Furthermore, he is one of the top investors at Covestor Investment Management with the highest number of subscribers following his trades.  Today I share with you the interview we had recently in which he reveals what a typical day looks like for this over-worked trader/blogger.

“Tim, you are one over-worked blogger/investor having to manage various tasks from writing to investing, not to mention your personal life.  Many struggle to manage just one thing.  So what does your day look like?”

It’s not over-working if you love it. There is so much bad information out there in this joke of an industry, I could live 10 lifetimes and still not be able to fix it all. I do what I can to put a dent in the pollution, ideally inspiring others to follow my lead:

Go to bed at 2-3 AM EST, after sending out a daily watchlist to TIMalert subscribers around midnight

Wake up at 7 AM, reserves shares to short on any pump & dumps, check and respond to emails until 9 AM

9 AM-Noon I watch the market for potential trades

Noon-4 PM I either trade or work on my new DVDs, websites or write blog posts

4 PM -9 PM Dinner, reading, spend time with my beautiful girlfriend Daleela

9 PM-11 PM, Respond to emails from throughout the day

11 PM-2 AM Write the watchlist for the next day, research stocks

“You have been blogging for quite some time.  Has your blogging experience impacted your trading in any way?  What valuable lessons have you learned outside of trading?”

Blogging helps my trading immensely. Initially, I was addicted to trading, and my overall results suffered as any addict can attest.  However, now every time I make a trade, I have to send out an email alert to TIMalert subscribers, write a blog post,  and send out a text message.  Furthermore, I know I have to do the same when I exit too, so it makes me focus on only the best trades!

“As you already know, the ‘brand’ Tim Sykes has become quite controversial. People either love you or hate you. What are your thoughts on this?”

Who cares what people think! How can there be anything controversial about someone who has already turned thousands into millions before, who is up a verified 400%+ in the last 20 months, and who is the top ranked trader on Covestor for the past year?  It’s more controversial that I still have to put up with all these morons claiming I’m a scam/fraud.  My only real haters at this point are stock promoters, who are going to hell anyway, and penny stock suckers, who will never allow my strategy to be right because it’d nullify their purpose.

“Do you have any interesting facts about yourself that not many know about?”

I got rich at a very young age and found all my money not very fulfilling. Teaching suckers not be suckers anymore and cutting through the industry BS, while earning enough to keep my Jewish roots satisfied, is infinitely more interesting to me now.

“What drives you the most to be successful?  Can you tell us some of the inspirations that keep you going?  Both trading and managing your own business are not ordinary and simple tasks.  However, you seem to succeed at both!  Any secret ingredients?”

I get inspired every day by all the fraudsters, liars and cheats in the finance industry.  I know I can do better than them and eventually hurt their business enough so that they quit.  Oh yes, I have an opinion on them.  It’s disgusting what finance people resort to in order to pay the bills. The good news is that these creatures will always exist in some form, so I teach people how to profit legally from their evil, yet predictable actions.

“Can you share some past investing stories? Best and the worst trade you’ve made?”

Sure, Chapter 6 of my book “An American Hedge Fund”

Click to view the PDF file Tim shared with us. It’s an interesting chapter.

An American Hedge Fund Chapter 6

“What did you learn from the hedge fund experience?”

1. Don’t be too greedy
2. Stick to what you know
3. Everyone on Wall Street is full of sh*t
4. There are new suckers born every day

“So what does it take to be a successful penny stocker? Not all are fit to succeed in this field.”

1. Patience
2. Discipline
3. Knowledge of past setups
4. My instructional DVD training

“What’s next for Tim Sykes?  Do you have something exciting in the pipeline we can look forward to?”

3 new websites launching in late November and 4 new instructional DVD packages will be ready in December. Check http://www.timothysykes.com for all updates, I’m just getting started! Thanks again for the interview!

“Thanks for the interview Tim!”

I share his story today not because I think day trading risky stock is for everyone (in fact, I personally wouldn’t recommend it at all to the average investors given its risks) but because I believe there are various ways an individual can be successful at investing.  Whether you’re a fundamental expert, or a risk craving day trader, an economist from a renowned university or a video game champion,  everyone should be encouraged to learn the game of investing and find the best style that fits you the best.  I am a believer that everyone can succeed in this market with training, discipline, and passion.

I hope you enjoy his story. You’ll see his unique personality through his writing.  I bet you won’t see an interview like this anywhere else…because this is not the “norm” a typical investor would agree with.  I just believe in sharing interesting stories with the rest of you.  Enjoy.

