HYPER INVESTING- NO GUTS NO GLORY

Pathetic returns continue from NSFG

2006-08-03T22:02:00.000-07:00

Finally, I'm making an HYIP post after a long time. I do check some HYIP blogs once in a while. The most often news being posted is about programs closing down. I'm glad I'm out of this mess ;)
Anyway coming back to NSFG, these guys started out with a bang and they don't even whimper these days. Their return for last months was a pathetic 2.41%. God, even I did better than that for last month. For the last few months we just keep hearing excuses FXCM stealing money, Korean crisis, Lebanese crisis etc. Eventhough I criticize their results, they are the one honest program which I still believe in. Hopefully they will last long and improve their performance. Hey who knows, if I start getting better results I might say adios to them. I don't really care how NSFG performs since I have such a teenie amount invested there.

Whoa, I just noticed that I have 2 posts for the day and it's been so long since I posted 2 posts in one day.

Dull Week

2006-08-03T21:46:00.000-07:00

I have placed just one trade for the week so far and it ended up as breakeven. I wanted to scalp a quick 100 pips on the pound. Everything was going well till I placed the stoploss order as I wanted to leave the trade alone and go sleep. I placed the stoploss the price went up exactly to knock me out of the trade and headed down again. Sometimes, I wonder if the broker's software is so set to hunt for stops. I've heard that this happens especially during news announcements. Well, always be wary of these brokers as forex is not regulated as much as the other markets. Anyway, I could just be fantasizing here, but you never know. I just entered a short on the Aussie. Let's see if that could earn me a few pips. Well, the month is still young...

Missed the Money train...

2006-07-29T10:22:00.000-07:00

Oh man, this was a terrible week in a good way. It wasn't terrible because I had a huge loss, but I missed a great opportunity which would have netted me 300 pips. I was playing the GBP JPY and went short at 215.20 with 3 minis with a stop at 215.80 and target of 214.20. It was very likely based on my analysis that the pair was heading south. I set myself a 100 pip profit limit and waited for the big drop. My plan was to take 2 lots out at 100 pips and let the the 3rd ride.

The entry couldn't have been more perfect. The price was hovering around 215.00 and I didn't want to enter at that price. Usually I have seen on this pair that when price hovers around a price level before it moves on there is a small upspike/downspike in the opposite direction. Since the price had been hanging around around 215 for while, I entered an sell order at 215.20. If there was an upsurge before the price bottoming then I would have a better price. Well guess what, the price did spike upto 215.35 and I got in at 215.20. The price dawdled around 215 again for a while and finally broke through.

Everthing was looking good and the pair was dropping down nicely and heading towards my target. I moved my stop to break even point. When the pair had dropped had dropped down 40 pips I moved my stop to 216.10. Then when it moved down further to 215.50, I moved stop to 215.00.

Did I do anything wrong by moving my stops? Did I move them too early? I don't think I did anything wrong by moving my stops. The cardinal rule is never to let a Winner turn into a Loser. With everything going my way I went for a good sleep. Well the price dropped all the way to 215.33 and reversed. It stopped at 215.94 before heading down. But because of the huge 9 pip spread my stop order was hit and executed taking me out with a net 60 pip profit. The money train left me because of a lousy 3 pips.

The pair then happily moved down into 213 territory. Initially I felt very bad and upset in the morning when I realised that I had missed the killing move. At one point in time I had a net 220 pips on paper. I was cussing myself for having moved my stop too early.

But after everything sank in, I realized that I had lost nothing, infact I had 60 pips in the bag. What was I crying about then? Yes, I had missed the 100 pip move which would have netted me 300 pips. I had missed a big opportunity today, but there will always be numerous opportunites around every corner. I just have to wait for another one. I have to stop crying over my spilt milk and move on. I have come to value these great lessons taught by the market.

Apart from this I had 2 more trades for the week one with a 60 pip profit on the EURJPY and another with a 120 pip loss. So overall, I'm still at the same place for the month with 200 pips profit.

Smooth sailing for the week

2006-07-26T22:01:00.000-07:00

I put in two trades for the week and ended up for the week. The first trade was on the EURJPY ended at breakeven. The bad thing was that I was up 120 pips on this one before the market turned back on me. Well, did I do something wrong not to lock in my profits. I thought about it and came to the conclusion that I was right sticking to my trading plan. I had set a profit limit and I will wait for the market to go there. As long as I break even, I have not lost any of my trading capital. So that's good enough for me.

The second trade was on the GBPJPY. Somehow all my recent trades have been EURJPY and GBPJPY. The GBPJPY pair is kind of moving sideways now on my charts and I'm going to leave it alone for a while. Both are pretty volatile pairs which could do you good or bad. Well this was a home run and I made 147 pips on this one after the spread. The only thing I hate about this pair is the spread which is 9 pips. I'm happy to end the week on a positive note. I'm up almost 200 pips for the month.

Swinging back into Action

2006-07-22T23:07:00.000-07:00

So after a good long vacation, I'm back in action. During my vacation, I had been reading a lot on trading. I have made some changes to my trade plan. I have switched to 4hr charts rather than the 15 min charts which I was trading off of before. Man, what a differnce it has made. If I want to stay longer in this game, I have to switch to the longer time frames. I don't have to stare at the charts for a long time like before. I can spend my time usefully on other things now. I have officially changed from a day trader to a swing trader. Hence my swinging back into action.

I opened up a real account with GFT. I like GFT's dealbook platform a lot. Their charts are very good and I can place orders off the charts too. I'm still trading mini lots but I'm trading mulitple mini lots. I have read in several places that it is hard to make money consistently trading with one lot. One of the advantages of trading multiple lots is you can take out some lots when certain levels are reached. This also helps with letting your profits run. If the trade eventually goes bad on you, you atleast have some pips locked away.

I have started by trading 2 to 3 mini lots and will slowly increase them as my account and confidence level increases. My trading strategy still needs some tweaking, but I'm still positive for this month and that is really good.

I made a total of 9 trades for this month so far. The number of trades I made is in itself a big change for me. Out of the 9 I have 5 winners and 4 losers. The pros and con are that the winners have good earning potential and the losers have good losing potential. I made a total of 547 pips on my winning trades and lost 505 pips on my losing ones. So I'm slightly ahead by 42 pips for the month so far. On my loosing trades I was up most of the time and the trade finally went away from me. I have to learn to identify when to get out sooner if a trade goes bad.

If I can cut down the pips lost on my losing trades I will be in good position...

Enjoying the worldcup live...

2006-06-30T22:33:00.000-07:00

Its been a while since I posted anything. I have been on vacation for over 3 weeks now. I travelled to Europe to catch the worldcup live. It's been a wonderful vacation so far. I have not been trading during this period, not even thinking about trading. I will be back in July off to a fresh start.
Hopefully my time off from trading has recharged me and will do me a lot of good when I return to trading again.

One thing for sure is that it is very expensive to have a vacation in Europe at this time with the forex rates at this time. I truly am able to appreciate this fact now. London just killed me with its exorbitant prices. The prices are same as in the US but with a conversion rate of almost 2 it is just so expensive to do anything worthwhile here.

Anyway, I am hopeful that I can recover all that I have lost on this vacation when I start trading again next week ;)

Mixed day

2006-06-05T23:32:00.000-07:00

Well, I started off making 2 trades yesterday night on the yen and loonie. I set it up and went off to sleep. I woke up this morning to find that one had made me richer and the other had made me poorer. The one that went against me came down to within 3 pips of my target limit before taking off in the other direction. Man, that was really terrible. I was at the same place where I had started last night.

Then in the morning I saw 2 setups on the pound and the aussie. I took them both. The trade was going well in my direction and I was up 30 pips total. I made a terrible mistake. The pound hit the 200 EMA. I usually cash out when I see the 200 EMA because there is a bounce. Well today I wanted to let the trade run and I moved my stops to break even and I got stopped out. Seeing my pound trade stopped out I panicked on the aussie trade and I got out with a 2 pip loss.

Why can't I stick to my trading plan sometimes? Both the trades retraced and then reversed and came back in my direction later to make myself some decent profits.

Lesson learnt today - DON'T BE GREEDY and STICK TO YOUR PLAN

So, I end the day with a 2 pip loss.

One year and 100 posts later...

2006-06-04T14:42:00.000-07:00

Yeah, that's how far I have come since starting my blog in June of last year. Wow it took me a whole year to do 100 posts. Well, don't they say that slow and steady always wins the race ;)
I started of as a newbie trying to make money online by investing in HYIP. After spending a year I have learnt and understood that most HYIPs are scams and it is definitely not a place for me. Eventhough I could have made money if I had continued, the constant fear of which program will go down first did not go well with me. In my one year in this field I have seen hundreds of programs rise and fall and then swept into the sewers to be long forgotten. Just like forex trading HYIP investing involves discpline and patience. If you want to make quick money you will burn yourself.

Along my wonderful journey through HYIP land, I chanced upon this wonderful thing called forex trading. First I wanted the easy way out and tried to focus on HYIP programs which traded in Forex. Next I tried to see if could start a managed account. I guess I wanted to have the cake and eat it too. But I was told that was not the case. Unless you took the reins in your own hands it wasn't going to be as profitable as you wanted it to be. Well, just like HYIP investing forex trading is a risky and crazy business too. If you don't know what you are doing you will be taken down for sure. It is a zero sum game. For every winner there will be one or more losers.

I think to have lasted in this blogger world for a whole year is indeed an achievement. A lot of blogs have a lot of activity initially and slowly wither away into the netherworld. It does take some effort to maintain a blog. I have learnt a lot from reading the personal experiences of several bloggers. So, to all you bloggers out there continue the good work.

(Raising my glass) To another successful year .....

The Mental Edge

2006-06-03T20:28:00.000-07:00

Losses are inevitable in trading. It is a part and parcel of trading and there is no way any one can hide from it or shoo it away. The important thing is to have the mental strength to absorb these and move on. This is the one of the hardest things to do for anyone. I guess trading is one of the hardest jobs on earth as it plays with your mind. It can be so gratifying sometimes and it can turn you into a mental wreck at other times.

These days I'm kind of thinking twice if it's a wise move to become a full time trader. I wonder how these full time traders deal with the enormous baggage of stress they are left with. Unless I can develop into a emotion free trader, which again is like scaling the Everest, there is no way I will be a fit for full time trading. I have already decided that day trading is not for me.

Well, I guess I'm counting my chickens already before they have hatched. Let me first cross the first hurdle of being a successful trader who can consistenly reap a profit. Then I can start planning and talking about my future ;-)

A couple of quotes to keep the spirit up.

"A market may run away from you but it cannot hide. It leaves its tracks everywhere it goes. Confidence is the magic ingredient that allows a trader to follow these tracks and trap its prey."
--Byron Tucker

"Have a profit - forget it ! Have a loss, forget it even quicker !"
--Jesse Livermore

Retracement day

2006-06-01T22:06:00.000-07:00

After some good runs the retracement had to come and it came today. I had 2 bad trades each touching my stop loss and taking me out with a loss of 30pips. I tried to analyze what went wrong and in hindsight I saw what I did wrong. Hindsight is always 20/20. I hope this is a good trading lesson for me and I don't repeat these mistakes again. One was during the European session while the other one was during this morning. I stopped trading today after my losses. After 2 big losses you tend to be emotionally down and not in the right mindset for trading.

After a good run like this when you have a bad day it really dents your confidence. Hopefully, I can rebound back again. I will not be trading tomorrow, not because it is Non Farm Payrolls day but because I have some personal commitments to take care of. Yeah NFP day can be really crazy. Yesterday was a decent day with a 28 pip profit. Overall this week has still been a positive week and that is good. Not too much progess towards my goal this week.

May the next week be better!!!

Pretty good day for trading today

2006-05-30T20:38:00.000-07:00

I placed 3 trades one of them was for last night on the yen where I got a small 11 pip profit. Then later this morning I saw the GBP finding support at 1.8709 along with a 0.382 level at the same point. So was expecting a reversal. I entered at 1.8730 to see the market reverse. I panicked and got out with a 8 pip loss. What a stupid move as it reversed and went on higher. Once you get in a trade don't change your initial thinking and stick to your plan. Learnt a good lesson today.

Anyway, I re-entered again at 1.8760 after it broke throught the 20 EMA. My profit point was set at 1.8775 as I had a support line there. Don't know when I drew that there. But my support lines have always helped me. So I keep them on my charts. Since I was watching the charts and since the price was pushing higher I let it run. There was a another support level at 1.2897. The market stalled at 1.8785 and I got out for a 25 pip profit. Well did I get out early or what. Looks like it as the pound went on up for another 83 pips. But as always I was happy with my 25.

The end result was I increased my capital by another 28pips. Not too bad for the day.

Kickstarted my Forex trading with a win for the week

2006-05-29T21:22:00.000-07:00

The Asian session was slow today. As the European session started there was some good action in the market. I saw a good setup on the Yen and took the trade. I was rewarded with 30 pips. I exited at the 0.618 Fib level. The market bounced and then went right down for another 40 pips. I was happy with my 30. The USD seemed to be a little weak as the major currency pairs gained against the USD during the initial stages today. You could have made money if you were on the right side of any of these major pairs.

I got a copy of Joe Di Napoli's book 'Trading with the DiNapoli levels' today and have started to read it. Hopefully, I can get some more insight on using the Fib levels. The one thing I don't want to do is overload myself with too much info that I start to lose focus on the basics.

No Trades today

2006-05-29T10:29:00.000-07:00

This being the long weekend in the US (Memorial Day weekend) the markets were very dull with almost no movement today. I have always been advised not to trade on holidays. So, I just ended up enjoying my holiday today. I did fire up my platform to see if there might be any setups, but couldn't find any. So, I didn't bother to look further.

