Tradera collapses: Owners exit-scam, affiliates unpaid
In an email sent out to affiliates, Tradera has announced it is “ceasing all operations effective immediately”.
Tradera’s e-wallet provider, merchant partners and affiliates haven’t been paid. And co-owners Kody Sell and Eastan Harris are in hiding.
Of course Tradera’s closure email makes no mention of any of that. For more we turn to a recent webinar held by former Tradera affiliate Domonique Barbee.
Barbee (right) reveals that King/Queen and higher ranked Tradera affiliates were part of a “royal council”.
As told by Barbee, royal council members
[1:54] meet with the owners every single Wednesday, and we just discuss things to make things better for you all.
The last few meetings some of the leaders … they were just acting irate and acting, you know in a way that was turning the owners off.
Specifically Megan Lynch. She was yelling at the owner, she was talking to him like he was a child, right? And he was getting very frustrated with her.
So why were Tradera’s leaders irate?
[2:26] (On) the last meeting that we had … we had the news broken to us that the (client) price will be raised and doubled.
So instead of $99 it will be $200 to join Tradera.
Immediately after that (announcement), everybody in the council was shocked.
The provided reason for the price hike was that the more users Tradera brought to their undisclosed third-party signals provider, the more they had to pay in fees.
One would think bringing more clients to a company would result in lower fees, but I digress.
[3:07] So after the meeting we had a chat with the royal council with those leaders and there was a lot of arrogance.
One person in particular who you see, she was …
… And I talked to Kody (Tradera co-founder) and the other leaders talked to Kody, and he specifically told me he was not liking those royal council meetings because he didn’t like being yelled at like that.
[3:57] After that I get text from Megan saying “I got into it with the owners”.
After that, all I know is we had communication with the owners through a Facebook page … all I know is on Friday, I was on vacation with my family … I walk in the door and I get a call from ten leaders back to back.
And I knew something was going on. And after that call we had to get on a meeting because they (Tradera) disabled the chat in the call.
They disabled the communication. They blocked the leaders. They blocked me, they blocked Steve, they blocked Selena, they blocked Tiffany. They blocked us.
And then we didn’t get a message saying we got paid. So I’m like, “What is going on?”
Barbee claims she is owed $50,000. She also states this isn’t the first time Tradera has had commission payment problems.
This time around however, things were different.
[5:59] And then I go to the e-wallet and it says, “This merchant has disabled the e-wallet”.
So in my mind I’m thinking like, “OK, Megan probably pissed them off, or whoever pissed them off. They may be having an anxiety attack, chillin'”.
But somebody called the e-wallet and they said Tradera has not paid them.
Barbee claims to have contacted Tradera’s “educators”, only to find out they hadn’t been paid either.
While all of this was going on, Tradera was still accepting new signups and collecting fees.
This went down last Friday. Over the weekend there was no communication from Tradera’s owners.
Barbee states that it was only after all of this played out, that she announced she was leaving the company.
[7:34] I cannot be part of a company where you not gonna talk to me and you’re not gonna pay me my money.
In the aftermath (the past 24 hours or so), Megan Lynch and Domonique Barbee appear to have been feuding.
Barbee claims Lynch is lying to people about trying to recreate Tradera through another company. Lynch has accused Barbee of cross-recruiting.
Barbee denies cross-recruiting but confirms she’s jumped ship for Epic Trading, a rival signals trading MLM opportunity.
The first ten minutes of Barbee’s webinar are relevant to Tradera’s collapse. The rest is a promotional spiel for Epic Trading.
Looking forward, Tradera has dumped their entire forex trading education library on YouTube. The company states it did this as a ‘final contribution to the trading industry and our gift to each of’ their affiliates.
Tradera’s legacy is free, top-tier forex trading education for the world. With this gift, you will never have to pay for proper Forex education again.
Affiliate squabbling aside, I’m not inclined to believe that Tradera raising the cost of access to its signals service to $200 was the result of merchants charging them higher fees.
Like I said earlier, raising fees per referred client the more clients are referred makes no business sense. If anything more clients would result in a discount.
In BehindMLM’s published Tradera review I questioned the retail viability of Tradera’s $99 monthly client membership fee. Given only a three-day refund period was provided, I didn’t believe Tradera stood by their product.
That would certainly have made it difficult to pitch to retail customers. Even more so at $200 a month.
