These updates were previously provided on the main website under the Vince Stanzione review page but I’ve decided to move them onto the blog as it is easier to post them here.

A load of trades expired on the 14th June 2011 and caused a large move in the balance of the account.

Here are the important numbers:

Trades opened: 42
Winning trades: 28
Losing trades: 13
Break-even trades: 1

This leaves my spread betting account up 24.1% from the balance at the close of play on the 15th March 2011 (the time of the last update).

28 trades rolled-over – can you guess why? These will all expire on the 20th September 2011.

As this account approaches its first anniversary, the overall return on closed positions is a very healthy 27.08%.

Speaking to a business associate over the weekend it occurred to me that not everybody has a vast understanding of spreadbetting and that, compared to some, I’ve got plenty of experience! My account with Finspreads was opened way back in 2004 and has had many ups and downs.

In fact, I discovered some old trading statement emails from back in April 2004. These showed just how undisciplined my trading was in the early days.

For example, I lost almost 50% of my bank in just 10 positions over a week (!) and then made 20% from 9 positions over the next two weeks when I was on holiday and away from a computer.

The style of trading I adopt now – where I often don’t check my positions for days, and only open new trades once a week – is far less stressful and appears to be performing quite well at present.

With the low amount of funds I have I am limited in the markets I can trade. All of my trades over the last year have been on UK shares that are under £7 whereas back in the days where I was losing a lot of money I would trade Gold, GBP/USD, US shares and stock indices.

My main aim for the first 12 months of this new, cautious approach to spreadbetting was to simply not lose money and providing that I don’t suddenly make a huge mistake or get caught on the wrong side of all of my trades, I could end up doing better than I imagined.

With stop losses in place on all my trades, I know that I am covered to an extent against a sudden crash (or boom) in the markets. Providing we don’t see massive gapping occurring in UK FTSE 350 shares I should survive.

What was missing in my trades back in 2004 was a solid money management plan. Everything I traded was at, say, £1 a point or £2 a point. It was always rounded up to the nearest pound.

Today it is different. One trade I opened this morning is for 72p a point, another for £1.05 a point. A few weeks ago I opened a trade for £5.23 per point but this has the same risk as all of the others.

Is this money management plan helping me to make successful trades? Maybe. What it definitely is doing is allowing me to relax. I know the worst case scenario for any trade I make and that makes it far less stressful.

No margin calls, no anxiously watching the screen hoping for a turnaround.

Risking only 2% per trade means I’d have to have 50 losers in a row to go bust. Although this can happen, the likelihood is low.

At the moment, it is quite enjoyable to be a “spreadbettor”.

It has been difficult to keep a straight face this week whilst watching the pretty ridiculous goings-on of a big, well-known business opportunity publisher.

This company – which here I’ll call “ABCD” – have built a reputation over the years of always offering a no nonsense, no questions asked money back guarantee on all of their products.

And they’ve been very successful.

Several years ago they sold a very expensive financial trading product and brought in millions of pounds in orders. It set of a bit of a trend.

There have been many other manuals, newsletters and courses over the years. Some good, some poor but each one with a solid money back guarantee.

For some reason ABCD have recently released a brand new product with one of those “mystery” opp sales letters. This is where the promotional letter gives very few details about what the opportunity involves.

The buyers still ordered- many who were probably previous customers and trusted ABCD with their money, assuming that they’d be able to get their money back without any fuss if it turned out to be a poor product.

Some found the product to be poor and sent it back to request a refund.

Here’s where it got silly.

ABCD apparently aren’t issuing refunds without a fight, claiming that the guarantee only applies if the product”doesn’t work”.

As you can imagine, this has enraged the buyers who have been refused refunds.

Of course in this day and age it is easy to find other people who aren’t happy with a product. All you need to do is go to a business opportunity forum or a review site that allows comments.

So that’s what the buyers did, congregated on forums and blogs, discussing the way they’d been treated by ABCD.

And the discussions went on with each comparing the various silly excuses they’d been given why they couldn’t have a refund.

Until…

ABCD appeared to get their lawyers involved.

Yes, ABCD have allegedly been issuing threats to the forum and blog owners about these supposed “defamatory” remarks about this new product.

The discussions have now been severely edited.

One forum owner has even stated that the forum will shortly be removed because he is tired of being threatened and of having to moderate the posts.

All in all it’s farcical.

The internet has been a blessing for consumers as it can be used to compare products and give reviews and warnings to others.

Biz opp publishers who want to write “blind” sales letters – letters where the opportunity isn’t outlined – no longer have the advantage they used to because the subject of their product is now revealed quickly.

