Complaint Review: Max Idzik

I first met Max at a free seminar in London in May 2013. His achievements sounded impressive, he’s shown proof of earnings and I got a feel of someone who is a straight talker and will stand by his word. He made the money-making and execution of his system sound easy, mechanical, even “boring”, and backed up his offer with a 100% money-back guarantee (guaranteed earnings of 3% a month, going to over 20% for some students). 

Based on this impression and some trust in the commonality of having been born in the same region I’ve decided to sign up to the £18,000 (plus VAT) Turtles program. Unfortunately, upon closer inspection I found I could not get the funds together, and even after his reduction of the price to £10,000 I had to withdraw. Just over a year later, his sales assistant, Jack Domagala, contacted me with an offer to continue the conversation about joining the program. I’ve asked for some numbers of his actual students and spoke to them; the results seemed to vary a lot, ranging from a loss of 50% of the account to making 30% in the first year. “Not enough dedication from the former”, I thought, and after some deliberation I decided to go for it, for the reduced price of £10,000 + VAT.

I initially got an enthusiastic response from Max, who immediately invited me to a 1-on-1 breakfast, where he explained the basics of his system. After a couple of Skype calls I started executing the system myself, consistently, on a daily basis, spending 15-30 minutes a day, which I did for the next 12-14 months. I did my best to follow the system to the letter, and got adjustments from Max on the follow-up Skype calls. I’ve had to re-start the trading from scratch, on a new demo account, twice, because I got some instructions wrong.

This is where the trouble started. Max was generally unavailable from the beginning, and because of the failure to explain the fundamentals properly, I couldn’t get the returns he promised. To get additional time to explain things was next to impossible. Max repeatedly ignored calls, missed scheduled sessions without an explanation, and on those he did make he was often up to 45 minutes late. Given they were given in the morning and I followed a 9-5 lifestyle I often had to skip work in order to make them. In addition, several of his contractual agreements were never fulfilled; I told myself, “well, here’s the system, it’s up to me to trade it, what else do I need?”, but in the ensuing months it became clear that it required a level of attention from the trainer that Max was simply not willing or able to give, so after a success of the USDJPY rally at the end of 2014 and an account bust because of Alpari UK going down, my results were quite inconsistent. This is an email I sent in November 2014, which spurred some extra activity from Max, but not for long:

“Dear Max, Jack,

I am writing to report on my experience singing up to the Turtles program 5 months ago, which so far has been less than satisfactory. To keep it short, going back to the original contract, these points have not been fulfilled by Max:

• Two days' initial training, six hours each day
• Bi-weekly follow-up. Our last session happened on 30 August; one session was booked after that and ignored with no explanation as to why, further attempts were made to book a time that did not fit into a 9-5 schedule, as Max has promised they would. The biggest problem I have is a complete lack of transparency and communication; my multiple attempts to contact Max by email, phone, and Skype have been ignored.
• "The Client agrees to maintain a 100% accurate trading record throughout the programme", the method for which has not been explained, so it's unclear how my performance will be judged at the end of the trial period. So far the account balance has been steadily decreasing, with equity going up to 145%; at the moment the balance is standing at 59%, equity at 93.5%. I do not know what the actual figures need to be or whether I am following the system correctly, because I lack the necessary feedback, see the point above.

My investment into this program equalled to 3 months of full-time work, which demonstrates my seriousness in engaging in it. My intention has always been to follow the systems with 100% accuracy, leverage them to the maximum and make a lot of money. With the right guidance I am still committed to achieving that end result.

I understand Max is incredibly busy and it's hard for him to train each student personally. However, this program obviously requires a closer level of monitoring and feedback. This is why I have suggested to Max that he delegate some of the training to his successful students, which so far has been ignored.

I'm open to a conversation about what is required from Max's successful traders and what am I doing wrong with the systems. I can hold a session at any time tomorrow (Friday), this weekend, and potentially most of next week. I sincerely hope Max invests his time into my education so we can both profit from this agreement.”

This situation only got worse as Max showed less and less interest in my progress; I eventually managed to reconnect (over a year on), and was even offered some additional coaching as compensation but could never quite get the footing and consistently of communication with Max and, after yet another skipped session, felt like I was being fed scraps from the table. Upon offering to withdraw from the programme and requesting to give the fee back, since the systems have consistently brought demo accounts to the ruin for months, Max said that he won’t do that, stating sharing his systems as the reason. So, £10,000 (plus VAT) and 18 months down the line, what I have to show for my collaboration with Max is nothing.

My estimation is that Max is genuinely passionate about the idea of teaching anyone how to trade, but he has overestimated the effort required to train someone up from scratch, which involves psychology training much more than the actual systems. Worst of all, he feels it’s acceptable to skip sessions, lacks any communication and doesn’t believe he has to keep to his word.

I doubt of the effectiveness of this report as Max has currently suspended all educational activities, but I’m publishing it to warn any future program participants and to shed light on his personality to any potential investors. This is a person who lacks fundamental integrity and doesn’t have the decency to accept his mistakes and offer a solution. In my case, after being fed scraps for months, the only solution I see with Max Idzik is a complete refund of my investment.