In turn that would mean the majority of Tradera clients were also affiliates, resulting in Tradera operating as a pyramid scheme.
Tradera’s provided corporate address was a PO Box in Texas. The dark horse here is an undisclosed US regulatory investigation.
For now though I can’t verify if one exists. But all of this otherwise just seems strange.
If Kody Sell and Eastan Harris were upset at certain Tradera affiliates, why not just boot them and continue running the business?
And nobody seems particularly upset at losing access to what was marketed as a successful signals service. Did Domonique Barbee, Megan Lynch or anyone else in Tradera actually use the signals?
Or was it the same old sign up as an affiliate, pay $99 a month and get paid to recruit others who do the same pyramid story?
Pending any further updates on Tradera’s abrupt pre-Christmas collapse, stay tuned…
Update 30th December 2020 – Megan Lynch and several members of her downline have filed a lawsuit against Tradera’s payment processor, iPayout.
Few things on this. I was a Tradera retail customer and loved the academy. When I signed up, I was solely interested in learning how to trade and did not want to build another network marketing business.
As such, I found tons of value in the academy videos and the live trading sessions held by the contracted coaches.
On the other hand, I found their signal service to be lacking and it was pretty 50/50 in terms of the wins/losses; I didn’t make note of the results of EVERY single though so can only speak to the overall feeling.
That being said, I’d say I was probably in the vast minority as a product customer since some of the leaders mentioned how for some of them, [building Tradera] was their only stream of income which absolutely blows my mind as it means they aren’t even using the product.
@Customer
Thanks for giving us some insight into the signals service. I imagine a 50/50 win/loss service isn’t worth anywhere near $99 a month, let alone $200 a month.
That would explain the pyramid nature of the business you came across.
If that’s how Tradera operated, I can’t imagine Epic Trading being any different.
50/50 can be very good if Reward to Risk ratio is high.
For example if risking $1 to make $2+ I will happily pay $99 for that service.
But if it only 1:1 or less is not worth a poop.
Bear in mind that’s a 50/50 split with potentially equally magnified losses (or higher), which you don’t know of beforehand.
Is that really worth $99 a month?
I thought they were already gone.
Had not seen it promoted for a while.
I trade Forex and never heard of this company until a few days ago.
It’s not your accuracy that makes you money it how much you risk for how much reward.
If you risk $1 to make $10 you can be wrong as much as 80-90% and still make money.
On the Other hand if you risking $1 to make $0.1 than you could lose money even if you are correct 90% of the time.
When someone saying it’s 50/50 I assume it’s their win/lose is 50/50.
@Alex I see what you’re saying. So the 50/50 don’t matter cause either you win or lose you can still profit out of that.
I think what Alex is trying to say is, I can trade with the same lot size but in one trade, I lost -$50 and another trade I profited $150. I profited $100 even at 50/50 win lose ratio.
+1 to what Alex is saying.
That being said, I just sifted through what I believe are all the trade signals I inputted from the back-office and the result is actually the complete opposite of what I felt/thought it was.
4 losses – 16 wins (3 or 4 of those are doubled up because of 2nd take profit zones), so more like 4 losses – 13 wins. I’d say I only took 1/5 of the signals in the 2 month timeframe so the data really isn’t statistically significant.
I’m going to assume the losses hit harder because they came in groups, or because I was fiddling around with larger lot sizes so they felt bigger?
Anyways I apologize for the misinformation from before. Either way, the $99 was well worth it to me but there were definitely affiliates building it out like a pyramid scheme and not even considering the product.
What Alex is saying is nonsense. He is claiming it’s possible to trade forex in such a way that every time you win, you win really really big (IOW, wins of multiple times 100% are standard); but every time you lose, you only lose the amount you put in (so a loss can never be more than 100%).
(a) That’s not how it works in reality.
(b) If someone was capable of making predictions that do work that way, the percentage quoted as their accuracy should reflect that.
Let’s take his example:
I will assume that “make $10” means buying at $1 and selling at $11, rather than selling at $10, and his (implicit) claim that I will only ever lose the $1 I bet, so I’m not trading on margin.
For the “80-90%” value, I will use 83%, because that’s 5/6, and represents the odds of getting a simple real-world event wrong: the roll of a die.
Those predictive odds are the same for everyone: whichever outcome I predict, I will be wrong 5 times out of 6. Alex claims I can make money with that accuracy.