And that’s a good thing.

10 years ago this wasn’t possible but now if you can’t figure out what a sales letter is saying you can simply wait a week or so and someone will review it online.

In this case ABCD, instead of creating a good product with a reasonable no-risk guarantee, are refusing refunds to unhappy buyers.

And they are damaging their reputation at the same time.

So instead of simply pacifying customers by giving them their money back, they appear to send legal threats to any website owners who carry unfavourable reviews of their products.

There are rumours that ABCD are having financial issues. Maybe this is true, maybe not, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence.

However, behaviour like this i.e. desperately holding on to customers’ cash when they aren’t happy, certainly makes it look like something is very wrong.

2010 saw the general uptake of a particularly scammy technique – the “False Scarcity” claim on a sales page.

The way it works is simple – a marketer releases a product in a big launch but swears that there are only x copies. The x is usually a small, believeable number such as 200 or 300.

The limit is placed on sales to give the launch a feeling of scarcity and prompt the potential customer to act quickly before “stocks” run out.

Of course, most of these products are digital – eBooks, videos, membership sites – so they will never technically run out of stock.

Is it fraud?

I’m not a lawyer so I wouldn’t know. It does strike me as a bit of a scummy thing to do.

These marketers are lying to their customers.

A good (or bad, depending on how you look at it) example of this in action was Matt Bacak’s “Mass Money Makers” launch on the 28th December 2010.

From Matt’s salespage:

“we’re forced to limit access to this powerful software to the next 200 lucky individuals”
“After we reach the next 200 downloads, we’ll be forced to pull the software off market”
“Thousands of people will see this page, but only the next 200 individuals will get access to this software”

To anyone reading that they would think that there are only 200 places available. However, that’s not so.

On his JV pitch page – where Matt sends potential affiliates to ask them to promote his product – he says this:

“We’re talking reaching the unreachable…2,000 Clickbank Gravity (which has never been reached before) and seeing the unseeable, 20,000 front end units (front end units, not total units) – and in turn create history”

20,000 front end units?

I’ve one question; how would you be able to sell 20,000 front end units if you are limiting the number of customers to just 200?

Very disappointing behaviour but I’ll bet now that, because it works so well, false scarcity is used more and more in 2011.

Has anyone seen Kevin Potts?

Kevin Potts, the man behind the Cambridge Business Academy and the wildly expensive “Churchill Apprentice” course, has disappeared.

His membership site has been closed down with a notice claiming it has been “sold” and his business partners (or should that be ex-business partners?) aren’t saying anything at all.

It’s a big mystery what’s happened and with Kevin keeping a very low profile he is just fuelling the speculation.

The “Churchill Apprentice” course cost £20,000 per place and if claims are to be believed around 100 people signed up.

These people were promised full access to the Cambridge Business Academy website and staff but now, a few months later, all of that appears to be gone.

A very strange way of doing business.

One of the reasons it was successful was because the website ranked very high for the term “make money online”. Surely anyone buying the site would do so to take advantage of that ranking?

By wiping all of the content from the site and leaving just a small piece of text on the front page, the site will lose that valuable search engine ranking. This does sow doubt in the mind to the claim that it has been sold.

Any information would be gratefully received, the Kevin Potts saga is turning into a big talking point going into 2011.

To make a change from writing blog posts about dodgy opportunities, here’s an update that is similar to the newsletters I used to send out and focuses on some good opps.

I realise that these appear to be few and far between recently.

Further down you’ll find links to some great free information from a well-known expert information publisher who has been quiet for quite some time. Evidently he’s still beavering away in the background.

But first…

The One A Day System

This opp is currently being tested and the results updated regularly on the main site:

The “One a Day” System from Clive Keeling of Canonbury Publications

Sometimes it seems that as soon as I start to test a system it goes through a big losing streak.

Remember the Lazy Lay system from a couple of years ago?

The Lazy Lay Quick Profits System by Bill Stratford

Not long after I started to use that system it began to lose money consistently.

Eventually it seems everyone gave up on it, apart from the publishers that is, who still have it up for sale online.

Clive’s system started quite badly for me, the second bet was a painful loser, as was the 5th bet but then it got interesting.

Ten winning bets over ten consecutive days brought the bank back into profit and suggested that this system has potential.

Of course, 3 losing days in a row straight after that threw a spanner in the works and even Clive admitted on the 3rd day that he should’ve declared it a “no bet” day.

19 bets so far probably isn’t a valid statistical test so I will be continuing with this one.

If you’re interested in the One A Day system, keep an eye on the results using the link above.

A 100 day test would seem to be reasonable as that would equate to 100 bets so that’s what I’ll aim for.

