrong to try and rush Hugo because this new course is “worth the wait“!

Second up is the huge sales letter. It’s 20 pages long and goes into great detail about how you can use this new course to “‘Steal’ Thousands A Month From The Biggest Pile Of Money On The Planet“.

You see Hugo has developed 5 special profit alerts which, when they all line up together, give you the green light to get thousands of pounds from trading the financial markets.

Indeed, it’s a “sure-fire way of making thousands of pounds, month after month, year after year… forever!”

It’s all a very convincing sales letter until, on page 10, there is a very strange claim about other trading systems:

“…There are plenty of ‘systems’ out there and I’ve tried many of them. Most are ‘okay’ and could bring you £200 – £500 a month. But NONE are as powerful as Pentatrade!”

Now, how can a system only bring you up to £500 a month? Surely he means 200 – 500 points a month.

If a system could make you 200 – 500 points a month then if I was trading £10 a point I would make £2,000 to £5,000 a month. If I was trading £1,000 a point I would make £200,000 to £500,000 a month and so on…

It’s probably just an error in the sales copy – after all it’s very unlikely that Hugo Lawrence actually wrote it himself.

There are then 10 more pages of sales copy explaining how much money you can make and how easy it is. What it basically boils down to is that you will be day-trading all manner of financial markets in order to try and scalp some points each day.

Hugo does own up and say that sometimes you will not be trading – some days the five indicators will not match to give you the “green light” so you do not trade at all that day.

However, he also says that if the “Window of Opportunity” is open and “some alerts are there, [you] might have to wait a while to see all five line-up…”

Fair enough, at least he is honest!

Personally I don’t have the time or patience to sit watching charts all day. I get the feeling it’s probably rather boring and stressful, especially if things aren’t going your way.

Searching for information about Hugo Lawrence doesn’t actually bring much up although I did find that he placed an advertisement in the Sunday Times earlier this year promoting his spread trading seminars which were around £500 – £1000. The websites have since been taken down…

As per usual with Streetwise Publications, you get to test the course risk-free for 30 days. If you don’t like it you can return it for a full refund – as is mentioned in the sales letter and again on the third part of the sales pack, the “Risk Free Priority Reservation Certificate“.

I won’t be buying to be perfectly honest as my trading is longer term and day-trading doesn’t appeal to me…

I have been trading though, you can check out how I am doing with my little spread betting “experiment” at the other blog:

http://bizoppsuk.blogspot.com

Over the past couple of years I have had several sales letters from Michael promoting his beginners course called “Making Money From Financial Speculation”.

I took the plunge recently and have been reading the manual and watching the DVD included.

The course name sounds similar to Vince Stanzione’s “Making Money From Financial Spread Trading” and is very similar.

However, rather than simply covering spread betting and fixed-odds trading, Michael also goes into the basics of trading with CFDs and trading the cash market.

The package is very well presented apart from a few typos here and there.

Also, there is a solid refund guarantee, something which is lacking in Vince’s home study course.

Unfortunately, most of what Michael has included in the course was useless to me as I have been studying trading for a couple of years.

Apart from the section on CFDs, the remainder of the course is pretty standard stuff on moving averages and trends.

Still, if you are new to trading, I have seen a lot worse.

And the price is not extortionate at just £53.95.

You can read more at:

http://www.BizOppsUK.com/michael_hein.php

Darren Winters runs investment seminars through his company, the Winters Investment Network.

He has been giving these 3 day workshops for years but recently started a major advertising campaign in the National Press. You may have seen the adverts in the Sunday Mail or, quite surprisingly, Inside Soap magazine!

(Of course, I don’t buy this magazine – honestly – but my girlfriend reads it every week. I just have a glance through to look at the adverts)

With this new campaign, WIN Investing are touring the UK offering free, 3 hour trading workshops.

I attended the Manchester workshop and was looking forward to seeing Darren in full sales mode.

Unfortunately I was sad to see that he wasn’t there and had sent one of his employees to do the selling.

Expecting the big man himself, I was very disappointed and left halfway through.

A week later I received a call from a very nice lady from WIN Investing offering me a hefty discount on the seminar but I politely declined. She also offered me a home study course which I also declined.

Perhaps if Darren was still doing the seminars himself I would have accepted but they have employed a new investing guru to run the 3 day weekend courses.

If you are interested, there is more on the site:

http://www.BizOppsUK.com/darren_winters.php

Vince Stanzione runs similar courses and also offers a home study course on financial trading. He too is featured on the site:

http://www.BizOppsUK.com/vince_stanzione.php