What is your primary background?

My primary background is painting/sculpting/scribbling, which means I am free to interpret the world without pressure from hierarchy or medium.   The disadvantage is no structure, funding, or consumers.  I spend some of my time trying to invent a self inflicting pyramid scheme of product.   I try to start with small idiot devices of little use in order to bankroll more complex useful devices.   I have yet to fully file a patent or sell a product.  I also work on theoretical ideas that are somewhere between crank/imagination and perhaps usefulness but with little math skill or presence in an academic environment I am just making anonymous noise.

How did you get into investing?

I am a gluttonous and perhaps degenerate gambler.   I enjoy numbers, randomness, and risk.  I was interested in casino gambling a long time ago but I recognized there was nothing about it that could be profitable unless you found a manufacturing flaw and exploited it.   If you ever meet a gambler who says he has a system and makes money with it,  hes lying.   There is only one casino game you can play in the world and make money on the game itself and not the secondary systems around it, and that’s the stock market.  The markets “odds” are exponential to your skill unlike casino gambling with the possible exception of poker.

Two events led me to investing many years ago.  One is the death of my granny and the other are magical invisible boots I used to sell on ebay called J-boots.  The boots made your metame run fast within the medium of Everquest.  I noticed an emerging shadow market of the already shadowy economy within the game Everquest, and I thought I would take a crack at finding an area to exploit that I could dominate in. There were too many sellers already so I had to get very specific and sell one particular item.  I chose the J-boot because everyone had to have them, and the major sellers were not bothering to sell it due to its complicated delivery procedure.   So in a fairly short perdiod of time I had ammased a decent amount of money from death and magic virtual boots.   I then decided to take that money and push it into the markets.  I knew nothing about stock markets, and the year I made my first trade was 2001.  Both bad and good timing.  Lost more than I would have if I had started in a more prosperous time but learned a lot in the process.

When the market is plain old unsafe,  I will swing trade with hold times of a few days to a few weeks, to possibly but very infrequently, a few years.

If the market is even more unsafe I will day trade only with hold times of a few minutes to all day…. every once in a while I go overnight with something that has momentum.

Momentum is for day trading, which is either behavioral in terms of pure price action or news driven.  In the end the two blend together into a messy giant sundae, and I just try and get a few bites before it becomes a sloppy disaster.

5. They always say don’t rely on luck, don’t hope, and use fact not intuition.  I thrive on Luck, Hope, and Intuition, in fact I am hoping my intuition can find me a lucky trade tomorrow.

Thanks Brendan for the interesting story.   There are absolutely great investors who look at fundamentals.  There are absolutely great investors who come with multitude of ceritications and degrees.  There are absolutely great investors who rely on technical analysis to swiftly make successful trades.  Then there are great sculpters who take on Wall Street with a complete different set of views.

So John, tell me a bit about yourself. How did you get into investing? How long have you been trading?

I worked for a company that had a retirement plan with a small selection of very poor quality funds. I think the only 5 star rated fund was Pimco. And as it was a bond fund, it moved very slowly. At that time, I considered the market no different than a trip to Reno or Vegas. One day during the tech collapse, I opened my account documents and found that my retirement account was worth about 1/2 of what it had been the year before. So I logged onto Morningstar, reviewed the fund choices and began to try to piece my account together. I was convinced that with a little research, I could produce better results than the fund managers.

I began studying fundamentals as that’s what all the fund managers said was important. I then began watching Jim Cramer and read 3 of his books, studied DOW theory and all the things that clearly have not been as important since. I also took disastrous fliers on penny stocks based on suggestions from mailers and the like.

I can’t remember where I read it, but late last year, I encountered my first article concerning a simple crossover system to buy and sell. Go figure, it kind of worked. That was the beginning of my study of technical analysis. Unfortunately, it came too late to save most of my account from the 2008 collapse.

How would you describe your trading style to be? Short-term? Buy-and-hold? Options? Particular sectors?

My trading style has grown shorter and shorter. I would prefer to swing trade, but have become leery of holding stocks overnight. You only need to wake to find a market drop has wiped out 10% of Apple over night to make you think hard about doing that. So I pretty much daytrade now, although I do hold overnight if a stock tends to drop before close and bounce in the AM. My gut feeling is that we will exit the present lateral market in a week or so and once we pick a direction, I think a lot of the chop will be gone and I can swing trade with more confidence.

Do you have any good success stories? any past mistakes you learned from?