I did come across a couple of interviews given by Mark Douglas who authored the best selling book "Trading in the Zone". He deals with the psychological aspect of trading. Anyway, listen to these as you can glean a few tips from him. I found these in the WoodiesCCIclub page.
Mark Douglas talk/chat - "Trading in the Zone" June 2005

Mark Douglas talk/chat - "Trading in the Zone" - August 2005

Charting myself !!

2006-05-26T12:18:00.000-07:00

This is how I have done so far for this month. It was good that I plotted this out. It does give me some feedback. I can see that I have a lot of trades for this month which means I have overtraded. You can see that when I was overtrading I was going nowhere. For every upmove there was an accompanying downmove also.

It is funny that when I see the above chart, the first thing I noticed were the support and resistance lines. It seems that there is a huge support level at 250 and some minor support at 300. I wonder if I can apply my Fib lines too to see where my next retracement will be. Just kidding, but who knows they might be true on my charts too.

Am I becoming a geek trader now? ;)

Eked out one last trade for the week

2006-05-26T09:52:00.000-07:00

I managed to pull one more trade yesterday night. I saw that the Swissie was weak and dropping. When it fell past the 60 EMA, I shorted it and expected it to bounce off the 200EMA. I set my profit target at the 200 EMA. It came touched the 200 EMA and even went a little below the 200 and then bounced back up. This trade netted me a nice 21 pips. I now end the week with a 228 pip gain from last week. This leaves my account balance at 517 now. I'm happy to see that I'm slowly and steadily progressing towards my goal.

Some of the things I currently look at when I want to enter a trade
1. Support and resistance levels
2. Fib levels
3. 20, 60 and 200 EMA
4. Overall trend, break of trend lines and the strength of currency.

I don't use any other indicator. I think the Support and Resistance is the simplest and best thing which is working for me. If you see all the tools I use now basically indicate the support and resistance. I plan to stick to these tools as far the going is good. If anything changes I will come back and re-evaluate.

To a successful next week ...

My good run continues

2006-05-25T15:31:00.000-07:00

Today was another good day. I shorted the yen today after it broke it's 200 EMA this morning. I waited for a couple of candles for confirmation and entered the trade. I made 18 pips from my first short and I got out as it hit 112.00. I made another short after it went below 112 and gained another 13 pips to make a total of 31 pips for the day. I closed down for the day as I was happy with the gains. The Euro and the pound were wild today and I'm happy I didn't touch these.

With this my total gains for this week is 207 pips. My account now stands at 500 bucks. I'm right at the midway point of reaching my goal. I don't think I will be trading tomorrow morning as I have to go out early in the morning. I won't regret not trading tomorrow as I have made enough for the week and happy with it. I have a 10/10 record this week.

I hope my good run will extend into next week also....

Awesome week so far

2006-05-24T21:17:00.000-07:00

Oh yeah, this has been a fantastic week so far. I have 8/8 trades go my way netting me a total of 176 pips this week. I know this trend will not continue for ever. But, I will ride as far as it goes.
My account is sitting at a pretty 472 now. I'm almost halfway to reaching my goal now. I'm thinking of going live with a regular account once I double my current mini account. I will continue to push forward.

The one problem with having a good week like this is it makes you a little bit overconfident and you kind of think that you have mastered how to trade forex. I have to be careful that I don't get into mentality. One thing I have noticed is the more simpler your trading strategy is the better your results are. Keep it Simple Stupid !!!

Making good progress

2006-05-23T07:42:00.000-07:00

I made 2 trades yesterday and one today morning and all turned out to be good.
I bought the EUR at a Super Kluster level yesterday and it went up by 100 pips. Well I didn't stay in for that long and got out early with a 22 pip profit. Sometimes, I don't know if I have to cry over my lost profits or be happy with what I got. I think the best thing is to be happy with what you have.

Last evening I made another trade with the pound and went short. This trade dawdled along for a long time and went no where initially. Finally it found some momentum and went against me. This was a risky trade as I did move my stop once. This was a stupid thing to do as I should have taken my loss and be done. But the market did turn at a higher resistance level and came back all the way down to my profit point to earn me 36 pips.

I have to be more strict with myself not to move my stops again. I think when I have a regular account my account size will be big and I can afford to have a bigger stop loss limit and not worry about moving my stops. But with this mini account I find it very hard to implement the 5% rule. I hope I can switch to regular account soon.

So these 2 trades yesterday netted me a profit of 58 pips, which is the highest I have earned in a day so far trading the mini forex trading account. The last trade took like 5 hours to close. Well I wasn't watching it all the time as I set my limits and go away when I trade in the evening.

This morning I saw the pound coming back to find support at a Super Kluster level and I went long. It went up 35 pips and slowed down. I had my limits at 22 pips and I got out. Usually when there is support at an SK the currency pair goes up nicely. I have to watch this today to confirm this.

For those who are wondering what a Super kluster is, I had watched a video seminar from Neal Hughes who is a Fibonacci expert. I bought a 2 videos a Fib intro and an advanced fib. He teaches them well covering the basics in the first session and then delving into the advanced areas in the second. He makes it so easy and simple on how to use the Fib tools. The main tools he uses are Fib retracement and the Fib Expansion which is all that is needed. For 80 bucks, I consider it to be of very good value and highly recommend it for newbies like me. You can check it out at Fibmaster.com

This week has been very good with me making 5 trades and all having gone my way. My account is sitting at 425. Do I see the the light at the end of the tunnel? Not yet, but I will continue to push on.

Pips, Pips and more pips...

2006-05-21T19:47:00.000-07:00

I usually don't trade the Asian session especially on Sundays. But, I found a nice setup on the pound and the Euro. They were at the .38 and the .5 Fib retracement leves. The trend has been down for a few days. So, I waited for confirmation and I shorted both of them and the pound moved nicely and I got out with a 35 pip profit. The Euro was slower and I got out with a 16 pip profit. I wanted the let the profits run on the pound as it eventually went all the way to 1.87 to find support whereas I got out around 1.8735. I still haven't learnt the skill of letting my profits run.

Hey, But I'm happy with what I got. There's always tomorrow. So, on the whole I made 51 pips today. This is my second biggest amount of pips earnt in a day. I had made 55 pips last week only to give back most of it the next day. Hopefully, that doesn't happen again tomorrow. This brings my capital to a small profit level. Hopefully I get to go forward from here and not turn back.

After earning so much today, I still wanted to get back in to make more. I was waiting for the pound to break 1.87, so that I could jump back in. But, I wanted to stick to my plan and I closed my trading platform. That was the only way I could control myself not to overtrade.

I live on to fight another day...

My Forex Adventures..

2006-05-20T14:12:00.000-07:00

So, what have I been upto offlate. I have been learning to trade forex and it has been going good so far. I am learning to trade the US session as it is the best time for me. I wake up around 5 every morning and trade for about 2 to 3 hours every morning. The market moves a lot during this time and it's easy to place trades. But, there are days when there is a lull especially on some days with no news coming out.

I have been reading a lot and my forex knowledge has gone up tremendously both on the technical and fundamental side. My mentor is real good. I trade with him in a chat room every morning and he knows what he is teaching. Other than the chat room where you trade with him, he sends email lessons with reading material and his videos to watch to understand a concept. After going over a lesson you get to do some homework which tests your concepts and send him charts related to the concept where you spot things which were being thought. It is not only the technical side that is enriching me, it is the other aspects of trading the emotional, money management, setting goals etc. which is helping me very much.

What I'm trying to achieve is not to copy his style of trading but try to develop a trading style which works for me. Not everyone is the same and not everyone thinks alike. So each man should have his own trading method.

My short term trading goals for now
1. Try to earn 15 pips on an average daily.
2. Not to overtrade. If I got 15 pips, I'm done for the day.
3. Try to preserve my tiny capital. This is the most important thing for me now.
4. Not to risk more than 5% of my capital on each trade.
5. Stick to trading only the US open session unless there are some really good setups in other sessions.
6. Until I double my mini account, I'm not going live with a regular account.

The 15 pips earned daily easily adds up. 15x5x4=300pips for a month. As you start to increase your number of lots you can increase your pips. This is the power of 15 very simple but very powerful. It needs discipline to stick to this. Sometimes I have found that even after I made 30 pips, I still kept going back to lose it all. I'm getting a little better now at controlling myself.

The other problem I used to have is trying to trade all the sessions. This caused me to overtrade. I have cut my trading time to only 2 to 3 hrs a day. In the evenings if I see a good trade setup, I enter my trades and set my limits and go away. This makes it completely emotion free trading.

Currently I'm trading with a mini account. I funded it with around 330 bucks at the beginning of this month. I want to trade with my mini till I can be sure that I make a profit consistently. So, I have set a rule that I will switch to a regular account only if I double my initial capital. I don't care how long it takes, but if I have followed my trading rules to get there. If I can't make money with a mini account, I definitely can't make it with a regualar one. So far I have gone down all the way to 250 and have rebounded to 295 for now. I did see a high of 364 at one time. But due to some bad trading practises I lost it all. Trading with this mini account is teaching so many valuable lessons. I'm not an expert yet, but I think I'm on the right track.

Going forward I will be posting more on my forex forays here on this blog.

Will I succeed for fail? Time will tell...

MPDW pays me and what's up with NSFG?

2006-05-20T13:45:00.000-07:00

Yeah, MPDW paid me this month. This is supposed to be one of the last payments from them for a while till they get back on track or whatever. I have given up on MPDW. They started with a bang and have now whimpered off into the dark. I still have 35 units in there. I'm not sure if I will ever get it back. I'm taking it out of my list which I should have done a long time ago.

So what's happening with NSFG. They have had 4 bad months in a row now. Does this mean anything? I have no idea. They still are one of the honest and transparent programs out there, but they are failing to produce consistent returns. Really pathetic returns after February which went from around 5% to 3% to 0% to a loss in May. I don't know what the loss is going to be in May.

They have stopped trading for May and are changing their brokers at this moment. I don't know if this is a coincidece, but right after they opened their Managed accounts their returns have been dropping. I hope they can do a 180 and come roaring back in. I don't have too much invested here and am not terribly concerned. But I was very close to joining their Managed accounts. It was a good thing I waited to see a couple of more months returns.

Man, time runs very fast indeed. It's already been 3 and half months since I joined Peraads. With the end of this month I would have completed 4 months and am moving on to level 2. At level 2 I should be earning 50% each month. Let's see how this one will pan out. If they keep up their words then this will definitely be a very good program for me. So far I have earned 30% on paper. I'm still not clear how to withdraw my money. Maybe I have to buy their mastercard to get it out. Will have to investigate on this one a little further.

And so, Life goes on....

All is well and will that end well?

2006-04-22T10:53:00.000-07:00

So, what have I been upto these days. I haven't been talking about any HYIP programs offlate. Will I be getting back into them again? The uproar after the 2daily and stormpay incidents has finally appeared to have calmed down. People have moved on and 12daily is now history. Time is a healer as they say. Stormpay's operations have been severely restricted and they have stuck to their auctions now. Where am I going to go from here? What do I see for me ahead?
A lot of questions come to mind and will I be able to find the answers.

I see reports of new autosurfs arising and some old autosurfs coming back again. I hear that some of these have have been paying regularly. I am tempted to jump in again for the ride. Am I mentally ready for it? I started investing in the HYIP arena around last May I think. It's almost going to be a year now and is there anything which might make me proud about this last year. After thinking long and hard, I have to put down my head and say no.

I had started small trying to get a feel for the field and had some early wins and losses. After wading in the shallow waters for a while, I realized that if I wanted to make some serious money, I have to go deeper into the waters. I understood that it takes money to make money. I started increasing my stakes and for a while everything was going along fine and I started reaping in the benefits. I was getting real comfortable when the Stormpay fiasco happened early this year. I lost some money over this, money I can afford to lose. But losing is not a good deal. So, finally for the year I ended in the negative.

After the stormpay fiasco, I took a breather and sort of went into semi retirement to go and lick my wounds. I wanted to see where the industry went from there. Everything seems to have come back to normality for now. But, what I personally feel is that this is a dormant volcano waiting to explode again. Till that time continue to reap your profits in this arena.

During my time off, I had looked into forex trading and saw a huge potential to it. After dabbling in it for a couple of months, I have understood the following
1. Trading forex is not easy as has been hyped everywhere.
2. It is hard work and unless you invest time to learn the basics and fundamentals, you will be eaten by the sharks.
3. 90-95% of traders lose money. The main reason being they have not taken time to treat this as a business but unknowingly treat it as a gambling venture.
4. You don't need a thousand indicators or big systems to make money. All that is needed is a simple plan, self discipline and some common sense. Believe me, there a lot of successful traders with just a high school education.
5. Demo trading is good but is nowhere close to real live trading.

I have started to read and learn how the currency market functions. I have been taking this very seriously and spending quite an amount of time into this. The best way to learn forex trading is to be shown how to do it. This does not mean that you cannot learn it on your own. But it will be a lot easier if you are guided by a mentor who knows what he is doing. The mentor is not only going to teach you how to trade but also going to watch over you and point what mistakes are being made. If we correct our mistakes early on, then the chances of success are really higher.

The sad thing is that not everyone can be a good mentor. A good mentor is someone who is a current trader and has been trading for a while. He has struggled with the market had his ups and downs and finally found his niche. Not all traders are good teachers and not all teachers are good traders. It is real hard to find somebody with a good mix of both. The other downside is mentoring costs you money. But I believe that if you don't get your fundamentals right then your foundation is very weak and crash anytime.

I have signed up with a mentor who is doing a sort of internship program. My classes begin next month. I will do some posts on how my internship program progresses. I have been attending some chat sessions this person is doing and from what I see, he is very knowledgeable, has been trading for a while and is a very successful person. I'm planning to get a lot out of this person.
It was pure luck that I chanced upon him.

