Several weeks ago I decided to start trading again and this time I promised that I wouldn’t waste money on silly trades…

Listed below is my progress so far, each term is the P/L of open positions as of the close of trading on that date:

24/11/06: +£112.95
17/11/06: +£99.01
10/11/06: +£54.34
03/11/06: -£21.46
27/10/06: -£38.59
20/10/06: -£24.52
13/10/06: +£12.82

As you can see, my trading started well, then went a little downhill but has now come back into profit as of the close last Friday the 24th November.

Today my position in Gold expires and so we will see whether I was right to ignore Sandy Jadeja’s advice about going short December Gold (see blog post from 8th November).

Mine was just a small punt on the price and at around 1800GMT today I should find out whether I was correct to stick with my long position. I expect the price to be volatile on the last day so I could end up losing money even though I am currently in a reasonably healthy position.

All my trading decisions at the moment are based on the ideas I got from Vince Stanzione’s home study course. As I have previously mentioned, I bought Vince’s package a couple of years ago and it was the first “business opportunity” I ever invested in.

Since I read that 2004 edition I have read the 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2005 and 2006 editions.

If you don’t know who Vince Stanzione is, he is featured on the site:

Vince Stanzione and First Information

Last week I managed to get hold of Darren Winters’ home study course, “The Path to Financial Freedom” which consisted of a large printed manual and 3 videos featuring Darren speaking at a WinInvesting seminar. I will do a review of the material shortly. Stay tuned!

Got another sales letter for Hugo Lawrence’s “PentaTrade Profit System” this morning from Streetwise Publications.

They want to give me a “cast iron” 30 day money back guarantee so I can:

“Tear open the packaging , watch the DVD, listen
to the audios, read the beautifully produced
full-colour training materials…”

I did notice that they have changed the sales letter to remove the strange comment about other trading systems. You can read more about that particular sales letter here:

Hugo Lawrence and the “Pentatrade Profit System”

I have received a lot of letters about this particular opportunity so I decided to have a root around the web to find out more about Hugo Lawrence.

As I mentioned in the last blog post about PentaTrade, Hugo Lawrence was advertising in the national press earlier this year. I mistakenly said it was the Sunday Times but, looking back at my records, it was actually the Mail on Sunday.

His first advert was printed on the 5th February 2006 and it advertised two websites – bcfpublishing.co.uk and 2busy2trade.com – both of which are now offline.

The first site (bcfpublishing.co.uk) offered a trading course called “Secrets of Financial Trading” for £97, quite a lot less than the £2000+ needed to buy the PentaTrade Profit System.

In the sales letter for this course Hugo states:

The fee for my home study course is just £97.00.
Why is my course priced so low? Because I know
there are people who charge exorbitant fees for
trading information

The second site (2busy2trade.com) offered a more expensive trading course called “Trading for the Long Term” for $425 (discounted from $895).

It was quite interesting to see that this course focused around trading a “Window of Opportunity” – just as PentaTrade does.

The second time Hugo advertised in the Financial Mail was on Sunday the 23rd April 2006 where his ad only contained the BCF Publishing website.

By this time Hugo had changed the website so that it advertised his “Private Protege – Mentoring For Success Program”. This was priced at £695 and involved a trading course in Devon limited to just 10 attendees.

The site contained several testimonials from past students who praised Hugo’s teaching methods as well as the same photo of Hugo in front of dual monitors which is present on the PentaTrade sales literature.

It looks like Hugo Lawrence has put his BCF Publishing websites on hold so that he can concentrate on supporting the PentaTrade students…

As I have previously mentioned, I am on a lot of business opportunity mailing lists and so I receive loads of sales letters through the post.

This week I received a letter from James Rhodes telling me that:

You Can Make Big Money Part-Time From Home With This Amazing Turn-Key Internet Business!

In the envelope I received a two-sided A4 letter, a small order form and a leaflet, all showing me that I could have “2 hot web sites on the internet” for only £150.

I would also be protected by a 100% money back guarantee.

The whole sales package came from a company called Fast2Net who operate out of London but who are apparently an off-shoot of a business created in the US.

For my £150 (usually £445 but I got a discount of £295) I would get a choice of two passive income producing websites featuring either:

Books, software and music,

“Women’s” goods,

“Adult” goods or

Casino/gambling sites

I logged onto Fast2Net.co.uk to find out exactly what these websites looked like.

The first, a CD store at Go2emedia.co.uk seems well designed but doesn’t seem to rank particularly highly in any search engines and also has a rather poor ranking at alexa.com:

Traffic Rank for go2emedia.co.uk:  1,116,903
Speed:  Very Slow (90% of sites are faster)
Online Since: 04-Apr-2001

So, this is a flagship site for Fast2Net but doesn’t seem to attract many customers and is also flagged as being very slow.

The same was true of the “Women’s” store, 4her2shop.co.uk which had a rank of 1,386,660, loaded slower than 92% of websites but had been online for the same amount of time.