Making Money From Financial Spread Trading

If you’ve read through BizOppsUK.com then you’re probably aware that Vince Stanzione’s spread betting course was the first biz opp I bought back in 2004.

Since then I’ve jumped in and out of spread betting and fixed odds betting. My BetOnMarkets accounts never did very well and I can’t say I’ve ever really warmed to that site.

Spread betting, however, is a completely different story.

At the beginning I lost some money – mainly through making some silly day trades on a whim – but recently I have been quite successful trading UK shares long and short.

I’ve a load of trades open at the moment, all expiring on the 14th December and overall I am doing pretty well. Of course, this could all change by the expiry date so we will have to wait and see.

However, I am very happy with the latest version of Vince’s course which has gone through a re-vamp.

More details are available on the site, including results:

Vince Stanzione, Spread Betting and First Information

Stuart Goldsmith

Over the weekend I was looking through the manuals and folders sat on my bookshelf and found a course I hadn’t read in some time – Escape the Matrix by Stuart Goldsmith.

In the past Stuart always seemed to retire, then return, then retire again. He has been quiet for a long time now with no new products.

His site shows that he is still writing from time to time and you can read several of Stuart’s reports for free – completely free, he doesn’t even ask for an email address – on his site:

Stuart Goldsmith – Free Downloads

Have a good read through his reports, it’s well worth your time and you may well just pick up some ideas that you can use to make more money.

Random Bits

Have you used Vince Stanzione’s methods? How have you fared?

What about the One A Day System? What kind of results have you got?

Are there any other betting systems that you like the sound of but haven’t bought yet? I’m looking for other systems to test, hopefully ones from credible sources, not the junk that one Barnsley internet marketer keeps releasing under fake names!

If you’ve anything to add, feel free to add a comment to this post.

Over the last year it’s been interesting to watch the fallout from the recession, especially in the business opportunity world.

It’s a funny thing selling business opportunities – you are selling a product that is supposed to make the customer money.

Therefore if you sell products about making money, your company should be able to make money. If you can’t make money and admit you can’t then you lose all of your credibility. So it’s very important for biz opp publishers to keep up the pretence that they’re still making a lot of money.

Over the past couple of years the market for selling “make money” products has become more and more difficult. You won’t hear this from many people because they can’t admit this.

What you will hear more and more are such claims as; “it’s easier to make money in a recession because more people are looking to make money“.

Rubbish.

The usual buyers in the business opportunity market aren’t buying as much as they did two or three years ago, this is something that is being talked about in the bar at seminars, during mastermind sessions and via gossipy Skype chats.

We’re seeing some big biz opp and internet marketing people suffering in this downturn – but they’ll never admit it simply because they can’t. Their methods are supposed to work in all climates but cracks are beginning to show.

Take for example the £2,000 one-year mentoring course from a big UK publishing company that is now offered at £750. It wouldn’t usually raise any eyebrows except this is a company that never offers discounts and never reduces the price of its products.

Something’s very wrong if they’re suddenly offering huge discounts…

And there are other examples.

Take a look at the high-profile casualties of the recession:

Tim Brocklehurst – Tim closed his “MyViralSpiral” site with no warning and it later turned out that he was having financial difficulties:

What happened to Tim Brocklehurst’s MyViralSpiral?

Andy Shaw and Greg Ballard – Andy and Greg claimed to be millionaires who had made it big via property investing and information publishing. It was less than a year ago that they both were declared bankrupt in Brighton:

Andy Shaw and Greg Ballard from Passive Investments – Bankrupt?

(Greg seems to have vanished but Andy is now trying to sell a financial trading opportunity)

Pat Lovell and Sean Roach sold Rip2It as a complete business-in-a-box that anyone could use to make money, even if they’d never build a website before. Their whole business partnership collapsed late in 2009 and Pat appears to have left the internet marketing scene completely:

Pat Lovell is No Longer Associated with Rip2it

Sometimes Things Happen for a Reason

Which leads to…

The lastest offering from Streetwise Publications.

This is of lower quality than their usual offerings and certainly isn’t something they would’ve released a few years ago when they were able to sell 10 CDs for £2k (remember the Insider Signal?)

I can’t say I’m impressed with the Complete Computer Cashpoint and that should be obvious in my write-up:

The Complete Computer Cashpoint from James Walker and Streetwise Publications

When will things improve? No one can say for sure.

I’d imagine that we’ll know that the economy is improving when the quality of business opportunity products begins to increase and we see less and less “get rich quick” opps being offered.

It’ll be nice to write about some good opportunities for a change…