StairSteps To Riches

I just received this newsletter from Soren Jordansen, about Marl – the Stock Trading Robot is a scam. And I just want to help spread the word. Everybody be warned. Below is the story of Soren’s experience with these scam artists, excerpt from his blog at:

http://sorenjordansen.com/marl-the-stock-trading-robot-is-a-scam

Marl, The Stock Trading Robot Is A Scam!

by Soren Jordansen

A couple of weeks ago I decided to purchase and test Marl the stock trading robot (doublingstocks dot com). I fully anticipated it to be hogwash, in fact if you do a search on Google you will find plenty of people complaining about these scam artists. But I decided to test it anyway, here are the 3 reasons why (remember I did this so you don’t have to):

1) Marl the stock trading robot is currently the number 1 selling product on Clickbank and I have seen a ton of affiliates promote it on various advertising venues – as an internet marketer this of course got my attention, I wanted to check their sales process to see why they were selling so well, getting people to promote them etc.

2) I routinely reinvest a part of my profits on the stock market and I’m always looking for good information and tools that can help me make the right decisions. The notion of finding cheap penny stocks that are very likely to double is of course something that will give most investors wet dreams

3) The Stock Trading Robot has a very compelling sales page that really sucks you in – Of course it is of the “too good to be true – run away fast” nature, but for testing purposes I decided to let myself be “sucked in” and give it a test.

So what is Marl?

The background story: a young computer geek develops a computer stock trading model, while contracted to Goldman Sachs. He then goes on to develop a piece of home computer software to predict the stocks future direction by analysing a stocks past price movements. The story is plausible, however if you search on Google you will find that a number of people have already shot it to pieces e.g. he was never contracted to Goldman Sachs.

The real problem is in the premise that his new software can predict stock prices based on past price movements. Yes you can use such a model as part of your analysis, but as you can imagine it takes a lot more than that to predict stock movements e.g. overall market trends, news and most importantly reports from the companies in question. Furthermore such a technical analysis of price movement requires and ungodly amount of data an calculations – plus you still have to make your “educated” decision based on the data and the other factors.

What you get (or don’t get) when you buy!

So, my alarm bells where already ringing at this point, but as I said I had decided to go ahead and purchase it anyway.

The main product is a subscription to their newsletter and it has a $47 price tag. Supposedly you will receive a weekly newsletter with a couple of recommended stocks as calculated by Marl. I paid and entered my name and email – I promptly received an autoresponder email from Michael Cohen (the developer). The email thanked me for signing up and told me that I would get my first newsletter on Sunday – well two Sundays later I still haven’t received anything. Again if you search on Google you will find that this is the most common complaint (and I can guarantee you 100% that this was not a junk folder issue on my end).

Bottomline: $47 wasted on getting a thank you email. The so called stock prediction newsletter might have been worth $47 if they actually bothered to send something – Of course if they did I would highly doubt it was based on a technical analysis by a stock trading robot

But it gets worse!

After you subscribe to the newsletter you get presented with an offer to buy your own version of the stock trading robot. It sells for $97 and sounds like a very good deal – you can then “predict” as many stocks as you like instead of getting 1 or 2 in your weekly newsletter… Yeah right LOL, but of course I also had to test this option.

I got my download right away and it was easy to install – a few minutes later I burst out in hysterical laughter…

1) You are supposed to download EOD (End Of Day) files from the various stock exchanges and to analyze movements you, of course, need as much previous data as possible. The stock trading robot offers these EOD files from their website and they are nicely formatted so it’s easy to import into your database. Problem: I have checked on a daily basis and they only have EOD’s available for April 18th 2008 – they do not update this and of course you can’t analyze movement from a one day data set.

2) Big deal, you can get EOD files from hundreds of websites including Yahoo Finance. Problem is that this “state of the art” stock trading robot does not support the conventional formats for the EOD files and it took me forever to get some valid data in there… No worries, afterall I was ready to get rich now.

3) The stock trading robot does not predict a damn thing. It has a range of filters you can use to analyze the stock movements, but nothing you can’t find in your own stock trading platform e.g. etrader. In fact the tools and interface in Marl is the worst I have seen in a long time and the documentation is virtually non-existent.

Conclusion – Run Away Fast!

There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that this is a scam. They have a highly optimized sales process, but deliver absolutely nothing of what was promised. The only saving grace was a couple of PDF’s with decent content, but nowhere near the $47 and $97 value. I have seen this a hundred times, their concept is to push enough sales through and then hope that people don’t refund (either because they forget or because they don’t want to admit that they got robbed)… I got my refunds from Clickbank today and if you have purchased this piece of junk I suggest that you go there and ask for yours.

My recommendation

There is nothing wrong with wanting to earn a significant ROI on penny stocks. But here’s what I suggest, take your $47-$97 to Amazon or your local bookstore – there are hundreds of great books on small cap investment strategies. Follow the market news both online and offline and do your own research on the companies you want to invest in. If you don’t want to do all the leg work, put you money in an investment fund that specializes in penny stocks – trust me that is far better than wasting your hard earned $ on a scammy stock trading robot.

Are you promoting Marl?

Are you one of the thousands of affiliates who are promoting Marl? I can understand the lure, it sells like hot cakes and pays some great commissions – to be honest that was one of reason why I decided to test it, had it been any good I would have been all over it. But you may want to take a step back and think… is a few quick bucks worth risking your reputation? I have seen people destroy their internet marketing career in a single email blast! And can you live with selling a known scam? The decision is yours.