If these are Fast2Net’s examples of how good their customers’ stores can be then I am staying well clear of this one. These statistics are not very impressive whatsoever.

Another problem with the Fast2Net opportunity is that you barely get any time to test how well your sites will perform.

They say that you will have 2 sites up and running with 24 hours. Fine, no problems there…

However, the “100% Satisfaction, Money-Back Guarantee” is valid only for 7 days after you have ordered and therefore just 6 days after having your sites set up.

If I were to build a site and test it properly, I would need at least 30 days before I made any decisions as to whether it was performing or not.

7 days is woefully inadequate.

I won’t labour the point but this promotion didn’t get my heart racing or have me tempted to get my wallet out. The leaflet carries two quotes from Declan Dunn, a successful affiliate marketer. They are just generic quotes though and do not relate at all to the Fast2Net opportunity. They are certainly not a testimonial for Fast2Net.

Out of sheer curiousity I ordered Fast2Net’s accounts for the year ended 2005.

I won’t pretend that I can read balance sheets and make any sense out of them but the extremely negative six figure number next to “Profit and Loss Account” didn’t look good to me.

I’ll stick to creating my own websites thanks – or outsourcing the work so someone else does it for me!

It was earlier this week that I sent off for Nick James’ new product which he has called the “Secrets of Licensing – How Big Business Makes Its Money and How You Can Too”. I received it the next day (yesterday) and watched the DVD immediately.

Today I have been reading through the manual to learn more about what licensing actually involves.

A full review will follow in time but for the moment I have decided to move quickly on this one.

Along with the 119 page printed A4 manual and the DVD, when you buy the Secrets of Licensing course you also get reprint licenses to 4 products.

I have picked one product and found an excellent domain name to register, purchasing it along with hosting. I have also put in a bid request on RentaCoder.com for someone to write me 10 articles related to the product.

The idea is that I will get the sales page up and running and also submit the articles all over the internet to draw customers to the site – hopefully to buy the product.

It was quite fitting that someone emailed today with a relevant question:

Hi Ben

I’m emailing you as you seem to be a real human being at the end of an e-mail address.

I probably subscribe to over 30 “internet experts” mailing list.

Everything I come across seems to be saturated (reselling ebooks) or zero chance of working.

The latest scheme I tried was selling other peoples products via Clickbank.

I’ve probably spent thousands of pounds over the years and it gets to the stage where you hold your hand up and say “ok I’ve been had”

I’m convinced there is something worthwile out there but I havent found it yet.

Can you be completely honest with me and tell me if there is something out there and that you honestly do it yourself?

Thanks

[name removed]

I will admit that there are a lot of “oversold” resale rights products on the internet. Most are hawked on eBay for pennies and, therefore, should prove to you that they are pretty much useless!

However, there are some gems out there if you are careful about what you buy.

For example, in the early months of this year I was offered two products, with full resale rights for £27.99 each. I got them “out there” quickly and since then I have grossed almost £2k in sales for these 2 products. Lots of other people also bought these products but I have not seen many being advertised. Where I have, they are not offered with much “gusto”, the seller has simply chucked a sales page up with a PayPal button at the bottom.

So, there is one example of something which has worked for me. I have everything about selling those products completely automated such as automatic delivery (through MyDigitalDispatch).

In the case of the licenses I got with Nick’s product, I will probably have some of the manuals rewritten and also repackage them with new “virtual” pictures of the eBooks. I may even rename the products.

A lot of products which seem to be “saturated” can actually still make a lot of money. It’s like any business opportunity – you have to tweak it so that you stand out above any other competitors.

As for selling other people’s products for commission, I do that too all the time. Still works well for me, you just have to work that little bit harder than everyone else – 95% of your competitors are very lack lustre in their attitude and give up far too easily.

I will come back to this point in the future and I will let you know how I got on with my new products.

In the meantime, see the site for more details about this opportunity – a review will come soon:

The Secrets of Licensing Home Study Course by Nick James

I was quite surprised last night to see an advert for Inside Track’s property seminars. Although I knew that they advertised a lot in the national press it was the first time I had seen the TV ad.

This was at about 5pm last night (Tuesday) on Five US, the new channel from, unsurprisingly, Five. Even though it is just a cable channel featuring American sitcoms such as “Joey”, it’s unlikely that 30 second ads come cheap…

Looks like things are on the up and up for Inside Track and Jim Moore, who set up the company in 2001.

Last April he was featured in the Sunday Times’ Rich List with an estimated fortune of £78m (yes, seventy eight million pounds).

Here’s what the Sunday Times said about him:

“Moore set up Inside Track in 2001 to advise on buy-to-let properties. Ahead of a possible sale or float of the Surrey firm and its related company, Instant Access Properties, he and his family trusts have a stake worth £78m”

There is more about Inside Track on the site:

Inside Track Property Investment and Jim Moore