So, moving forward I will be concentrating more and more on forex. This does not mean that I'm getting out of HYIP. I will still dabble with it when some good ones pop up. I will not go back to autosurfs, PERIOD. As you can see, I'm still enrolled with MPDW and NSFG. MPDW has been in the limelight over the past few weeks for some changes which they made to the program. They claim that these are going to be good for the program in the long run. They gave an option for people who were against the changes to get out if they wanted to. I did not get out, but I have lost my faith with them. I will not put in any more new money. Just withdraw my earnings if they still continue to exist. MPDW has become real questionable program now. In another 5 months or so we will know the truth.

NSFG has had some setbacks on its own. Their returns have dropped for the last 2 months. I still have trust in them. They are the only program which I have come across with such transparency. They are real and like any real programvwill have their ups and down. Hopefully, April will be a good month for them.

I'm still in with Peraads, which is run my a network marketer. The Peraads has nothing to with network marketing. Techs4success is the network marketing arm. With the end of this month I would have completed 3 months in Peraads. I will have earned 30% of my initial investment. but only on paper though. After completing 4 months, I am being promised 50% each month. I have gone in with a test spend. Let's see if this program will do what is says. It is supposed to close to new members at the end of this Month.

I'm also in Freedomrocks. It is not an HYIP. I don't know what category it falls under. Things have been going ok with this. It is a long term program and I will have it on the side too and see how it fares.

So, that's where I stand now. I just realised that this has been a long post. Maybe it will compensate for the lack of postings. It's going to be a bright and sunny from here, atleast that is what I hope !!!

No gains for last week

2006-04-12T19:58:00.000-07:00

No major updates on Freedomrocks yet. My account has had no major gains. To the contrary my open trades are at a loss currently which is close to 50% of my account size. This is the biggest drawdown I have seen so far. As like previous times, I'm hoping I can ride this one out too. Time will tell. So, let's wait and see.

Good article for forex newbies

2006-04-04T12:44:00.000-07:00

I came across an article written Sam Shenker a technical currency analyst. The article has quite a few pearls of wisdom in it. I could associate myself exactly with some of the things he mentions about what novice traders do wrong. It is a long read, but definitely a good read for anyone who is starting out with forex trading. Read it and learn the right steps and more important learn to avoid the wrong ones.

Meditations of a Trader

Made another $175 today

2006-04-03T20:11:00.000-07:00

Ok, this is seeming to be an amazing ride for me. I logged back into my account to see a ultra cool $175 profit in my account. I immediately closed my trades and cashed in my profit. That is an amazing 17.5% return in just a day. This is the easiest way I have ever made money. I don't have to follow charts and don't have to sit in front of my computer staring at the screen all day long. I have gone long again. Let my good luck continue. I also would like to point out that not every day is a big day like this. There are days where my account has been down 20%, but the good thing is it always bounces back. You have to learn to ride it up and down and know when to get out. This is not a get rich quick scheme.

If anyone is interested to sign up for Freedomrocks when they open up again, send me an email to hyperinvest@gmail.com. I will send you an update when they start accepting new members. If you have any other questions about Freedomrocks send me an email and I'll be glad to be of any help.

Starting afresh with my Freedomrocks

2006-04-03T18:21:00.000-07:00

At the end of last week, I had to take out some money from my forex account. I took out my 20% profit along with this too, which I had earned in less than 2 weeks. So this week I'm starting fresh with 1K. Eventhough it is recommended to start with atleast 2K, I have no choice. One good thing is the Freedomrocks system calculates how many lots to buy based on your Portfolio amount which is 1K in this case. So, if the amount increased to 2K then the number of lots you buy will also increase. The portfolio size is not the only criteria which determines the lot size but I would say that it is one of most important criteria.

So, I entered the market and bought the specified number of lots suggested by Freedomrocks for my account size. As of now I'm in profit already. My plan is to take the profits out if there is a profit of 10% or more. Let's see how it goes.

Another easy $200 made

2006-03-30T20:33:00.000-08:00

When I logged into my FX account I saw that my account was up by $200 and I didn't wait long enough to decide what I was going to do. I sold my lots and locked in the $200 profit. I repurchased the same number of lots and starting from scratch again. So far my account is up by slightly above 20% in 2 weeks just from Freedomrocks. I have been using a modified Freedomrocks system to suit my needs. Hope my good run continues !!!

Freedomrocks update

2006-03-29T20:05:00.000-08:00

I attended a Freedomrocks conference call yesterday night hoping to get some updates. These are the updates I got yesterday
1. New signups had been stopped until they found more payment processors so that the huge number of new signups could be handled. They are currently working with more payment processors and no specific date was given as to when the process will be completed. We would have more details next Tuesday about when the signups would open up again.
2. They are signing a lease to open up a new support center in Las Vegas.
3. There is going to be a new backoffice with more features and programmers are currently working on this.
4. A training video is also being created which will function as a tutorial for using the Freedomrocks system. I think this will really help the new members as I had to go read through a whole bunch of material to understand how the system actually works. It will be more easy to learn through the video by seeing someone actually perform the needed steps.
5. There were some details about the bonus checks about which I'm not interested too much.

For the more curious, please go here to listen to the entire conference call.

I haven't earned anything this week yet except for the premiums. I have earned 34 bucks just on the interest alone so far in less than 10 days. I did see my account go down to around 400 bucks yesterday. But today it is back to less than -$50. So don't be dismayed by the drawdowns as it equalizes with time. Just make sure that you have enough usable margin to deal with these drawdowns.

Anybody interested in this system, please try trading a demo account before you jump in. Get comfortable with the system as there is a small learning curve. Play around with the settings and find out which is comfortable for you. I have heard that some people had multiple demo accounts to test the system.

I received an email today from Freedomrocks about the monthly subscription -

" Just a quick reminder. We will not be charging the $100 monthly subscription to any credit cards while signups are suspended. The FreedomRocks website, and the Command Center, will continue to operate, so you are free to trade your account(s) as usual. Your downline organizations will remain intact as well."

This is nice of them to do this.

Freedomrocks Rocks !!

2006-03-24T19:34:00.000-08:00

So, I'm finally doing live trading. I opened a live account with Fxsol after trying a demo account for a few weeks. I'm using the Freedomrocks system to do my trading. It is a system which is based on correlation between currency pairs. I'm using the EUR/USD and the USD/CHF because of the high correlation between them. The correlation number between them is -0.98 with -1 being a 100% correlation. The way these 2 pairs work is when one pair goes up, the other goes down. It is not completely symmetrical but tends to equalize over a period of time. This is what I observed when I traded with my demo account. So, when you buy these currency pairs at the same time you are kind of limiting your losses.

Basically how this system works is like this
1. Based on the amount of money, the leverage you wish to use and the margin percentage you want to use, the system will calculate how many lots of EUR/USD and USD/CHF you have to buy.
2. Each lot size is 1000 and you buy the currency pair and take a long position.
3. Based on the above lot size, the system then gives a buy price and a sell price. When the market moves and hits these points we buy or sell more positions. For eg, if we are long 100 lots then you might be buying or selling 2 lots when the set points are reached.
4. We cancel the initial buy and sell points and the system gives us new buy and sell points.
5. As the set points are reached, we cancel previous points and set new entry and exit points. This just repeats again and again.

How this makes money for us is hard for me to explain. Watch the video here which will explain how we make money by doing this .

6. This is not the only way we make money. When we are in for the long term we also make money by getting paid interest on our long positions by the broker. For the EUR/USD and USD/CHF we are paid 3.5% daily which is kind of cool. For my settings in my portfolio I can increase my initial invested amount by 50% in a year just by relying on these interest payments. This is just like a solid HYIP :)

This is a long term system and don't expect to make money right away. It trickles in and accumulates with time. The great advantage is there is limited risk and it will not wipe out your account. The max draw down I have seen in my account so far with this system is only $200.
You also don't have to watch the computer at all times since you set the limit orders and forget them till they are hit.

I'm actually thinking of modifying this system to my own needs. My system is going to be simple. Whenever I see a $150 gain from these long positions I'm going to close my positions and take the profit. I will reenter the trades again. I'm not sure if this will go against me earning more if I stick with the original system. But, as long I keep earning I will be happy.

So far, for the first week I have made 200 dollars which is a 10% increase of my initial investment. I'm not sure if I can maintain this every week. Let's see how this system performs in the long run with my modification.

The system charges a monthly fee of 100 bucks and also a one time setup fee of 45 bucks. I think this is a small price to pay as long I make money with this system.

My foray into Forex trading

2006-03-14T22:50:00.000-08:00

I think after seeing the current state of affairs with HYIP industry, I want to pick up a backup so that if everything else fails I still have something to make some money. I think forex trading is such a thing. I have begun learning the ropes for some time now. One thing which I'm going to do which is different from other newbies is not to open a demo account. Opening and practising with a demo account is a good thing to do, but it does not involve the emotions which go with real trading.

The sick feeling in your stomach when you suffer a loss and the top of the world feeling when you make money is what sets apart real trading vs demo account trading. If I jump in right now into the waters then I will not be face any surprises when I trade a big amount. So, my strategy for now is to open a mini account trade the heck out of it and make my mistakes and suffer the pain which along it. It is a real good thing we have these mini accounts as we don't have to start big.

I've been trading for a few days and the basic things I have learnt so far is
1. Never force a trade and wait for it to come to you.
2. Don't overtrade especially when you complete a winning trade.
3. Set profit goals and follow them and don't be greedy.

I'm also looking into a new method to make money in forex which was recommended to me by a daytrader who is one of the very few who makes money. This opportunity is called Freedomrocks. Watch the movie and see the concept behind this. It's a long term system and deals with correlation between currency pairs. I'm still trying to learn the system. I have opened a demo account for this and will see how it performs. I will post the performance of this system here.

So, off I go into the wild again. Wish me luck !!!

Startling News !! EMO shut down for fraud

2006-03-13T16:29:00.000-08:00

I just found out that the Texas Attorney General has shut down EMO's operations and has asked a court appointed receiver to take over its operations. EMO is not able to account for $2.4 million of its customers money. This is a real shocker as we are just coming out of the Stormpay fiasco. I was so close to depositing money with EMO and finally by luck decided not to go with EMO. I think the whole industry is being dug up. I'm expecting more dirty laundry to be washed in the coming months. I will take a breather for a few months and wait for all the mess to settle down.

Anyways, here is the website which published the news about EMO shutdown.
http://www.oag.state.tx.us/oagnews/release.php?id=1493

Starting troubles...

2006-02-26T10:18:00.000-08:00

Well, the dust has settled now. I'm trying to kick back into gear and am having some minor hinderances. Basically, I'm trying to bring in some more spending money for investing and I haven't been successful yet. I desperately need some e-gold. I have 5 bucks left in my account now. I tried to use the easy but expensive way of funding my EMO account using CC. But so far for my own good, this hasn't succeded yet. Funding through the CC used to be easy with stormpay. I used to fund it through my CC and then pay it off when I received my payment/profits. I then played with my profits in the program.

With EMO I noticed that the CC fundings, atleast mine, are treated as cash advances. These tend to have a higer APR and incur cash advance fees. This is not a good way of doing business. If a program goes down and I'm left with a loss, this can turn into a disaster. So, I have decided to steer clear from this method. I will have to bring in my own cash.I am juggling things around so that I can get going with some new programs. These days people are instant gratification junkies and need everything right away. I used to be one of these kind. But, I have learnt that this is never good in the long run and am trying to change myself.

On an another front, I had joined Peraads at the end of last month. I don't think that this is an HYIP or an MLM program. Only recently I have begun to understand the working model of this company and the conncetion between this and Techs4success. I had attended some conference calls which made things more clear as to how things functioned here. I made a test spend and will see how this one will go. It seems to be a new way of making money, if it works. There's not too much history on this one. I will have to dig more on this.

Pangs of guilt !!!

2006-02-25T15:16:00.000-08:00

I was browsing through the new MoneyandProfit forum when I saw a post there with a title Money vs Morals. The topic of discussion was if you felt right to earn money by stealing it from others. I have always thought about this a lot of times and this kind of attracted my attention. All ponzis function by taking money from new members and giving it to the older members. Most of the HYIP programs including autosurfs are ponzis which have the same business model. So how do you feel to earn money in this manner? This is what I basically said in my reply to the post.

To make money in the HYIP field you definitely have to take it from other people. There is no other way to go. But this is the case for all legal investments like trading in stocks, forex etc. as people. It might not be as transparent as the ponzi world. Playing with money is a zero sum game. For somebody to make money, somebody has to lose it either directly or indirectly. My theory falls apart if you have a printing press where you could print your own money.

Thinking in this manner makes it look like that the whole world is a ponzi.

So, I don't think there should be any pang of guilt if one invests in the HYIP arena. Everybody has an equal chance of making money here. But, why only a few succeed is the real question. This is becuase they have put in the effort, did their DD, were discplined and kept their greed under control, had a strategy to go about and maybe even had a backup plan. Eventhough it looks on the surface that making money in this arena is so easy, it really is not. If you don't follow the basic HYIP rules, it is more difficult to make money here than from any other regular investment. It is more easy to lose money here than anywhere else.

My point here is that everybody has an equal opportunity here, but only those who sow the effort will reap the profits too. As long as you don't promote scams and try to make money by referring people to these scams, I personally think we are no different from any other investor in the real world. Experienced investors will steer clear from scams and stick to legal/gray areas. In my early days I treated my blog as a marketing page which I used to get people signed up underme at the various HYIP programs. But, I later realized that most of the programs end up as failures. So, it is not right on my part to advertise these scams and ask people to sign up. I still post my referral links on my blog, but I never ask anybody to sign up under my name. It is left to the person who comes across it. I talk about programs in my blog which I'm involved with and which I think might have a decent chance of survival. A program which made money for me does not have to make money for you.