So I make 600 bets of $1 each on the roll of a die. It makes absolutely no difference which number I ‘predict’ each time. 500 times I’m wrong, and I lose my dollar, 100 times I’m right, and I get $1,100 back. So in total, I make $500 dollar on an investment of $600.
Let’s forget for a moment that absolutely nobody running a dice betting game in the real world would ever offer bets like that.
The main thing here is that what I had was not actually a 100 right to 500 wrong prediction ratio, because my 100 ‘correct’ pure guesses were all of wins that were 10 times bigger than the 500 losses. So my win/lose ratio was actually 1000 to 500, or 66.7%.
Of course being able to predict something binary, like the up/down movement of a given currency pair, correctly 66.7% of the time can make you money.
Anything higher than 50% can (theoretically, not taking transaction fees and other overhead into account). Predicting things correctly 16.7% of the time, which is how Alex wants to misrepresent the same situation, will not.
To summarize: expressing accuracy as a simple win/lose ratio of the number of predictions is only honest if the maximum possible win and the maximum possible loss are exactly the same for each prediction.
Now that we’re on the subject: where are all the billionaires who started out with very little money, and made their fortunes betting on foreign exchange fluctuations?
If all the claims of people who present forex trading as the road to riches are true, there should be loads of them. I’ve never heard of anyone fitting that description.
I don’t mind people know to come here and express fact. Opinion is cheep. One relate one thing to another things which has no connection.
One don’t go to market to role dice, market is a collection of behaviours and there many pattern repeats itself consistently. Even if it was a rolling dice and the payout was 7:1 than one be rich man in the long run. But the reality with rolling dice it more 5/1, more edge to dice roller
Back to my point
I have been trading Forex for 5 years and never done Forex MLM. When I take position I always asses risk and potential reward.
If I am risking 10 points (in Forex term 10 pips) the minimum reward I am looking is 30 point (Forex term 30 pips)
That makes it 3:1 R:R (reward 3x risk).
For those of keyboard worrier you eff off if you are expert on this subject.
That is how I do it and it has been working for me.
Now back to to 50/50.
If one offers me 3:1 R:R with 50% accuracy I’ll happy pay.
But if there R:R is 1:1 or less this 50/50 will lose you money.
Because there are cost to trading, ie commission, keeping trade over night.
That is a fact and PassingBY you might know your shit but Forex is not one of them.
Again this post is not defend a Ponzi company but rather stating the fact.
Am I living in bizzaro land or is Alex’s theory predicated on a guarantee you’ll at least break even each month?
Yeah buddy that’s not what 50/50 means when it comes to provided signals. What trading you do on your own is entirely irrelevant.
Most of the calls and even the leaders were solely focused on recruiting people rather than the actual product.
When asking your mentor for help in understanding trading in detail, there wasn’t any. The conversation was only about how to get more people to jump aboard.
Wow. So I’m not the only one that noticed the signals were not very good. I joined Tradera in August and jumped right into trading after realizing the networking aspect was not working out for myself.
After roughly using about 15 trade signals and not winning a single trade, I started youtubing strategies from other traders and started seeing more profits than losses.
Although the academy of Tradera is pretty good, it only gives the basics, in my opinion.
I’ve since joined another service and am very happy with the education and trade SETUPs which are given by this company.
Thanks to Tradera for the foundation but overall, I’d have to give a grade of C+ in the trading portion. Too much focus on the marketing and not enough on the trading side.
If the company does resurface, change the name to MARKETERA.
This is very sad!
Yes they did lock down everyone’s eWallet accounts so no one was paid December 18, 2020.
No warning! Nothing! They still withdrew our monthly payments after they closed although no one had access to the education platform!
How are we gonna get our money back?
Oh dear, I’d missed Alex’s wonderful reply.
He confirms my suspicion: he thinks he can, through some unexplained magic, make sure that all his winning bets make huge profits, and all his losing bets only tiny losses.
And I wasn’t the one making the analogy with rolling dice, that was Alex, when he claimed he could make money on the basis of predictions that are wrong “80-90%” of the time. That just happens to describe the odds in predicting the roll of a six-sided die.
If you predict something incorrectly 83% of the time, it makes absolutely no difference whether it’s something purely random, like that dice roll, or something where you believe you can see patterns, like the forex market.
If you’re betting money on it, you’ll be losing five times more than you win. A risk to reward ratio doesn’t just apply to winning bets.
I’m not happy.