If you have considered or will consider buying Timothy Sykes’ DVD TimTactics, I have some simple advice: do not buy it. I say this not because I think it is a horrible DVD, but because Tim has covered much of the information in his other DVDs. I do recommend Sykes’ DVD Pennystocking Part Deux and I thought TimRaw was pretty nice (full reviews to come later; I need to re-watch them), but despite this DVD including so-called ‘advanced trading tactics’ I found little in this DVD that was not also in those other DVDs. The advanced tactics that were only in this DVD were not particularly hard to figure out and I have learned most of them in one year of full-time day-trading. Also, if you are the patient sort, Sykes’ DVD TimFundamentals 2 will be coming out soon; it was recorded during his 2009 seminar in Las Vegas (which I attended) and I think that was an excellent seminar. TimFundamentals 2 plus Pennystocking Part Deux would give you 97% of the information available on DVD about Tim Sykes’ strategy (the seminar would be sufficient to learn his strategy, but Pennystocking Part Deux’s intra-day charts are invaluable).
Following is my full review:
Informational content: 2 of 5 stars. TimTactics is billed as advanced trading tactics, so I was hoping for strategies above and beyond what he showed in his other DVDs. For example, it would have been nice to see how he reads level 2 or time and sales. He did not show that. Also, any student of his who watches Livestock religiously and has followed his blog (TimAlerts or just his free blog) for a year or more likely will have learned many of his ‘advanced’ tactics, such as how the overall market affects penny stocks. This brings me to some advice that I have said and written multiple times: if you are cheap and are willing to invest a lot of time you can learn Sykes’ strategy without buying his DVDs. Of course, buying one of the better DVDs is useful and will save on time and help to speed up learning. And if that helps you to make more profitable trades sooner, it can easily be worth the investment.
A few tactics he had that he has not mentioned before were things I had heard from other traders or figured out myself, such as how to get faster OTC BB executions. Other than the tactic for faster OTC BB executions, the only tactic I had not heard from Tim before (or learned elsewhere in the last year that I have been a day-trader) was his strategy for trading after-hours or in pre-market trading.
Production quality: 2 of 5 stars. The resolution of the video is barely acceptable. All the video was screencast from Sykes’ laptop, and it started life as a webcast. However, there is no excuse for not recording and saving the full screen resolution without much compression rather than packaging the low-quality webcast video on DVDs. Likewise with the sound, it is far inferior to the sound quality on my daily trade recaps hosted by Youtube. Towards the end of the last DVD for a few minutes you can here someone else making noise besides Tim. While the production quality is not good, Tim is easily comprehensible and the viewer can still see everything important in the video, so if you are still interested in this video, do not let the production quality stop you.
Disclosure: I received TimTactics for ‘free’ for signing up to Sykes’ October 2009 seminar in Las Vegas. I have a disclosure policy that provides more details on other Sykes products and services I have purchased and my relationship with him. I have purchased other DVDs of his and I am a TimAlerts lifetime member; I have now made over $93,000 trading using his methods since June 2008. I am an affiliate of Tim Sykes and make money when people buy his stuff through my links.