In the end it's a dog eat dog world. Let's try to stay ahead and not get left behind !

Forex trading seems to be hot !!!

2006-02-19T12:32:00.000-08:00

I have been looking around for some nice investment vehicle to help me multiply my earnings. Currently, I only have MPDW earning me something. MPDW has been consistently returning 3% to 4% weekly yields so far. I have close to 35 units invested there. I need another 65 units to become an elite member. Should I wait for my 35 to become 100 or should I deposit more money now is the question. They have given an option help members open up a Swedish Credit Union account, which will be yet another option to deposit and withdraw money. I listened to their recorded conference call which happened last Monday where they went over the details of the SCU.

The SCU option might be helpful for people who have invested or is planning to invest a large sum of money in MPDW. For the small fish this is not a viable option yet. The setup cost is around 700. So, I will have to skip this for now. So with this MPDW accepts e-gold, ebullion and wires.

Moving over to NSFG, I'm kind of excited with this program. Two people are running the show here. A program manager and a trader. Both seem to be well known in the HYIP circle as they used to be just one of us till with a load of experience. My intial deposit in feeder fund had more than doubled. I decided to draw it out and divert it to NSFG. NSFG is similar to MPDW , trading forex and has been providing 10 to 20% monthly returns for the pooled accounts. This will be a test spend for NSFG and I'm planning to put in more money in the coming months.

The reasons why I like NSFG a little better than MPDW

Complete transparency with nothing to hide. The trading records are shown in the GH forum (hidden to non-members of NSFG) and the trader also posts some daily commentary of his trades.
No websites for the pooled account. No hassle about DDOS attacks or server issues. But, can be a little inflexible for those who usually log onto some website to check their account balances etc. The admin sends a Statement of accounts at the end of each month.
They now have a managed accounts option. The entry fee is a little bit high and set at $25K, which is typical of most managed accounts. This option was started only this month and is brand spanking new with no past performance. Have to wait to see how this one performs. The word is that the returns here will be similar to the pooled accounts.
No referral commissions here. Only word of mouth advertising ,which in itself speaks volumes.
Limiting their membership. The program is closing to new members after March 25th.

The past performance has been good so far for the pooled accounts
2005
17.70% (Net) = September
10.49% (Net) = October
32.01% (Net) = November
8.73% (Net) = December

Year total: 68.93%
Average per month: 17.23%

2006
15.81% (Net) = January

Be aware that past performance is never a guarantee for future returns.

I'm actually eyeing at their managed accounts. I want to see how their first month goes and will take a decision. Well, the other hinderance I have to overcome is the huge minimum needed. As long as they don't have a bad month with losses this should be a good investment vehicle. Let's see how this one goes...

Operation Cleanup

2006-02-11T12:55:00.000-08:00

The storm has come and gone doing it's damage. Now it's time to clean up the mess it made. It was an ugly mess for most people out there including me. But, life goes on. It will be a bright day again tomorrow. Meanwhile we have to clean up the mess before we move on. I have to start the clean up right from my blog. I will be removing the links to the autosurfs which are now almost defunct. Will I go with them again? Most probably not now.

We are dealing with the HYIP arena. It has its ups and it also has its downs. As you are joyous during the uptimes you must be strong to deal with the downtimes also. This area is not for the faint hearted. This is a good time to weed out these people. I think a lot of people must have learnt a costly lesson. If you want to play with fire take proper care before you do so. You might argue, that the problem we saw here wasn't caused by any HYIP or autosurfs but by an intermediary payment processor. So who would have expected this and how could anybody be prepared for this? Yes, that is true and I was bit bad by that too. A payment processor triggering the downfall is a very unusual occurence, but definitely this is not the first one to do so. In this field you never know what will happen next. There is always the fear of the unknown.

For the people who have been in this arena for a while, they are ready to move on. It's the newbies who are crying wolf and raising hell. If people learnt how to cut their losses and not how to be greedy they will always have a soft landing when disaster strikes.

I have to formulate a new plan going forward. I have taken stock of my losses and have decided that I'm not going to do a charge back with my CC. I did lose over a grand here of my money and more in profits. It was well within my means to absorb the loss. and that is the reason why I took the risk. So, what is the reason why I'm not doing a chargeback. Well, Stormpay did cheat me off my money, but it wasn't the CC's money. The problem is between me and Stormpay and I don't want to misuse the CC chargebacks. Anyways, this is my take on this and I'm happy with my decision.

I'm already seeing the light at the other end of the tunnel eventhough it will take a little bit of time to reach the other end. I hope it is the same for others too...

Autosurf Industry brought to its knees

2006-02-03T19:21:00.000-08:00

Wow, is all I can say about what's happening in the autosurf world. By now everybody must have known that SP has froze almost all of the autosurf's accounts. The reason being given is that an investigation is currently underway by an external agency on the autosurfs. This action has struck like a lightning strike on all these major autosrufs using SP as their payment processor. The whole industry is in disarray.

Most of these autosurfs are running helter skelter under the impression that the Feds or whoever it is might be after them. I can see some of the admins have started taking down their website already. I think more will follow suit. There are some tough days ahead and we will have to wait it out. But, this has been one terrific blow to the autosurf industry which could kill it completely atleast for a while. But like weeds, they will grow back promising people the path to easy money yet again.

My Stormpay account was fine the last time I checked it. I requested a payout of the remaining money in my account. The request went through and I got a confirmation email too. Let's see if they will send me those checks. Last time, I received the checks in a week. Let's see what will happen this time. It was still posting as pending in my history. So, I don't know what to expect for now.

When I started in the HYIP arena, I hated the autosurfs. Why, because I knew that they didn't have any business model and were just exchanging money between one user and the other and finally running away with a portion of it. If you read some of my inital posts I have always said that I wanted to keep away from them. Well, if only I had followed my principles.

But, at the end of all this there is some good to come out of this. All the scammers out there will be weeded out after this and the truthful ones can start with a clean slate. I hope all of this will be resolved soon.

MONEY, something hard to get but so easy to lose.

Should I re-invest in 12daily again ?

2006-01-28T20:57:00.000-08:00

I received yet another payment today from 12daily into my Stormpay account. I again received my payment in 7 days. I'm happy that I used Stormpay to purchase my upgrades. I had chosen Stormpay as my choice even before 12daily started having problems. I think I should be a psychic. ;-)

I am hearing that 12daily is having big issues with EMO payments. The recent problems plaguing 12daily seem to have been created by the accounts which were allowed to compound, which is not allowed in 12daily usually. All these upgrades happened on the same day and expired on the same day. Man, a whole bunch of people should have jumped on this and upgraded. 12daily must have grossly underestimated these upgrades.

Anyways coming back to the question which prompted me to start this post, Where do I go from here? I have been with 12daily for quite a while and have made some decent money here. I'm well in profit and have no complaints. I'm definitely not going to bring in any fresh money. Now the question is, do I put back the profits to earn more or should I hang onto my profits and move elsewhere. I have already invested a part of my earning here in Alientrust.

I'm not completely happy with how things are unwinding at 12daily. Small fires are popping up here and there and the management is doing a good job to quell these. But, my fear is that a wildfire will surely start, which is going to bring down the house. With the way the membership is growing, I think 12daily will be a household name pretty soon. Innocent people, misguided, will join this frenzy and pay heavily. If that happens then 12daily will endup as a modern day "Charles Ponzi", after who the word ponzi was coined.

After a lot of thought, I have decided to move on. I might have a very small amount invested here to get back my ad credits. It's always greener on the other side ....

Alientrust 's Daytraderfund

2006-01-27T19:43:00.000-08:00

I joined DaytraderFund to see if these guys are for real and also wanted to make a test spend. I knew that if something went awry here, then my trust level for Alientrust will be lowered. I really liked their concept of DTF Annuity. Here is a brief description from the website as to what this is all about:

"The DayTrader Fund Annuity is a simple Auto-Surf replacement plan that allows you to earn the same types of returns as some of the major Auto-Surf for Cash websites without the need to be tied to your computer everyday, and all the constant cashouts and upgrades required to make the program work. All those cashouts and upgrades cost money - both to the company and to you.

99% of the people who are making money in Auto-Surf are simply turning around and re-investing their money. So the question is - why in the world would you want to pay all those fees to the payment processors, when you can simply leave the money there and continue to earn without all that fuss? Who's really getting rich here - you, or the payment processors?

We believe there's a better way. If you're going to re-invest the money anyway - let's just leave it there and collect ONLY the earnings. Doesn't that make much more sense? It certainly does to us."

This whole idea goes against Alien Trust's motives. I find it very hard to digest why they want to run two sites which are at opposite ends of the pole. The way this program is supposed to work is you deposit your money and then paid 2.86% daily for as long as the money stays in the account. Man, if this were true it is one heck of a method to earn easy money. Just deposit your money and watch it grow day by day and the important thing is you don't have to do anything. No surfing!!!

They also have another plan called Certificate of Deposit which pays 5% weekly interest and the funds are locked for 26 weeks. The funds are supposed to be invested for day trading I suppose.

Anyways all my hopes of testing this site out came crashing down. After I logged into the website, I searched for the deposit money link and turned the website upside down. But, I couldn't find it. Hmm, interesting I thought. I shot an email to admin right away about this and asking him other questions as to how safe this program was, etc. I'm sure the email went to Vince - Alientrust's admin. Anyway I get a very short reply the next day from the admin stating that the program was not open for business yet. Bummer !!! Why the hell is the website up and reporting that it has been running for 57 days?

THE TRUTH is OUT THERE. GO FIND IT.....

Delving deeper into Alien Trust

2006-01-21T20:19:00.000-08:00

What's common between Alientrust, 2x200 and Daytraderfund ?
For those who didn't know, all these are registered to North Shore Media, the same entity which runs AlienTrust. I was actually informed of more sites which were supposed to be connected to AT. But I could not find the connection, atleast in the whois info.

So, what does this mean? I was quite surprised with this info. I don't like companies running more than one autosurf. They are a signal for trouble. It doesn't mean that those running one autosurf are destined to succeed, but two or more by the same person usually means that the first one ran into trouble and they start the second to get some fresh money in. That doesn't seem to be the case with AT as it is supposedly doing well.

How about the Daytraderfund website? It is not another autosurf. Nobody has invested in it yet and it has been running since Dec 2005. Is this how they plan to diversify? What experience do they have in daytrading? They have a plan called DTF Annuity, which is supposed to be an autosurf replacement. I have too many questions and very little answers. Now, I'm not so sure about alientrust until some one can explain what's happening with them.

Here is the whois info for these three sites

Domain Name : www.2x200.com

Registered through: GoDaddy.com (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: 2X200.COM
Created on: 30-Nov-05
Expires on: 30-Nov-06
Last Updated on: 08-Dec-05

www.alientrust.com

Registered through: GoDaddy.com (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: ALIENTRUST.COM
Created on: 02-Nov-05
Expires on: 02-Nov-06
Last Updated on: 18-Dec-05

www.daytraderfund.com

Registered through: GoDaddy.com (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: DAYTRADERFUND.COM
Created on: 21-Nov-05
Expires on: 21-Nov-06
Last Updated on: 30-Nov-05

Registrant:
North Shore Media

9 Rene Circle
Wichita Falls, Texas 76306
United States

Administrative Contact:
Kronlein, Vince nsmedia@gmail.com
North Shore Media
9 Rene Circle
Wichita Falls, Texas 76306
United States
8005415820 Fax -- 9407993546

Technical Contact:
Kronlein, Vince nsmedia@gmail.com
North Shore Media
9 Rene Circle
Wichita Falls, Texas 76306
United States
8005415820 Fax -- 9407993546

12Daily vs Alien Trust

2006-01-21T07:41:00.000-08:00

The above table gives a snapshot of 12daily's and AlienTrust's salient features. The numbers above are for upgraded members only. If you request a cashout by Friday 12:00pm server time, Alien Trust pays it sometime between Saturday and Tuesday. Only one cashout request per week allowed

I had been experiencing big time problems surfing over the past 2 days due to some server problem at AT. They immediately reduced the daily surf limit to 7. Good Job AT!!!

Alien Trust, here I come !

2006-01-18T20:46:00.000-08:00

I received another payment from 12daily into my stormpay account 2 days ago. Since I didn't want to put this into 12daily again I was looking for something else. I had joined AlienTrust on the 8th of this month and left it idle. I was member #4792 when i joined. I checked it today and man, the total members signed up has crossed the 9000 mark. I guess AT is seeing some spurty growth. As 12daily continues and tries to iron out its wrinkles with EMO and other issues, people might be getting interested in Alientrust.

Anyways, I redirected my 12daily payment straight into my AT account. AT is kind of slightly better than 12daily in certain ways. I can make a withdrawal as long as there is 35 bucks in my account. I won't do it too often due to the Stormpay fees. I'm planning to make a withdrawal after 7 days and the second one after my upgrades expire in 2 weeks. This makes it easier to withdraw part of the seed money earlier. AT is also netIBA certified even though they don't display this piece of info on their site. Well, does this add any credibility to the site ? I guess not.

Is 12daily reeling already ?

2006-01-15T23:10:00.000-08:00

I am starting to see issues creep up in 12daily's alley. They have not affected me personally yet except for one thing. I'm having problems with surfing these days. I'm one of those guys who wishes to surf right at 9pm PST everyday to finish the next day's surfing. That is the time when the new day dawns for most of the autosurfs. I guess I'm not the only person on this boat. Recently I have been prevented from surfing as the website complains there are too many simultaneous connections. I have been given surfing holidays when problems occur, which is good.