Past mistakes are easy; Don’t listen to CNBC, don’t listen to fund managers, don’t buy anything based on someone else’s opinion before you look at it yourself and decide that it suits your style and the present market situation.

My worst experience as I was learning was to load up (if I recall) $10,000 of APPL, $10,000 of RIMM and about a $2000 of options on the two because Cramer, Barrons and several SeekingAlpha articles said that these companies were rockets. The articles made sense, the gurus were convicing and after all, they knew more about the market than I did. I woke one morning to find the options pretty much worthless, the two stocks down about 10% and the gurus saying ‘Don’t worry, these companies will rebound. Double down’. Well, I didn’t double down, but I did buy another $5,000 of APPL. The stocks began to creep back up, only to lose another 10% the following week. I sat on the options till they expired, hoping they would come back, But took my lumps on AAPL and RIMM.

I measure successes in little bites these days. I hardly ever have more than 20% of my float in the market and take my profits as soon as the stock begins to roll over. I hardly ever keep anything more than 3 days, so big returns are limited, but I have made more than 10% with KIRK, UNG, SLV and several others. Small bites of the sandwich so to speak.

You are clearly one of the most active players on Stocktwits.com (with almost 8000 tweets). How did you discover Stocktwits? And what do you think of it as an investing tool for us traders?

Didn’t know that about me. Guess that makes me the Kudlow of Stocktwits. I have been online for over 30 years (on a few questionable BBS’s in my earlier days), but I’m not faddish about it. I like the web as a tool. I don’t have a Facebook presence, I do have a site, but I’ve only updated it twice. I found a daytrading site but it was hard to follow and limited in its use. I never would have bothered with Twitter, except that I heard about this whizz-kid trader (@Tradefast) and when I went to his site, it said to follow him on Twitter. So I did. Then StockTwits emerged and it proved to be what I was looking for. Short blurbs about particular stocks, ideas about market direction, what to watch for, links to blogs and articles and a nifty way to socialize while staring at a screen all day.

From my perspective, StockTwits is a premier tool for trading. You just need to sort out who you are going to follow and why you are following them. You cannot follow everyone, you’ll go crazy trying styles that are outside your experience and ability. Keep in mind the value of free advice!

Do you have any twitter users on Stocktwits you follow for valuable investing ideas?

That’s why I’m there really. The list is endless and I also follow people that may not be pro, but they come up with novel or off the wall ideas. Also, just because I follow some people, doesn’t mean that I trade their ideas or even agree with their picks. I can’t stress enough that you need to trade your style and not someone elses. But, a big shout out and thanks to :@alphatrends (Great TA book BTW), @stevenplace, @fundmyfund, @kunal100, @StockGod, @upsidetrader, @Mdabbles, @TradingGoddess, @hamzeiAnalytics, @DanFitzpatrick and many more.

As a power user on Stocktwits, do you have any “suggestions” as to how to make the site better? What should the next step be for Howard @howardlindzon (founder of Stocktwits) and his site?

About once a week, Howard announces a new StockTwits linked site of which he’s a co-founder and investor. He seems to have a handle on things. About the only thing I’d like is for Twitter to trot down to Best Buy and purchase another 100 servers and reinstate the Tweets that we can’t see anymore.

Lastly, do you have any investment advice to the readers?

You have to have a plan for each phase of the market and know which phase it is in. It isn’t easy to recognize the phases, but if you trade against the market, you will lose. Those phases are ‘Up choppy, up smooth, down choppy, down smooth, sideways choppy and sideways smooth”. (Can’t remember where I read that, but it’s true.) In essence, the choppier the market, the shorter your trading time frames and of course you have to be ready to change direction at any time. Nimble is the mode-de-jour. There are many ways to accommodate the market, you can hedge, use stops, use indicators, trade resistance, use options, trade portions, layer in and out. Those are the choices that you have to make to suit your style. I buy in and get out. I don’t scale in or out. I do use tight stops and stochastics on different time frames to enter and exit and I trade the market direction, presuming I got that correct.

Good luck out there, and remember, there is a gold chain wearing, cigar smoking Indian out there who will take your money if he can! ;=)

Well, that wraps it up folks.  John, again thank you very much for the opportunity for this interview.  I really appreciate it.

Well don’t worry.  There’s a reason why you were caught off guard when you visited iBankCoin expecting a typical financial blog…because it’s not.  The mastermind behind this atypical blog, mostly known only as “The Fly” (probably except a few lucky people who know his true identity), built his reader base through spiced up writing style and contents.  As described by “The Fly”, his edgy commentaries combined with his value-adding insight on the market are what led him to his current status.

