Complaint Review: Anton Kreil - Institute of Trading and Portfolio Management

All of these guys belong in prison for massive fraud. I'm talking about guys like Kreil who lie about who they are, what they've done, sell a wealthy life style to lure naive desperate people, and never prove their claims. There are many others (Time Sykes and thousands of others). These guys are always spending more time marketing on social media and YouTube than anything else.

Notice Kreil's lengthy response. It has a purpose. It's meant to overwhelm you so you won't actually take the hour or so to read it (because most people have lives) and you will assume he has defended himself. Don't assume. I am a very experienced Wall Street professional and I can tell you that Kreil is such an obvious fraud.

His scam is so extreme that he even posts fake net worth claims on his website. Kreil I know you will read and respond to this because your image is how you sell your trash to naive people. That's why you spend most of your time posting fake reviews about yourself online.  Save your bull crap for the kids you've swindled. You are a complete liar and fraud.

It really continues to sicken me how people can have an avenue to write totally unfounded “complaints” about a totally legitimate company that has incredible product and service in an attempt to discredit them and their product / service just because they as the customer did something wrong and then got p1ssed off because the reason that they wanted a refund is not a viable reason.

Firstly, this was a Singaporean client who booked a 3 month mentoring programme with the Institute by upgrading from the Professional Trading Masterclass (PTM) Video Series because our education is outstanding.

He originally paid $2999 for his online education then he chose to upgrade to our Trader Mentoring Programme for an additional $7,001 USD. Why did he do this? Because our education is so good, he wanted to pay us more to be taught One to One over Skype with our weekly Trader Mentoring sessions. We do not have to offer this service. We could just scrap Mentoring programmes altogether, however they happen to be extremely popular, and there is significant demand for them because they work!

How do they work? The client is assigned one of our Mentors who are the best in the industry. All of them are incredibly knowledgeable and have over 20 years’ experience in trading for investment banks and hedge funds. You can Google any of them - Chris Cathey, Jason Mcdonald, Raj Malhotra, Gregoire Dupont, Tristan Edwards. When you google them google the following search term “Institute Hires ” and assess their experience – You will not find better Mentors for Trading anywhere else in the world even at investment banks hedge funds currently!

This client paid for his upgrade of $7,001 for his Mentoring Programme because our education is the best in the world and he wanted to learn more from the best.

Secondly, The price of a Mentoring Programme is not determined by the amount of telephone calls that someone on the mentoring programme receives. Our students know this from the outset. The student in this instance is 100% wrong and has been malicious to then go ahead and write a bad review of our company and our education / mentoring when he knows 100% that what he is saying is wrong.

The student was not entitled to a refund in this instance for several reasons;-

1. Program costs are not calculated linearly.

As mentioned above, the mentoring programme costs are not calculated linearly by the amount of phonecalls someone receives. It is calculated on the basis of several inputs. Firstly the time of the Mentor i.e. a 3 month programme is 12 weeks / 12 hours per week. It is a total lie that phonecalls last typically 30 minutes. They are always 1 hour or over. This is company policy. The mentors time is one input that is taken into consideration. The second main input is organisation of the mentoring programme to begin with using company resources and time i.e. it typically takes people within the company several days over a period of a few weeks to get the programme set up for the student before it even begins. So once a student has agreed to the programme and made payment, several people in the company have to organise the programme for the Students to trade with real money and require their trading accounts to be set up. This requires a minimum of a weeks’ time (more like 2 weeks) with multiple emails, phonecalls filling in and checking application forms on behalf of the student. Once the student is set up and ready to start, each week other people in the company additional to the Mentor make contact with the student, arrange their diary to coincide with the Mentors, request the students weekly workflow and double check their work before sending it to the Mentor and arranging the call. Additionally there is always a third Trader (person) on the call who acts as an internal check that the Mentors are making progress with their students and that the students are making progress with their work outside of the calls also. Typically the third party Trader will be communicating with the student outside of their calls with the programme and their work. The Third party trader is the go to point person for the student between calls.

It is therefore totally obvious that the cost of a programme is not linear i.e. if a student pays $7,001 to upgrade to a 3 month programme, then the cost is NOT worked out linearly on a per call basis. This is just totally wrong. The person writing the complaint above is being malicious by blatantly lying about this as they know full well from the outset that this is not the case.

2. Demand & Popularity of the Programmes & Opportunity Cost

The Demand and Popularity of our Trader Mentoring Programmes is such that each programme has to be booked 4-6 weeks in advance of the first start date of the programme. Each Mentor has a capacity that is finite. At any one time, each Mentor can only handle 10 students. This means when a programme is set to FINISH in 4-6 weeks time the space is automatically booked up because we have a waiting list of students that want to be mentored by a specific mentor. That person then pays and the space is taken 4-6 weeks in advance. The 4-6 weeks is required because there needs to be preparation and company resources dedicated to getting the programmes set up (see above). If the student then decides after 7 weeks (out of 12) from the start of their programme that they want to end the programme they are not entitled to a refund because the company has missed the opportunity to Mentor another student. There is a penalty fee at any time for cancellation because the Mentors time (in this case 5 weeks) is now “dead” time before another person starts their programme in 4-6 weeks time. Again the student knows this when they sign up for the programme. It is a total lie that this student was entitled to a “full refund for the remaining unused calls” – it is just pure fabrication.