But with time the problems tend to grow. With almost close to 200000 or more members , 12daily seems to be reeling due to the growing membership mass. It's good on one hand that membership is growing as there is fresh money coming in, but I'm going to take extreme caution going forward with 12daily. The site has been running close to a year now and is reaching the mature stage of an autosurf. I have a pending payment due any day now another one which will be due around the 28th of this month. Let's see if everything will be fine till then.

At the end of the day 12daily is still a well run po***. Well, can I prove it? No, of course not as I don't know what's going on inside. But let me turn the question around, can you prove that it is not a scam? Nobody knows the truth except the real persons running the show. I could be way off here and it could be possible that 12daily has one heck of a business model which is being well executed to pay off these high interest rates every 12days. If that were true, I would really be in heaven. But it is highly unlikely for that to be true.

12daily itself claims in its FAQ that the high returns are based
"not only on incoming member fees, but also with multiple income streams including advertising, and off-site investments".
The point here is that they do depend on member fees, which is basically what we give 12daily when we purchase our upgrades. I'm not turning a blind eye to the advertising and off site investment revenue streams, but who knows what is the percentage earned from these other sources?

I don't know how long they will last. I'm a realist and in this world of HYIP it helps being one as it helps you be prepared.

So what is the moral of this story --> please please.. take out your seed ASAP. Work with your profits and you will never be in a mess.

In search of another winner

2006-01-08T11:52:00.000-08:00

I just realised that the number of programs I'm involved has dwindled to four over the last few weeks. Here is a brief overview with what I'm currently involved in

12dailypro is still going strong and my 12 days expired today and am expecting another payment within a week.
MPDW is also coming along fine and is now my major long term investment vechicle. I compound here each month with 5 units which is my strategy. So far everything has gone smoothly.
Feeder Fund - I'm not sure what I'm going to do with this one. Recently they have gone private which I'm not sure if it's good or bad. But so far, I haven't had a good experience with private programs except for MPDW. I just noticed that I have not been paid for the Month of December yet for my FXIG investment. Usually the payment is made by the 5th of each month. Should a flag be raised here? I have doubled my inital investment and I'm wondering if I should just get out. I will leave this one in limbo for now.
Vivasurf - Things slowed down last month and my payment was delayed. I was finally paid, but somehow I think that it might be running out of steam. I have let my upgrades expire here and I'm hoping that I will get one last payment. There is $97 left here in my account which I don't want to lose. I will be abandoning this autosurf as of now.

Basically, I'm just left with 2 programs which are the work horses for me currently. So, it's time for me to go out into the wild and see if I can find more winners. After 6 months in this field, I'm finally making some money here, but I have lost a whole bunch during my learning months when I was trying to get my feet weet. It sure has been one hell of a journey. The end may not be in sight yet, but I have been rewarded with a wad of experience well worth it's expensive cost. And so for this knight in shining armour, THE QUEST CONTINUES ... ;)

12daily pro phishing site ???

2006-01-03T23:41:00.000-08:00

Somebody left a comment on one of my posts. It was from an anonymous poster. When I clicked on the name of the poster it took me to a website called 12dailyproautosurf.This was totally unusual. The page was an exact replica of the 12dailypro website. Check it out yourself. I'm pretty sure this is a phishing website trying to hack my 12dailypro account. I hope I didn't fall into any trap and this doesn't come to haunt me in the future. It's very interesting to see how people try to trick you and try to get the better of you. Anyway, BEWARE of these phony sites and protect yourself from these fradulent schemers.

You've got Mail !

2006-01-03T22:51:00.000-08:00

Well, I came home this evening and was surprised to see a mail from Stormpay. Yes, it was the check which I had requested last Wednesday. I was really surprised that they had processed and mailed it withing one week. The FAQ on the Stormpay website said that it takes 1 to 2 week to receive the check. The money came at the right time as I am a little short of it right now. Well, it will be recycled and re-invested somewhere else pretty soon, after I take care of my personal requirements first. So as a whole, getting the money throught the check process was not as bad as I had imagined. Infact if you are not in such a hurry, I would suggest you go for it.

Egold articles in BW

2006-01-02T22:31:00.000-08:00

Here are links to 2 articles in Business Week which I got in a forum

1. Dr. Jackson's Golden Vision - Interview of Egold's founder
2. Gold Rush - Article on the Egold raid by FBI.

Egold raided by FBI !!!

2006-01-02T13:38:00.000-08:00

Man, what a way to start 2006. I came across this news articles from NoBSHYIP's site. Check out the complete article here. The article is actually from Business Week and that should stop any questions about the article's veracity. Well, sometimes magazines do make mistakes. Actually the article exists on Business Week's website, but is locked with an article date of Jan 9 '06. I'm not sure if it will be published on the 9th or if it's an article to be found on the next issue of the BW. It's a long article, so be prepared.

This is not good news, which comes right after the FBI raid on Intgold. The article goes into E-gold's history and some details about how Doug Jackson, Egold's founder, started his operation in 1996 and what actually motivated him to start egold. Currently E-gold has close to 1.2 million funded accounts which accounted for 1.5 billion dollars in transactions in 2005. Wow, that's a lot of money. The company has been plagued by subpoenas recently from a lot of agencies including the FBI, the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC), and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. They all are supposed to be looking for his suspect customers.

The main concern is the use of E-gold by criminals to wash their dirty money and make it legal.
E-gold has no regulations and anybody from anywhere in the world can sign up. Who knows who is using it for what and from where? The FBI raid is supposed to have happened on the 19th of December. It was on the 17th December that we came to know about the Intgold raid through the The Herald Banner newspaper. So, the E-gold raid happened right after the Intgold raid. The article mentions that the agents just copied computer files and documents and have filed no charges yet.

The E-gold website is still running fine. I'm now wondering if the FBI raid was the reason why the E-gold service was down last month. Maybe E-gold was trying to do some cleanup before the raid. I am already seeing that a lot of HYIP sites are trying to find another option to replace E-gold after it's last uninformed downtime. Well, when one door closes another door will open. But the question, is how many will get locked behind the first door ?

12daily saga continues...

2005-12-28T15:23:00.000-08:00

I received my 4th 12daily payment today. It was good that I got NetIBA certified recently and this saved me quite a bit of fees at Stormpay. With this payment from 12dailypro, I have taken my seed out. I requested Stormpay to send a check to me today. This was the seed amount I had put in initially. I re-deposited my profits back into 12daily again. Now even if 12daily folds, I have nothing to worry about. I have followed the most important goal of taking the seed out as soon as possible. Now I will depend on my profits to make me more money.

I was contemplating to sign up for the Stormpay debit card which is back after a brief hiatus. But then I decided not to as I noticed there were too many fees associated with it (not imposed by Stormpay but by the other bank) . Any ATM with a mastercard symbol can be used to withdraw cash. The card costs $29.95. I believe that this card will be useful to anyone who withdraws cash a lot of times and can't wait for the check, which is especially useful for anyone who is outside the US. I settled for the check method which doesn't cost anything. It usually takes 2 weeks for you to receive the check.

On another front, I finally received my payment at Vivasurf today. The payment was delayed by 8 days. I'm going to use this to buy my 5 units at MPDW for the month of Jan. This will bring my total to 30 units there. Things are beginning to slowdown at Vivasurf. I still have another 100 bucks left in Vivasurf. Have to keep an eye on this one for now. Vivasurf has been extremely profitable for me. I invested a paltry 15 bucks and have received over 100.

NetIBA Certified

2005-12-20T19:57:00.000-08:00

So, after finding out that if someone is NetIBA certified his/her fee, when they receive payments from others, drops to 2.9% from 6.9%, a nice reduction. For small sums this is not a big change. But for me, I save more than what I paid for the one year email certification, which cost me 20 bucks. So, I think it's a good thing for me to get NetIBA certified. This came at a right time as I just finished surfing my 12days at 12dailypro. I should get my payment in another 6 days. This will be a litmus test for 12daily to survive Christmas.

The certification process consists of 3 steps. You first have to verify your emal. Then someone calls your phone to verify your phone number. Finally a letter is sent to you with a pin number. The pin has to be entered online and this completes your verification process. I'm not sure if this certification has any validity other than reducing my stormpay fees. There already are stories that HYIPs which were NetIBA certified have closed and scammed people. So a NetIBA certification im my opinion is not reliable at all after these incidents as it is too easy to get a certification.

I'm still waiting on my payment from Vivasurf. It has already been reflected in my history details that I have been paid. But, I still haven't received it yet in egold. Egold going down must have caused some delays in the payment process. I haven't upgraded in two months here. After this month's payment, I will still have around 70 bucks left here. I have decided that I'm not going to upgrade here anymore. Based on my recent observances, I think that Vivasurf has matured and has now aged a lot. It's not attractive to me anymore. Surfing has been so terrible that I despise it so much. The recent opening of a sister site points to something fishy also. I'm not sure if my analysis is right, but I'm prepared to move my money to some newer autosurfs. I am in total profit with this site and have nothing to lose.

All that glitters is not gold...

2005-12-17T23:29:00.000-08:00

I have come to know that Intgold is under investigation by the FBI, who have raided Intgold's office on fraud allegations. Seems pretty bad. I'm sure there will be quite a few who have lost or have their money locked up here. I have been hearing stories about Intold over the recent weeks. I didn't pay too much attention as I wasn't involved with them too much.

What a co-incidence to see that the E-gold site is also currently down. The e-gold site seems to be having it's own problems. I'm not sure if the Intgold raid and the e-gold going down has any relationship to each other. I found that Nevis Financial Services had posted a warning on their website about E-gold being struck off from its rolls for non payment of dues or something like that. I have no idea who these people are and what the connection between them and egold is? Anyway you can check the warning announcement here on their website. As for me, I don't have too much left in egold currently. I'm expecting a payment from vivasurf and I'm not sure if the payment has already been sent as I have no ways of checking it. Just last week I took the remaining 5.25g of egold and bought 5 units from MPDW. Good timing, huh !!!

People have started doubting the credibility of egold now. If egold goes down I'm sure that the repercussions will be pretty bad as this will bring the functioning of a lot of businesses to a complete halt. If an HYIP is primarily e-gold based, they will definitely be in the hot seat. Are we just seeing the tip of the iceberg?

12daily pays yet again

2005-12-09T18:03:00.000-08:00

Woohoo, made some good money from 12dailypro. 12daily paid me again after 6 days which is the normal time. But the bad thing is, I lost quite a bit of my 'profit' to Stormpay (around 30%)', which could not be avoided. The fees in terms of dollars grow up when the investing amount grows. Well, I guess there is no other go if I want to use Stormpay.

Well atleast I won't have to pay an initial fee as I will be using money which is already in my Stormpay account. Stormpay charges 6.9% when you receive money and 3% when you depsoit money. Next time around I won't have to worry about the 3% unless I bring money from outside. I have already recycled the money into 12daily again keeping a small portion of the profit. E-gold is much much better with this as it charges only 0.05g of gold for payments received, which currently works out to $0.85. What a difference!!! So think twice before you choose which payment processor you want to use with 12dailypro.

I'm not sure how long 12daily's success will continue, but I will definitely try to make some hay as the sun shines...

Surfcityautosurf has run out of water to surf.

2005-12-05T23:32:00.000-08:00

Surfcityautosurf admin has publicly announced that he is having cashflow problems now and goes on to say that it will take longer to pay the members. He has cut the daily interest to 1% from 2%, but doubled the number of days the upgrade is valid. All cashout requests have been disabled till the previous requests are taken care of. This is one autosurf I'm not in profit and I'm the only person to be blamed. I forgot to request a cashout for last month. How lazy can I get? I have around 60 bucks left here and I will be very surprised if get anything back.

Whenever you see a cashflow problem it is a sure sign that the program is in the doldrums, getting ready to bite the dust. It doesn't matter if the admin says he is honest and will not run away with the money. Yes the admin can be honest, but there is no way he can come out of this impending doom. I got my doubts when the admin introduced an e-gold scratcher game last month. Again I'm the only person to be blamed for not acting on these tell tale signals.

Another day and another lesson learnt...

Grand Daddy Studio Traffic getting ready for his funeral ???

2005-12-02T21:10:00.000-08:00

Before I begin, I would like to point out that I'm not a member of Studio Traffic and have never invested with them. Studio Traffic, the grand old dad of autosurfs seems to be struggling for life. It has taken some desperate measures to increase its longevity. First, it was the US accounts getting blocked. More recently accounts from UK, Malaysia, Singapore and Australia have joined this blacklist. I also found that the forums have beeen closed for now. You can visit a whole bunch of sites to see what is going on with ST. So, I'm not going to delve into the details here.

What piqued my interest here was seeing an old timer which has been a cash machine for so many people is showing signs that it is finally going to run out of steam. I have seen so many people supporting ST till these issues surfaced. It was the most popular autosurf which stood firm as hundreds of autosurfs appeared and disappeared. Somehow I never got into investing in it even after seeing so many positive things being said about it. It's not that I didn't believe those people, it's just it never interested me. Maybe the 1% daily was not attractive enough for me. Well in hind sight it seems that I took the right path. Wow, what a genius I am !!! :)

I think in the land of HYIPs and autosurfs, there can be no program which can last forever. If it is going to last for a long time then it cannot be classified as a HYIP. I have heard of private programs which have existed for a long time and have continued to pay its members year after year. Well, these might be the odd ones out in the group as nothing in this world is perfect. After being involved in this field for six months now, I think the birth and death of a HYIP program is a natural event. Some programs outlive the majority out there, but there will be one fine day when the light will finally flicker and go out even for them. I'm pretty sure that the much successful 12dailypro will definitely face its end of life one day.