If you don’t know him, get to know him now because he’s certainly a big part of my entertainment during my morning commute.  With over 2,000 followers on Twitter (@The_Real_Fly) ,~10,000 visits a day, and hundreds of comments per day, “The Fly” is doing something right.

So who the hell is he?? Although I failed to get anything that gets me closer to his true identify, he helped me answer some of the questions I personally had for him.  I hope you enjoy the interview and get to know his character that you’ll get to consume at iBankCoin.

“I know this may be a silly attempt, but I gotta try. Who are you? What is your background? Besides dishing out valuable investing contents spiced up by your entertaining style of writing, do you have other secrets that led to your popularity?”

I am “The Fly, ” better known as “Le Fly” in France or Senor Tropicana in Vegas. I’ve been managing money for more than a decade. Aside from being the best wordsmith on the internet, constantly keeping the blog updated with fresh/relevant content and generally not giving a f*ck about what people think, there are no secrets to blogging. Like anything else, in order to be successful, you need to do it better than everyone else and with greater frequency.

“Recently, the topic of bloggers and our “anonymity” sparked some discussions, thanks to Dennis Kneale and his idiotic attempts to attack the bloggers. I believe iBC was one of the bloggers mentioned by Dennis on his show – the so called “cowards”. Well, what is your rationale behind this whole anonymity? Given the premium service (PPT) you offer, you’d think you’re better off not to go this route for credibility purposes?”

Some people enjoy having their name out there, so deranged people from the internet can prank call them, during late hours of the night. Personally, I’d rather have my eyes gouged out by a pack of wild dogs, than have that happen to me; thank you very much. As for my premium service: the issue of anonymity is an irrelevant factor, since it is an analytic engine, not some sort of paid newsletter.

“Why did you start your blog? It is now quite popular with over 10,000 visits per day with hundreds commenting on posts each day. What got you so popular?”

The blog is popular because I filled a void. Before I started blogging, most finance sites followed a ridiculous moral code, whereby edgy commentary was banished and considered blasphemous. Aside from providing edgy commentary, I win a lot too, so that helps a great deal, with regards to credibility.

“You have a very unique style of writing, a rather abusive one I’d say. I personally love it and use it to spice up my dull morning commute. However, I suspect not everyone reacts the same way. Has your writing led to any haters? Threat mails? Any fun stories you can share?”

Not really. If you notice, I rarely single out people. My threats and insults are broad and general. Therefore, they are meant for no one, if you know what I mean. I’ve received a few “you’re a real jerk” emails, but nothing to call the internet police over.

“Can you tell us a bit about your PPT (premium service)? How many subscribers do you have?”

It is an analytic engine that ranks every stock that is publicly traded, sans non-listed, thinly traded turds, using specific technical and fundamental data. It’s like iBD on steroids, but better by a factor of 1,000. At the moment, we have about 400 subs.

“Your blog has been around for a few years, but I suspect you’ve been a trader much longer. How long have you been trading?”

I started investing when I was a teenager; but I did not trade until I got in the business. One of my early wins was AMER, before it became AOL. I made a lot of money on the stock, which in turn motivated me to enter the field of money management.

“What do you think of Jim Cramer?”

Jim is an entertainer and has not managed other people’s money in nearly a decade. Like an old baseball player, Jim has lost his swing, sad but true.

If you did not at least grin at some of his commentaries, you need help.  I hope you enjoyed his responses as much as I did.  Thanks to The Fly for his “exclusive” participation as he indicated he had never done an interview for anyone else.  We all get lucky once in our lifetime.

aiki14 has  ~1900 twitter followers (as of July ’09).  aiki14 has been selected as recommended twitters on Stocktwits.  aiki14 has made whopping 7000 content packed, value adding tweets that helped various investors following him.  Hell aiki14 even got interviewed by Howard Lindzon for Stocktwits TV.

So who the hell is aiki14?  Well, I present you Jim Gobetz, the man behind @aiki14 and the former Merill Lynch who now manages a hedge fund.

“So what is your background? You used to work for Merrill. You actively trade everyday.  How did it all get started?”

I Started out with investments in Real Estate, flipping residential properties. I am pretty handy so I could buy the worst place in a good neighborhood and put some sweat equity in and cash out a little on the sale. Eventually my wife and I decided to look at vacation rental properties, where we could buy a place we liked and that would generate a positive cash flow during the times we were not there. We chose beach front properties with in place management and maintenance in places we like to spend our free time. We Love Maui so we began there, and have added some properties in other places we like.