3. Disappearance / non attendance on Telephone calls  

This particular student failed to attend 2 of their scheduled calls due to “Travel and Work Commitments” – Again all calls are scheduled by contacting the student several days in advance each week over a 12 week period. If the Student commits to a call in the diary when they are given several options each week then disappears / doesn’t get on the call, then they miss the call. Lets say for example this happens in week 4 of a 12 week programme. Very obviously if they agree to their week 4 call to occur at 5pm on a Thursday and they miss that call, the week 4 call is then not arranged for week 5 and then week 5 pushed to week 6. Calls are not carried over. This is due to point 2 in this section of our rebuttle to this complaint. We have a waiting list and the programmes are extremely popular. If we carry over calls because a student double books or cant make the call due their own fault, then for us as a company there is opportunity cost to this. We miss the opportunity to Mentor another student. If it is down to the mentors fault, we carry over calls. That’s is company policy. Again the student making this ridiculous complaint was totally aware of this before they started the programme. Additionally we did actually provide some leeway in this instance and DID actually bend over backwards for this student and carry over the calls, which we had no obligation to do so. That’s because we try to the best for our customers and because we wanted to help.

So why is this person doing this? Why are they making the complaint if they knew all of this?

Well it comes down to them simply not getting their own way. The student disappeared after call number 7 out of 12 (after re-scheduling 2 calls that we carried over for him), and then disappeared for over a year! After sending multiple emails attempting to schedule calls with this student the company received an email totally out of the blue asking us for a “refund for the reminder 5 telephone calls” one year after his programme ended. The email cited that his father was sick and he needed money - I mean seriously! What type of reason is this to give for a refund in the first place for any product or service? J After explaining that we are not a bank where people can make a deposit in 2014 then ask for a withdrawal in 2015, and reminding the student that programmes are not costed linearly, the student then threatened us with writing online bad reviews unless we gave him what he wanted i.e. the amount of money he wanted back. Originally we worked out that we owed him roughly $1,000 in value and offered to pay him this, however he continued to threaten us with cyber bully tactics by sending over 50 emails in a period of 2 weeks via the company website and to our compliance department. We decided to give the student back $2,500 because we felt sorry for him and he accepted this. We thought he might have personal issues / problems, that he had become too volatile and that he was becoming an even bigger drain on company resources. Then 1 week later he wrote this bunch of lies and fabrication online on a website called “Rip Off Report” insinuating that we ripped him off and we scammed him.

Why did we give him any refund at all? After all, he literally wasn’t entitled to anything. For any product or service a “cool off period” is generally accepted in all western world economies for products (goods) received as 7 days and for services as 21 days. Meaning the client is entitled to refund if the goods or service were not as described. NOT 1 YEAR and our service was exactly as described!!! We could have not even responded to this person. There was absolutely no recourse for a refund legally and qualitatively due the nature of the case any refund (if we wanted to provided one) was calculated around $1,000. We gave him a refund of more than this i.e. $2,500, because we look after our customers where we can and try to go above and beyond to do the right and fair thing in any situation.

We have taught thousands of students globally in the last 4 years of operation and receive a less than 1% complaint rate as a company. We look into every case if there is a problem very seriously and we do the fair and correct thing for every one of them. Some of these complaints are unfounded and this is absolutely one of them.

Again back to my original point, it really continues to sicken me that people think that they can get away with this! By trying to hold small and medium sized companies that offer great product and service to ransom, by threatening bad reviews online and trying to cyber bully their way to the result that they want to get even though it is totally unjustified. These people are a disgrace. Especially when they know 100% that our education and our service is the best out there through their own admission of firstly taking our online education and then upgrading to our premium education. This is an admission that what we do is the best! Then when they as the student don’t follow through on their obligation to complete a programme, this person tries to hold us to ransom by cyber bullying. We will not be bullied with lies and we will not yield to “Rip Off Reports” that are simply fabrication. One of the biggest lies in his report is that our programme is “Go or no go to put on a trade simply based on simple technical indicators.” – This just simply isn’t the case. We literally pride ourselves on our programme being the opposite. This student has written this because they know it will annoy us because it’s the opposite of the truth i.e. lies and because they didn’t get their own way.

All of this is quite simply childish and disgusting behaviour!

What have we done recently with our Mentoring Programmes?  

1. Since this person was on their programme in 2014 we have had to increase the price of our Mentoring programmes. Programmes rose in price from an upgrade price of $7,001 to $9,000 at the end of 2014 and then again in 2015 to an upgrade price of $12,000. This is because the demand for our programmes is extremely high and is testament to their success rates. We mentor hundreds of students per year globally. In 4 years we have had 3 complaints about our mentoring programmes!  
2. We now do more due diligence on our students before we agree to take their money for a programme. We do not let anyone on them. Again, with this particular student this is an extremely isolated case. It used to be the case that we only did a little bit of due diligence on each student. Now we require a lot more information and several conversations to assess the person’s ability to complete the programme. We do not allow people that we believe to be “flaky” individuals onto our programme.  
3. We have terms and conditions that each student must sign off prior to their programme starting.

It is difficult to keep ones faith in mankind when this type of nonsense and lies is allowed on public forums. However we still believe that most people in the world do have enough common sense to realise that this “rip off report” is total nonsense. Otherwise we would not continue to do what we do. Which is to offer publicly the highest standard of education available in the financial markets to the Retail Trader.

No-one was trying to rip anyone off. Anyone that has a modicum of common sense and business knowledge can see this is totally obvious!

Regards

Anton Kreil