Timothy Sykes

Career

In 1999, while attending high school, Sykes used $12,415 of his bar mitzvah gift money and began day trading penny stocks. The investment would grant him about $1.65 million when he was around the age of 21.

Sykes graduated from Tulane University in 2003 with a bachelor's degree in philosophy and a minor in business. While at Tulane, Sykes routinely cut class to day trade. In 2003, during his senior year, he founded Cilantro Fund Management, a short bias hedge fund, using $1 million mostly from Sykes' friends and family.

In 2006, Sykes was included on Trader Monthly's "30 Under 30" list of up-and-coming traders in the market, a selection which editor Randall Lane later called "our worst pick" among the chosen honorees. Sykes claimed that the Cilantro Fund was "the number one long-short microstock hedge fund in the country, according to Barclays"; Lane later discovered that the rating came from "the Barclay Group," a small research company based in Fairfield, Iowa, and not the well-known Barclay's British bank.

In 2008 Sykes decided to recreate his initial investing success by again starting with $12,415. He named the attempt Transparent Investment Management (TIM). After two years, Sykes turned the sum into $90,368 and was the top ranked trader on Covestor.

Sykes self-published An American Hedge Fund: How I Made $2 Million as a Stock Operator & Created a Hedge Fund in 2007. The book documented Sykes' experiences from day-trading in college to becoming a wealthy hedge fund manager.

In 2012, Sykes created "Miss Penny Stock," a financial beauty pageant among the female representatives for his brand and company.

Teaching and other projects

Sykes currently works as a financial activist and educator.

In 2009, Sykes launched Investimonials.com, a website devoted to collecting user reviews of financial services, videos, and books, as well as financial brokers.

Sykes co-founded Profit.ly in 2011, a social service with about 20,000 users that provides stock trade information online. Sykes said the service serves two purposes: "creating public track records for gurus, newsletter writers and students and allowing everyone to learn from both the wins and losses of other traders to benefit the entire industry."

In December 2013, CNN Money wrote an article on Sykes and his student Tim Grittani. Under Sykes's guidance and coaching, Grittani turned $1,500 into over $1 million in 3 years. Grittani was Sykes's second student to earn over $1 million following Sykes's strategies.

Sykes founded the Timothy Sykes Foundation, which has raised $600,000 and has partnered with Make-a-Wish Foundation and the Boys and Girls Club.

In February 2017, Sykes donated $1 million to Pencils of Promise to help build 20 new primary schools across Ghana, Guatemala and Laos, to be completed between 2017 and 2018.

Controversy

Sykes is a registered investment adviser, and has declined to provide the necessary brokerage statements and related documents to validate many of his claims.

Sykes has publicly criticized various businesses and celebrities, including Shaquille O'Neal and Justin Bieber, for promoting "pump and dump" schemes, in which an investor purchases stock, hypes others into buying that stock to inflate its price, then sells the shares at a higher price and shorts the profit from the resulting decline.