I think the success of the 12daily might also have caused ST to falter. ST offers 1% daily for a whole year which means a $100 dollar deposit will turn into $365 in 1 year. Let's assume that the same 100 dollar if re-invested in 12daily with the assumption that you surf 12 days each month and withdraw once a month will reward you with 44 x 12 = $528. I am not taking compounding into effect so that I can compare apples to apples. Obviously my assumption of 12 days in one month and one withdrawal per month is not the best case which means if you work the system correctly you can make more than the $528 I have quoted here.

So given this case, why would anyone want to invest with ST. Well there are people who would say that 12% is such a huge return and this cannot be sustained longterm. They prefer to stay with programs offering around 1 to 2% daily, which they think is more safer. This issue has been beaten to death in many forums. But offlate seeing the success of 12daily more and more people are jumping onto the 12daily bandwagon. Maybe the money flowing into other autosurfs have started to decrease causing them cashflow problems. This is just my concocted theory and it might be wayoff from reality. But off late, I am seeing a lot of autosurfs folding or showing the signs of folding. It's really a dog eat dog world. As Darwin said only the Fittest will Survive here.

I was looking at alexa which gives an indication of traffic to a certain website. Just for fun, I was comparing what kind of traffic 12daily and ST were seeing. ST is ranked much higher than 12dailypro currently. But one obvious thing is, the amount of time it took ST to reach today's traffic numbers (2 years) is almost 4 times greater than what was needed by 12daily, which achieved this target in a short period of 6 months. Such has been the tremendous growth of 12daily.

Having said all this, which might really be a load of BS, at the end of the day don't stray too much from the fundamental rules of HYIP investing. The farther you go the greater the damage will be. These rules have been repeated in thouands of places a thousand times. But folks don't take it seriously untill they are personally involved with the demise of a program. By then it might be too late. The primary rule - Never ever invest more money than you can lose has to be strictly followed and the second rule is never to break the previous rule. Yes, sometimes you have to go in with a huge sum of money to make some quick money. But if you lose it, you have to be prepared to take the hit in your stride and move on. Get into profit as quickly as you can by getting the seed out. Always remember that all these programs are time limited and you have to act quickly. If not, you tend to go down with them. Enough said for a day....

The 12daily Pro Joy ride.

2005-11-28T21:07:00.000-08:00

12daily paid me for the 2nd time last week after close to 6 days wait time. The wait time seems to be normal for everybody. I had made a test spend of 30 bucks again. Now was the right time to jump in with a bigger amount. I wanted to make some quick money while it was possible.

I did see the Christmas time warnings as tis the season for many HYIPs to roll their shutters down. A lot of pondering was done to see if this was the right time to jump in. But now seemed to be the best time as the 12daily rollercoaster seems to scale new heights every day. I decided to firm up and also wanted to test my "No Guts No Glory" motto. So, I decided to ride on 12daily's coattails and jumped in with a huge deposit.

I had to use stormpay to make my deposit as I didn't have that much egold handy. If everything goes well, I will be paid around the second week of December. This is the biggest investment I have made so far for me. I hope I have made the right decision. Till then, I will be waiting with my fingers crossed....

Xperhits off my list

2005-11-23T19:01:00.000-08:00

After waiting for almost 10 days, I sent another email to the admin asking where my payment was and for how long do I have to wait. The admin replied almost instantaneously telling me that an email would be sent today with more details. The admin also returned my initial spend right away to my egold account.

What a waste of time? I surfed for 30 days and waited for another 10 days just to be given back my initial investment. I should be happy that I atleast got a refund. I think that the admin has a long way to go with respect to running an autosurf and I am not going to waste my time anymore here. Adios to Xperthits for now!!!

Reaching Critical Mass ...

2005-11-18T19:39:00.000-08:00

I feel that with the way things are going I'm getting very close to reaching critical mass. This is especially happening because all the autosurfs which I have enrolled are doing great and I haven't had any problems with them off late except for some minor skirmishes. By this month end my earnings from the 4 autosurfs I'm still with will be close to 200 bucks. I think that would be pretty neat if everything continues to go well.

I have to be a little critical about Xperthits. I have finished 30 days of surfing here on the 14th of this month. I have received one payment from this site and with that payment I have withdrawn 75% of my seed. The script is so error prone that it allowed me to surf for more than 30 days before I realised that something was wrong. The admin is aware of these errors and is currently working on correcting these errors.

The admin has done a good job so far, but the irritating thing is that before launching the site they should have done a dry run or something and rectified all these stupid errors. I understand that sometimes things go wrong and the admins learn as they go, but I don't think it has to be at my expense. Now because of the error on their side, they are making me wait for my return, which I could have invested somewhere else. Let's say if I wanted to re-invest the money in 12daily, I could have earned another 48% for these 4 days. The admin wants to correct all the errors and wants to update all member details manually in a spreadsheet before starting to deal with the payouts. Hello!! Isn't there a better and speedier way to deal with this. I hope this issue gets resolved soon here. But at the end of the day, it is better to say that my money is still with someone and not lost forever to a ponzi schemer.

MPDW and Feeder Fund updates

2005-11-12T15:39:00.000-08:00

MPDW is coming along fine. So far I have purchased 15 units from and it has slowly grown to 20 units now. The average returns are still going strong to 3% to 4% per week. My strategy of buying 5 units each month suffered a minor setback for last month as I wasn't able to make any additional purchases here. I'm hoping I can find some money around the middle of the month to go ahead and purchase 5 more units here. I'm totally satisfied with how MPDW is coming along.

As for Feeder fund, my initial 50 bucks has grown to 86 here. I'm thinking about taking 25 out when it grows to 100 and take another 25 out the next time it grows to a 100. If this strategy works then I would have taken my seed out and I will leave the rest of the money in there to grow slowly and steadily. This is assuming that FXIG doesn't go under.

Xperthits lives up and 12dailypro revisited

2005-11-11T18:33:00.000-08:00

Xperthits has survived and is back in action. I have received my first payment and I have already made 75% of my seed. Im close to receiving my second payment within a few days. With this, I would have made a 50% gain for this month becuase of the free upgrade. The usual return is 20% per month. I would strongly recommend this site. The admin is very responsive and active which is a good sign.

I went ahead and deposited 30 bucks in 12dailypro. I had signed up at this autosurf back in June when it was brand new and I was among the first set of people to receive my payout. Somehow, I branded this autosurf to turn out as a failure and did not re-invest. But, I have been proved wrong and this site has turned into a winner for many people. So, I am revisiting this one again. I have surfed for 4 days now and 8 more days to go. My first account is nowhere to be found and I had to re-register. The site is now NetIBA certified which has also boosted my confidence.

Xperthits takes the hit

2005-10-30T19:19:00.000-08:00

My latest autosurfing venture Xperthits has been in the eye of a storm. The admin who lives in Florida seems to have taken a direct hit from Wilma. The website is still running and I have no qualms about that. But the poor admin seems to be living in darkness without any power. I have been doing my regular surfing with no problems at all. I had put in a withdrawal request on Saturday and nobody had acted on the request yet. I was surpised that my withdrawal request had not been attended to. But later on, I saw this post at the talkgold forum. It was good to have an update of what's going on but knowing that this post came from a complete stranger makes the post's veracity a little bit shaky. I seemed to like this autosurf and was already making plans for the future. Well, let's see how this one will pan out and if it will recover from the true natural disaster, unlike many other HYIPs, which knocked it out...

Sinking of the Titanic???

2005-10-27T22:48:00.000-07:00

It has been too quiet on the HYIP front for me. Everything has been running like clockwork until now. It doesn't mean that there will be a big volcanic eruption, but I can see that the horizon is getting darker with the storm clouds. Will it affect me? Well, that is a million dollar question. "What is going with all this cryptic talk?", you might ask.

Hmmm, my much touted FXIG is the one under the limelight now. This program has been consistently returning a 15% to 20% return on average month after month. It was too expensive for me to go in directly and I had to use Feederfund as the middleman . I am hearing that some sweeping changes have been made at FXIG. Withdrawals are allowed only once in 2 months. If you withdraw more than 20% then the money will be taken out of the pool and kept for 30 days without any interest before being sent. If you make a 100% withdrawal and then want to go back into the program again, you will be charged a 10% penaly fee on the new deposit. They have also said that they are in the process of changing banks. All these are telltale signs of you know what.

All of these changes don't affect me directly as I have invested in FXIG through Feederfund. But, how will these changes affect me indirectly? I have no clue. The first thought which came to my mind was to withdraw my investment from FXIG and maybe redivert it to another program. I will wait till the end of the month to collect this month's interest and then make the changes. I have made close to 60% of my principal amount and will be able to withdraw the whole 160%. I really don't want to lose this money. I was thinking to take out the money and investng it in MPDW. But, then it will be all eggs in one basket which is not a good thing.

For now, I will take the wait and watch position ...

Vivasurf Quandary

2005-10-19T19:52:00.000-07:00

It's upgrade time at Vivasurf and I was pretty confused as to what I should do with my cash balance. I have more than doubled my initial investment and am in profit here. So, I was wondering if I wanted to take out the money and go hunting for more greener pastures or stick around. Well after thinking for a while I have decided to stick with Vivasurf and not move my money. I will do an upgrade to bring my member limit to 100. I think this is the best way to go here as I haven't seen any negative signs on this site yet except for the once in a while slow down in the surfing. The saying always goes "Cut your losses and let your profits ride".

The next question which comes to my mind is if this program runs for a few more months, should I continue to put all my earnings here to beef up my upgrades or to slowly withdraw some money once in a while. I have seen some strategies to keep 50% in and get the other 50% out. I'm tilting to a 60/40. Let's see how it goes for the next couple of months before I start making long term plans here.

New Investment

2005-10-15T06:42:00.000-07:00

Vivasurf finally came through and paid me. This is my second payment from them and I hope this continues. My upgrades have dropped to 40 bucks and I have a considerable amount of cash which I'm not using to upgrade. I want to get all the cash out next month and then maybe re-invest the money again. So, I had close to 40 bucks in my coffer and I was looking around to see if there was anything worth to put it into.

I came across a new autosurf called Xperthits from a trusted source. I checked it out and seemed satisfied with the program. The program pays 4% daily. You might say, 4% is high and could very well point to a ponzi scheme. That was the same thought going through my mind initially. But the good thing about this is the upgrades expire in 30 days. The key features of this program

4% daily interest
Upgrades expire in 30 days
Free $10 to start with
Upgrades are $10 each
Have to surf only 20 sites each day and spend 20 sec on each site.
Withdraw money when you have a cash balance of $30
Paid twice a month.

Bbasically you could consider this as earning 20% each month which is not much when you consider the 4% interest rate. The program is still in its infancy and that's good for me. The one thing I want to find out is what are the payment dates which is not clear on the site.

September updates

2005-10-06T22:48:00.000-07:00

FXIG had a good month earning 19.39%. They are the best in terms of monthly returns among the established guys. Recently, I have been hearing some negative news about FXIG. The rumour goes that a person involved with FXIG was associated with previous scams. I'm not sure how true these statements are. My plan for now is to get the 50 bucks I invested here. So far, my 50 has grown into a decent 77. In another 2 months the 50 should double itself and I will take my seed and let the growth continue.

MPDW had a decent run last month earning 13.9%. My 15 units has so far produced 2.25 units. I'm not sure if I would be able to put in my planned 50 bucks this month. Let's see how it goes and maybe I will get 5 more units here later on in the month.

My portfolio growth has been painfully slow, but atleast I haven't any bad news recently. Hopefully this trend will continue. Vivasurf is back to normal and admin has raised the surf limit to 40 again. I'm still waiting for my payout. It seems like I should receive it by the 20th. Surf city has been going smooth. Funny thing was the admin had sent out a request that he would like people to keep withdrawals at a minimum. The reason being that he has invested some money into 2 programs and he will be seeing returns from these programs only by November. Not a problem with me as long as the smooth run continues.

Payment Day

2005-10-02T07:36:00.000-07:00

I had a couple of surprises in store for me today. I received a payment from someone who I had thought was never going to make one. Guess who it was!!! It's none other than the zombie site of 4Daily. The payment albeit was only for a miniscule 8 bucks. I'll take the money and think of it is a bonus. After a long time, my empty coffers are beginning to fill up again ;)

The other surprise was a payment from vivasurf. I really don't know the logic behind this sudden payment. But, I'm not complaining. The odd thing is that I haven't received it yet in my egold. I will give it one more day before I start complaining. I thought egold payments are almost instantaneous. I also noticed that I now have a cash balance of 40 bucks which has not been carried over to this month. I wonder why that happened. I think from now onwards all upgrades can be done only on one day of the month. This should simplify the problems that many users were having which messed up their payouts.

Anyway, it has been a good day so far as I'm beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Let the games begin !!!

Where's the sun, I want to surf......

2005-09-28T22:38:00.000-07:00

I was having problems with the Vivasurf's surfing just like everybody else and was pretty pissed off with the time it took to finish surfing. I think the admin did the right thing to reduce the number of sites to be surfed each day to 10 for earning the daily interest. I just finished today's surfing and I would say that it went on decently. I ran my other autosurf side by side and it was much faster than vivasurf.. I noticed that my member level has dropped as some of my upgrades had expired. I definitely want to upgrade but am abstaining from that till I get a withdraw from this site. Hopefully I will get something next month.

Back again...

