Complaint Review: Interactive Trading - Lindon Utah

If I can check this off as "Run in another direction" instead of "How unlikely I would recommend this", I would. My husband and I attender what was suppose to be a free seminar with Kevin O'leary from Shark Tank. There were two other speakers Steven Sitkowski, and Jeff Tomasulo, both work for Response Marketing Group particularly Interactive Trader, though this was never made clear or even mentioned at the seminar. They shared "heart touching" stories about financial ups and downs, and the importance of understanding and being in charge of "your trading portfolio", as well as the making big money fast trading Options and Futures.

During that time they encouraged to sign up for 3 day training class for $997, that will give us the education we will need to make us ready to trade options and futures. The kicker was that if you complete the class and make 15 super easy option trades, you will be refunded your $997. Both my husband and I trade stocks, and fairly knowledgeable about the market, him more then I. Though options is something we did not have experience with, so we were interested. In addition we were promised to be given a trading software that would make it incredibly easy to read the charts, trends and so on. Free for the first 30 days, and then $29.95 a month after that. My husband and I signed up for the 3 day training class eager to learn about option trading, though it was nothing what they promised. The first day we received beginner information, since many people in the class of about 85 people had minimal to 0 experience with the Stock Market, it was understandable.

A lot of chart reading and basic rules for trading (trends, ROI, etc...), as well as beginner Option trading (call's, put's, contracts, recognizing the trend, etc...). My husband came home excited, feeling optimistic, despite a very strange homework assignment, where we had to go through their site, using their code to check our credit score. So that Interactive Trader can give a "loan" for anywhere from $3000-$25,000. That night I went on to our trading website to see what our positions would trade like as an option, just to find out that YOU HAVE TO APPLY in order to trade Options and a separate application to trade Futures, as well as some trades require you to have $25,000 and a Margin Account before you can place a trade. Wait! What? I thought this was super easy, and a quick way to make money. I also did not expect to see pages of disclaimers and alerts "Trading Options is Extremely Risky". No one even mentioned that at the seminar, nor the class.

The application is 15 pages long, with 6 pages of disclaimers. The following day was a complete waste of time 20% of the day was spent on talking about option trading, though the explanations were never completed, and the examples left you completely confused. Just when you thought you had it, the next example was even more confusing. The other 20% were filed with irrelevant stories (that disrupted the explanation on what ever they were trying to explain about particular trades), and the other 60% was trying to sell you on the "Elite Education" so you can "understand it better". Each time the Speaker was explaining about a particular Options trade, he would rush through the examples, then go in to a random story, to finish it with a 10 min explanation on why you had to sign up for the Elite Education Program. The eye opening moment came at mid day, when the price tag for the Elite Program was reviled... $33,997.00! They had a less expensive option "Platinum" for $19,997.00.

No wonder they were running your credit score! As we talked to other attendees during the 2nd and 3rd day, most people had a very un-easy feeling, and started to feel like it was a scam. Feelings were mutual. The attendance was also dropping, by 3rd day it was at about 55 people in the group. We did not receive our software either. Please, to anyone out there. Do not go in to debt to try to make money. And don't drink the cool-aid, you will only get burned. If you really want to learn how to do this, there are other better ways. There is a reason why many professional traders do not do Options. Ironically Mr Tomasulo does not have Options as one of the areas where he has seen "successful trades".