When I was just out of high school a friend was working for a brokerage and got me started in mutual funds. As the online investment and trading platforms became more robust I became more interested in trading for myself rather than let mutual fund managers run things for me.

As a big believer in education before putting capital at risk, I looked into obtaining my series 7. Through a series of lucky breaks and a little hard selling, I was hired by Merrill to work in their brokerage division. I learned a lot there and made some terrific contacts, but my interest is not in selling, it is in trading and investing. When my superiors insisted I partner up with a private banking group within the firm I felt that was a good time to move on and become an independent.

I began work on a partnership which was to be a typical long short equity hedge fund. When the other party to the partnership elected to leave, I formed The Wallingford Trust, which is a provider of Family Office services. We have an equity hedge fund inside the Trust, and I run the day to day investments of that fund as well as set the investment strategy of the trust.

My strategy for trading (as opposed to investing) is a pretty simple methodology, I look for a high beta stock or ETF that has enough liquidity to move in and out of positions rapidly and then use candles, stochastics, and volume for entry and exits, and money management based on risk assessment and confidence to allocate position sizes.Can’t say it’s the best, only that it’s been working for me.

I don’t know that I have an edge in any sense other than that I love this stuff, and it has never seemed like work to me. I find the whole process of trading and investing, and all the sociology and psychology that goes with it, absolutely fascinating. I think that allows me to put in the time and due diligence necessary without it seeming like any effort at all.

I am grateful that the Stocktwits folks have seen fit to include me in the recommended list, and I am honored that Howard chose to invite me to be interviewed. You will have to ask them as to what went into that decision. I hope it’s because I have assembled a fair body of knowledge and that the fun I am having in this game and in sharing that knowledge comes across in some fashion.

Stocktwits has helped in a couple ways. Most obviously is the way it functions as a screener for investment ideas. When someone tweets a stock or idea, they have done some thinking about it and in some cases it moves me to investigate for myself the viability of the idea for my portfolio. There are some pretty sharp folks here who are very generous in this respect and I have traded things that were mentioned here that I may not have found otherwise.

Another way it’s helped me, which is less obvious, is that when I have put an idea out into the stream it gets attacked by some of the same sharp folks. One of the hardest things about trading is that one tends to only look for things that support ones position, and this can lead to overconfidence. I want to take the attacks on, because if I can’t defend my position against them, or I didn’t see the negative in the first place, I know I need to rethink the position.

I hate when people talk about some huge gain they had or some great trade they made in the past, it comes off as bragging at best or utter BS at worst, and there is nothing to be learned from these things in most cases anyway. I have had the good fortune to be able to do the things I want in life due to my participation in the world of investing and I think that speaks for itself.

One the other side, where the learning takes place, are the inevitable disasters that come with this line of work. I have made all the classic blunders and some that haven’t made the standards list yet. What separates the survivors from the trail of broken wreckage is learning from the mistakes, and making the cost of the mistakes as low as possible. I am most proud not that I have made these errors, but that I have survived them and prospered. The only thing that is more obviously BS than talking about every great trade is acting as if you’ve never made a bad one.

For trades I tend to get in in one move, and then get out quickly if the trade is going south. I have set a loss tolerance ahead of the trade so if it goes against me I know where I am going to exit. Occasionally I will leg in if the position is too large to enter all at once, and more rarely I will add to a down position when some set of circumstances occurs that allows me to justify it. If the trade is working, I will usually exit in 1/4′s locking in some profit as the position runs up.

I have an idiosyncratic method, in that I like to take positions in share amounts that are easily divisible. 32, 64, and 128 for instance. I might buy 64000 shares of XYZ so I can sell 1/8, 1/4, or 1/2 positions easily. This might be due more to some latent OCD than logic.

I identify trading picks as I said above, looking for liquidity and Beta. If those two criteria are met you’ll do fine.

For investments it’s a much more detailed process because one needs to have a portfolio level approach as well as a position level approach. I believe the longer the term you’re likely to hold the position the more a fundamental approach is the most efficacious.

There is no substitute for hard work. Don’t look for shortcuts, or easy ways, they are fools errands. Instead be a sponge for information, read everything you can get your hands on, pay attention to what the folks you respect are saying, and learn.

Thanks Jim for your participation. Keep on tweeting good insights for all of us!

On a different note, I am very appreciative of what the internet and technology have brought us.  Whether it’s Stocktwits, investor blogs or  an user generated investment advisor like KaChing, the community that exists today wouldn’t have existed without great ideas and technologies.