2005-09-22T21:05:00.000-07:00

Whoa, I have been out for quite a while. I had to move to a new city and the move and the setting up had taken up most of my time. I got screwed up on my DSL by SBC during the move. Finally, the dust has settled and I'm back in business!!! I took a look into my much neglected portfolio. I'm happy that Feeder Fund and MPDW has been working without me and doing good. My 50 bucks in Feeder Fund has slowly grown into 68 bucks. On the MPDW front, I had bought the minimum of 5 units initially and the last time I checked I had a little over a unit in interest. Not bad for a 20% return in over a month. As part of my long term strategy which I have talked about before, I did my monthly investing and bought 10 more units at MPDW. My plan is to spend atleast 50 bucks each month into a credible program. Eventhough the returns are not as high as the other programs, I'm beginning to understand that "Slow and Steady will always win the Race". Go Tortoise !!! ;-)

I guess I got screwed up at Vivasurf again for a payout. Am I not understanding their rules properly or what. I sent the admin an email and initially he said that because of my upgrades in August I'm not being paid. But I replied back saying that part of my upgrades had come from my July earnings which was why I did not get paid for July. Then I got a reply saying that my upgrade in September is affecting my payout. I'm not satisfied with the reply I got and I'm not going to pursue this any further. I'm just going to stop doing any more upgrades till I get my payout. I've got over 50 bucks in here waiting to be withdrawn.

Surfcityautosurf has been growing steadily and I have made more than I invested. But this is still on paper though as I haven't withdrawn anything yet. I am very close to the minimum limit for the withdraw. Haven't had any problems with surfcity so far.

I think that's enough for now as I have to go back and catch up with what's happening in the ponzi world :-)

Where is my Viva?

2005-08-19T20:56:00.000-07:00

Vivasurf has not paid me yet for last month. I was quite surprised as they said that they have completed payouts for last month. Have to knock on the admin's doors to find out what's happening. Anyways I'm not too worried about this and I should get my payment without any trouble.

MPDW came out with a nice surprise today. They have gone private effective immediately and I kind of like it. They are not accepting any new members currently until further notice. Further details are awaited from them. I am happy I got in with them early. They are going to incorporate offshore and are going to change the way new members are invited to join. Lots of good thing are coming my way from MPDW.

Feeder Fund and MPDW updates

2005-08-15T20:40:00.000-07:00

Feeder fund paid me 15% last month. I'm quite happy with that return. I guess this will be automatically compounding for next month which is kind of good. MPDW has paid me 4.75% for last week. If they continue to make 4% to 5% a week, I will get 15 to 20% each month similar to Feeder Fund. Things have been going good at MPDW. They are now trying out a second trader by giving him a small amount. As I get more experience in this field, I can see that I don't want to touch any of the get rich quick HYIPs offering a huge return in a short time. These returns are definitely not possible over a long period of time.

As I was writing this blog, I formulated a small plan. I was thinking if I saved 50 bucks each month and deposited it into FF or MPDW I would increase my returns faster. This will be some kind of compounding eventhough I'm putting my own money inside. This is a practical idea as 50 bucks per month is not a big sum for me. This will be put into good use rather than me wasting it on some useless item. Investing 50 bucks over a period of 6 months with an average 15% return per month would return 503 bucks. I would have doubled my initial amount and increased my portfolio significantly. Sounds like a plan. Now let me go ahead and implement it.

Is my cup half full or half empty?

2005-08-06T22:47:00.000-07:00

I want a cup which is overflowing and neither half full nor half empty. It hasn't happened so far. But, I'm definitely counting on that happening some day in the near future. With this positive attitude I put my remaining money into one more investment vehicle. This is a fairly new program called MPDW. This is a program which invests in Forex trading and pays out weekly interest. This seems similar to the FXIG program in Feeder Fund. If anybody wants details check out this presentation @ http://www.moneytalkslive.com/mpdw/MPDW7142005.htm
I invested the minimum amount of 5 grams of gold (cost me 73.6 bucks) into this program. Let's see how this one will pan out. If you become an elite member by purchasing 50 grams of egold (around 720-750 bucks) you will be allowed to see the trader making his trades in real time. I would love to have to access to this, but can't afford it at this moment. From the outside it looks to be something real. But apperances can always be deceptive as I have learnt in this field.

It's calm after the storm...

2005-07-31T21:59:00.000-07:00

Last week was a very bad week for me. Bad news from 2 big investments of mine. HYA has folded, running away with my money. Sunflower seed admin has gone on a vacation and admitted that his original intention had been to run a ponzi. I admire his honesty. I got 50% of my money back from him. I'm considering this HYIP closed eventhough the admin has promised to return everybody's money back. That's just plain BS. Anyway, I have taken the hit. It has hardened my hide and I'm ready to move on. As I always say, there is no use crying over spilt milk. I was prepared for all of this when I came in. So I have no gripes. Hopefully, I will have better luck next time.

Drastic changes @ Sunflower

2005-07-28T20:50:00.000-07:00

My 2nd week was completed today in the weekly program of Sunflowerseed and I requested for a payout which was paid out in a few hours. So far I have withdrawn over 50% of my seed.

These were the sentences I had typed before I logged into Sunflower to check how much percentage I have got back and how much money I lost due to the withdrawal fee. This was when I noticed the new changes which were introduced today. The admin has abolished programs 2 and 3 which were paying 28% weekly for 8 weeks and the other was a monthly program. He has moved my funds into the newer program 5 which pays 20% monthly. Look at that, my returns have been reduced from 112% to 20%.

Reasons given by admin for these changes
- Admin was expecting users to withdraw their money rather than their compounding it. His calculated returns do not invlove compounding by investors. Now, whose fault is that.
- He has come to the conclusion that investing in other HYIPs is risky and time consuming. What a lame request and what was he really expecting. Admin says that he has now reached maximum investing limits in the programs he is investing in. I would say that this is pathetic planning on his part . I understand that this guy is new to this and all that. So he should have started off in a beta mode with a limited number of users before he opens it up to the entire world.
- Doing this to ensure that his program would survive. He has come to conclusion that if he did not do these changes then there will be a point in time where he won't be able to pay anyone any money. Again, a case of gross underplanning and under execution.

I do want his program to survive. But the least he could have done is let the programs run and expire and not take any new money into these programs. He could have stopped anybody from compounding in these programs if he thought that was the real issue. He now has plans of investing the money in a managed forex account. I'm not criticising this move, but this seems like a sudden and unplanned move. I am now wondering if this guy really knows what he is doing. I am coming to the conclusion that he has very little experience at what he is doing. Eventhough he is learning on the way, it could be very costly to his investors and himself if he continues to operate in this mode.

Keeping Track of your money

2005-07-26T21:14:00.000-07:00

When I started, I was just testing the waters and enrolling in one or two programs at a time and making test spends. With time I started to enroll in more HYIPs and start putting in more money. During the initial stages I could keep track of where my money was, how much I made in each program, where I lost money so on and so forth. But with each passing day, this task is turing into a gargantuan task and if I don't take action now this could end up in a big mess. Even though my entire spending history is at egold, I need something much better to see where my money is and how it's faring. I guess I have to cook up a spread sheet to satisfy my basic needs. I will give myself upto the end of this week to come up with something. If anyone has any suggestions, I'm ready to give it a try. One thing I don't like about egold currency is its daily variation with the gold rate. One day I might have 10 bucks and the next day it would become 9 or 11. This tends to make it even more complicated as I tend to miss these ups and downs. As long as these changes are small I am not going to care about it. Before things get out of hand, I have get my accounting straight. I guess this will be one item you have to pay close attention if you want to be successful in this arena.

Telltale signs ???

2005-07-25T22:57:00.000-07:00

First of all, I'm not basing my opinion on the fact that Vivasurf is down today(for their alleged server change). I have been thinking about Vivasurf for the past few days. Is this because I'm becoming paranoid? I don't think so. Maybe, I'm becoming experienced day by day ;-). Let's go back to last month. Why did they pay off everybody on the 5th instead of the 20th? They said they wanted to check out their scripts. Is that so or is it because if they pay on the 5th they would pay less than if they had to pay on the 20th? Why were they asking everyone all of a sudden to upgrade on the 23th and 24th? They were offering free credits. Were things slowing down and they needed more money into the program. If they want to really rope in people they should have offered an upgrade bonus. Anyway, that's beyond the point. And finally there is the server upgrade. It just reminds me of ultrasurf. They did the server upgrade just before they vanished. Well, what's the logic behind this last reasoning? None at all; just a gut feeling. For all practical purposes, I might have side stepped here quite a bit. But nobody knows what's happening, which gives you the feeling as if you are driving in the fog. I would love to have Vivasurf go on for a long time as I have a vested interest in them too. Will they? Only time will tell...

Doubler lessons

2005-07-24T18:43:00.000-07:00

What did I learn from my recent foray into doublers? I learnt that you have to get in right in the beginning of the queue to ensure yourself of profit. If the timing is off even by a small amount then the whole thing will end in a disaster. When I joined, I was hoping for a large influx to this program. Unfortunately growth has been pretty slow and not as I was expecting. But, the one good thing was I got involved right in the beginning with one of the new slots and I did end up making some money from that line. So, overall I ended up learning my lesson without losing any money in this game. I will time myself better next time. Another day another lesson...

Double it up baby !!!

2005-07-23T07:56:00.000-07:00

After seeing the success of the Dutch doubler, I wanted to get a share of the pie too. But it was too late for me. Eventhough it has been around only for 2 days, around 5000 people have signed up for it. The lines are pretty long and it might take a long time to go up the ladder as it depends on how many people invest after you. I went away thinking that these grapes are sour. But come today and I see another doubler at the Realestatehyip site very similar to the Dutch doubler. Only 500 people had signed up when I looked it up on this new one. Man, I jumped aboard right away hoping to make a quick profit. If anybody is interested get in NOW when the program is still in it's infancy. It's selling like hot cakes. DON'T MISS IT!!!

No Guts No Glory

2005-07-22T19:13:00.000-07:00

Last week, I had some cash on hand and didn't know where to throw it into. I didn't want to sign up for anymore autosurfs. So, as I was shopping around I came across HYA Investments. This HYIP makes money dealing with arbitrage. For those who are not familiar with what arbitrage is, check this simple explanation here. I was kind of drawn into this after reading this. I'm not sure if the admin is really involved with arbitrage, but he seems to have done his homework well. This HYIP does not seem to be very popular and sometimes that is an indicator that this might not be a scam. I checked out the site's forum and saw positive comments. I further checked out three more external forums and saw the admin being active and responding to questions. The admin has been doing this for 5 years and has managed to earn 6% to 10% weekly. Strange thing was, I saw no referral program which might explain its low popularity.

The program does not pay that much. It pays 8% interest for 5 days and returns the interest with the principal. So, it was paying 1.6% a day. Not too high of a return which is kind of a positive thing. After pondering a little more, I boldly stepped in and threw in a hundred. Hey, isn't my motto NO GUTS NO GLORY. Somehow, I had a gut feeling that I was going to get my money back. ;) Well, after waiting for five days, I was pleasantly surprised to get my 108 back today. My gutsiness had paid off. Eventhough the gain was only a small number, it is the small drops which make the big ocean. I think of going in again and make some more spending change.

I also signed up in another interesting program. This one's called E-TradeXchange. As the name suggests they help in exchanging your ecurrency from one type to another. For example you can change your E-gold into Intgold, SFIpay, Netpay etc. The exchanges take around 1 to 4 hours. The fees charged for this service is low too and varies from 1 to 5 percent. So, if ever you need to swap your ecurrency head straight here.

So, what was in it for me? Well, they also have an investor program. You first have to perform an exchange in order to sign up for this. What do they promise? They say they will give back 300% of what you have invested. There is no timeline as to when the 300% will be achieved as this depends on how their business is doing. I did some research and saw people were getting into this and some were throwing in huge sums.

I did a test spend with a 20. If all goes well it will turn into a 60. In 3 days I have got back 17% so far which averages to a 5% return daily. I got into this as I like the business model and the investors will provide the liquidity which the business need. The only thing which I didn't like was, why they forced investors to perform an exchange before they got aboard. Let's see how far this goes. So far so good...

Sunflowers are growing...

2005-07-22T12:42:00.000-07:00

I have completed week1 in the eight week program at Sunflower Seed HYIP. Now I wanted to do the withdrawal test to make sure everything was working fine. I saw the 28% interest sitting in my account along with the accumulated interest from program 1, which has been closed now. I have already recovered more than 50% of my seed from program 1. I went ahead and did a withdrawal request yesterday and I got my money credited within 24 hours. The program has been under DDOS attacks over the past 2 days. But the admin has been constantly posting on the talkgold forum about the backup websites and keeping us updated. Sunflower Seed ROCKS!!!
Pretty soon my sunflowers will be blooming !!!

4Daily and the Wild Goose Chase

2005-07-21T00:30:00.000-07:00

4Daily is taking everyone on a wild goose chase. I really pity those people who think that everything is going to workout for 4daily and that it will continue to churn more profit for them. The program admin Jim had started off by saying that the June earnings would be a write off meaning no payment to anybody. He later changed this to 25% payment which was later upgraded to 30%. Then a couple of days ago, he says that he has enough money to pay 50% to all concerned people. Finally, today he comes back saying that he made an error while doing his calculations and he started to pay people 50% of their earnings when he realized that he is short of money and won't be able to pay some of the investors. Luckily, I fall into the unpaid category. This is the most unprofessional behaviour I have ever seen. Does he really expect us to believe all this BS?

I'm sick and tired of his lies. Another technique being used is not to update the cash balance after the upgrades expire. A lot of people have complained about this, but no action has been taken so far. I'm pretty sure this is not a software glitch but well planned and imlemented strategy to prevent people from withdrawing money. One of my upgrades has expired and I'm in the same situation with my cash balance not being updated. I'm so frustrated that I'm beginning to think to take this investment as a washout and move on. No use sitting around waiting for something which might never happen.

Is Ultrasurf next in line ?

2005-07-18T22:51:00.000-07:00

I am hearing that investors are having trouble with Ultrasurf. People have not been paid since last Friday. Their site is working but the forum seems to be down. Is this their ploy to avoid negative feedback while they try to milk the last drops of money coming in? Something very fishy is going on here. I have nothing to worry as I have got my seed money out of this one. Whew, what a sigh of relief !!! I have no idea why I joined this program. So people, beware and be cautious with this one.

I came across a new HYIP Udachu Fund. The site is very similar to what Feeder Fund offers with respect to the programs it participates in. Seems to be a copy cat of Feeder Fund. Feeder Fund is well established and Udachu is pretty new and offers similar investment programs. So, what makes them think that people will be attracted to their program.

Surfcityautosurf

2005-07-17T22:40:00.000-07:00

I joined the Surfcity autosurf and made a test spend. Some of the salient features of this are

2% daily after surfing 50 sites with 18 second timer
free $5 to begin with and $5 for each upgrade unit
Payouts on the 15th of each month
10% of your referral upgrades
Free 3000 credits each month to promote your websites.

They take Egold, Intgold and Paypal. I have been surfing there for a couple of days and the surfing has been going on without any hiccups. This seems to be a decent program with not too high an interest rate. This was also recommended in the Autosurfinfo website. After 4daily's disaster, I'm going to sign up for programs which promise nominal interest rates for now.

This guy is for real

2005-07-16T22:11:00.000-07:00

Now, what is this guy's picture doing in my blog, you might ask? No, it's not me if that is what you were thinking. Well this is the admin Karsten, who manages the Sunflower Seed HYIP. I got his picture at one of the forums and I thought it was very interesting for this person to reveal himself to the whole wide world. Actually there were more pics of him. But, I guess this picture will prove the point that he is for real. He is also very active in the forums. It's almost a month since he started and the membership to this HYIP has been growing steadily with almost 833 members signed up now. In his forum he had mentioned that he doesn't want to be listed on the ministry of gold rating website because he thinks that most of the sites listed there are scams. He didn't want to be associated with that site and had himself removed. I think this is going to be one cool program. So, you be the judge and pass the verdict...

Hit the Bulls Eye about 4Daily

2005-07-15T18:36:00.000-07:00

I guess my nightmare has come to life. 4Daily is infact going down just as I had predicted. They have a cashflow problem and won't be able to make the July payments. Well, they do have the guts to say this rather than closing shop and running away. I appreciate them for that and that alone. They say that the July payments will be reduced to 25% of its initial amount. After making such an announcement do they really think any person with an iota of intelligence would want to upgrade not and not request a payout. Everybody will want to run away now. The next week will be the climax and it will be exciting. I'm really wondering if I will even get my seed money out. All the profits earned here will be going down the toilet. Hold your horses for now...

End of Chapter for 4Daily in "my book" ...

2005-07-14T20:11:00.000-07:00

After seeing today's update on 4daily's site, I have decided that this was the last straw for me. They say that surfbar will be down during the early morning of 15th and also that they will start to process payments starting very late on the 15th and continuing into the 16th. I have made up my mind (if indeed I get paid tomorrow) to take the money and run away as far as possible. I'm still keeping Egold as my payment processor and am not very sure if this is going to cause any problems. I have seen Egold payments delayed before. Anyway let's wait and see.

I have had enough of this site. I checked and found that my major upgrades are also expiring on the 18th, just 3 days after the payout date. That is very convenient for me to clean up my account here. I just hope that they will continue to pay till then. Somehow it appears that 4Daily might be a sinking ship. Maybe I'm wrong about what's forthcoming. But, I have achieved what I wanted here and I will go on with or without 4Daily. I will be happy if it lives on and continues to pay its investors and make money for them. But this is the end of the road for me and 4Daily. Adios amigo!!!

On a brighter side, LGE has completed my purchase process and transferred the egold into my Egold account. Everything took less than 24 hours which is great. I transferred a 100 dollars today to Sunflower Seed's plan #2 which is the weekly plan paying 28%. Let's see how this one will go. I'm still on the lookout for more HYIPs to invest my remaining money. I also used my final withdrawal in Ultrasurf. With this, I have taken out my seed money a complete 100%. Now is this good or what...

4Daily Jitters

2005-07-12T19:12:00.000-07:00

As the deadline for 4Daily's payout closes in, I'm hoping that they won't pull the same trick like last time and reduce the interest rate for last month. 4Daily has been plagued by a lot of issues recently. Their surfbar was up and down over the last few days. When it was up the surf engine was so slow. But, they have been kind enough to credit everybody for the days from June 29 till today when anybody was not able to surf. I see that their site is open for surfing today and also noticed that they have increased the surf time for each site to 40s. This is not a big deal to me but when the site slows down this could be a real pain in the butt.

My very first upgrades at 4Daily are expiring around the 20th. I will be able to withdraw my extra profit I have made here. After my upgrades expire my earning potential will come down significantly. I'm still thinking If I want to hang on to this program. I am thinking of maybe re-investing 50% of my profits back into the system. Well, let me first receive my payout after which I will decide on what to do next.

I logged into my Feeder fund account and saw that it was doing well. I have invested my money into the FXIG program. The program has been averaging around 20% each month. So far they are up 5.48% for this month. This is my first month for which I will earn interest from Feeder fund. Hopefully this will be a slow and steady earner for me. I also saw that I have a referral for this program. I think that this program will be a safe bet for anyone. You don't have to deposit any money to sign up. So, go check it out for yourself.

I finally went ahead and deposited money into the Wells Fargo account of LondonGoldExchange to buy some egold. I have also sent a copy of my receipt to them by email. The process was very simple and fast. Now let's see how long it takes for it to show up in my account. Dennis who read my blog informed me that LGE is very reliable and fast. Thanks for your feedback. Now I have one less thing to worry about :)

Ultrasurf pays again !!!

2005-07-10T10:56:00.000-07:00

Ultrasurf paid me the second time today. With this I have withdrawn 85% of the money I put in in this HYIP. Now I will start to compound my earnings and let the profits grow. I had made my witdrawal request on the 8th and I hadn't received anything till the 9th. So I sent a PM to the admin at the forum and got a reply from him pretty soon indicating that the payment has been sent. That was pretty helpful. Eventhough this site has had its ups and downs in the last few days, I think it is kind of stabilizing and hopefully will continue for sometime.

Planting Sunflower Seeds - Will they grow ?

2005-07-09T08:43:00.000-07:00

I came across a new HYIP Sunflower Seed. It has been around for 18 days. It is being managed by a guy from Germany. He invests the money collected into 15-20 HYIPs and a couple of stable offline investment programs. He seems to be pretty much honest and gives all info upfront. I think that this program will last a few months helping me to make some quick money out of it if you get in early. It offers 3 kind of investment plans -

5% daily for 30 days (Introductory offer only; Will close soon.) --> Don't miss this.
28 % weekly for 8 weeks.
2.9% daily for 90 days.

I have signed up for the first plan to take advantage of the 5% rate. After the 30 days the money can be reinvested in plan 2 or 3. This plan is being offered to get in more people. There is a daily withdraw limit of 25. The admin has imposed this as the program is still in its nascency and this will help the program to grow. If you need more info about this program, check out his FAQ and forum. I have plunked in a small amount for now as a test. Let's see if my seeds will grow to yield some nice and bright SUNFLOWERS ...

Tricks of the trade

2005-07-08T22:37:00.000-07:00

Recently I have been investigating a lot of HYIP programs and I noticed that some of the programs tend to go private after some time. At first I thought this was something good and that the HYIP was doing this to limit more investment into the program. Little did I know that this was one of the oldest tricks in the book. This does not go on to mean that all programs which tend to private are scheming devils waiting to run away with your money. There are some HYIPs which have gone private and still continue to pay its members. So think twice when you come across investments saying they are going private.

I actually fell for this trick when I joined Reality Millions. I don't know if this was a good idea but I will blame it on my rookie status. Reality Millions has been going through a lot of changes recently and I'm hearing mixed reviews of what's happening in house. More to come on this later.

Ultrasurf seems to be up again. I had lost 3 days of surfing due to their down time. I was hoping they would credit me for these days. But I haven't seen anything yet. I made another withdrawal today from them. If this gets paid, I have 80% of the initial investment out. I am also racking up some nice profits at 4daily. In another 2 days I would have made a cool 100% return on my money. I'm waiting for the 15th to take out my first payment from them. The joy ride begins...

Surprise payout from Vivasurf

2005-07-05T18:50:00.000-07:00

I was surprised to see a payout from Vivasurf today. I thought this site paid once a month and on the 20th. Today is not the the 20th. So, what am I missing here? Did they change the payout date or something? I can't say that I'm not happy to receive this payment from them, just surpised. I double checked to see if the money was in my Egold and it sure was there. Will I get another payment on the 20th? After this payout, I have got back just over 50% of my initial investment.

I also noticed today that they were giving away free upgrades for the 4th of July. I went ahead and bought one upgrade unit before the deadline but the free upgrade hasn't showed up yet. I will wait another day to see if they will add it to my account. I bought this upgrade with the left over money in my account. I'm still questioning myself why I did the upgrade today. I wanted to get my seed money back before I started to do anymore upgrades. If I get my free upgrade, I will make a dollar less than if I had not upgraded (assuming another payment on the 20th). I guess that's not a big deal. The only bad thing is I have violated one of my cardinal rules. Hope it doesn't come back to bite me.

Egold Fee Calculator

2005-07-04T07:40:00.000-07:00

Each time somebody sends a payment to your E-gold account, E-gold charges a transcation fee. I have always wanted to find an easy way to calculate this. I have been searching for a tool and finally came upon this calculator today. I noticed that for anything above $70 the fee stalls at 69 cents. If you receive 15 payments of $1 each, you pay 75 cents in fees while a bulk payment of 15 dollars will cost you only 15 cents. Something to think about ...

12daily Update

2005-07-03T22:48:00.001-07:00

I received an email from 12daily giving me the latest on what is happening there. I'm posting a part of the email which talks about the new launch date. I don't have any money invested in them right now. I'm going to see what happens after the 10th and then decide if it will be worth anything to go in again.

:: TENTATIVE LAUNCH DATE - JULY 10
The new site is tentatively set to launch on July 10 with a new design, new server network, and improved functionality for all members. We have worked very hard to tailor the site to meet both the long terms goals of our program as well as some of requested features of our dedicated members. We have a small team of programmers, server technicians, and account management staff hard at work in preparation for the launch. We will be sending out an email a couple of days before the launch that will educate you on all of the change-over, any new policies, and what to expect during the changeover. We also want to assure you, that all of your accounts will be automatically transferred. You will not have to signup again and you will not lose any referrals. We feel confident that we have created a user-friendly site that will be home to many 12daily 'Pros' for years to come.

London Gold Exchange

2005-07-02T22:24:00.000-07:00

I signed up at the London Gold Exchange today to buy some Egold. I have read about them before and it seems that they are good. Let me try it out and see if this is true. They charge only a 3% fee for cash deposits. The cash deposits have to be made at a local Wells Fargo bank. That seems to be pretty simple and easy. I have made a request for making a purchase and am awaiting further instructions from LGE. I see that the Ultrasurf site is down today. I was able to logon earlier today. But currently it seems to be down. I will give it a couple of days for this one before burying it and doing the honors.

Update : The fee is either 3% or $15 whichever is the larger amount.

Sudden Windfall

2005-07-01T21:38:00.000-07:00

I received a decent sum of money yesterday which was completely unexpected. Now, I really don't know what to do with this as I have too many uses for it right now. I'm definitely planning to invest some of this into some HYIP. After dabbling for a month trying to get my feet wet, am I ready to take a plunge in the shark infested waters of HYIP? This is a very good opportunity for me to increase my portfolio as I had planned before. Now the confusion is where do I invest this chunk of money? I have decided that this might not go into an autosurf program as I have already invested in 3 of them right now. I have shortlisted some HYIPs. I will be watching them closely in the coming days and will choose the lucky one pretty soon. The other headache is to convert my money into egold. Last time around I had used Goldnow. These guys were very fast and had funded me in 36 hours. I think I will stick with them again this time. If there are any other better options out there suggest me some...

Dream run comes to an end..

2005-06-30T06:35:00.000-07:00

Ok, I finally had to come face to face with reality. It looks like 3x90 has closed its doors. The good news is that I was able to get 50% of my money while the bad news is I lost the other 50%. Not a big deal as I was kind of prepared for this. This is the first program where I have lost money. Well, there's no use crying over spilt milk. I guess each one of these stumbles will harden me.

I was able to finish up my surfing for 4Daily for the month. I hope 4Daily doesn't make any more stupid changes. I withdrew my money from Ultra-surf and this was half of what I had put in. Ultra-surf recently changed their payout rule. You can have only 2 payout requests in a month now as compared to the unlimited requests allowed before. The rule makes sense to me. So in another 10 days, I would be able to get back the remaining portion of my investment. If Viva-surf pays me on the coming 20th I would be getting back 50% of my initial investment. As for 4Daily if they pay me on the 15th I will be making a small profit of 15%. Let's see how it goes. ..

Setting Goals...

2005-06-27T20:50:00.000-07:00

On my way back from Canada, I was ruminating over my HYIP investments. I decided that I wanted to set some goals so that I can gauge my performance over time to see if I'm going anywhere at all. For me to earn a considerable sum through HYIPs I have to increase my portfolio to a significant amount. So, this is the most important thing for me right now. I would like to double my initial amount invested in another 2 months and maybe triple it in another 2 months. I want to be diversified as much as possible and spread my investments among short and long investment vechicles. I don't want to set my goals too tight as this will force me to go into riskier programs promising quick money. This will increase my chances of losing money rather than my earning it. I want to use the short and midterm investments to increase my long term portfolio. As and when I earn some profit in my short term investments, I must funnel some of this into my longer term investments. I want to depend on the more stable longer term vechicles for my extra income.

Hypothetically let's say I want to earn a steady monthly income of 1000 dollars and I am invested in a longterm plan paying 20% a month, I have to have a 5000 dollar portfolio. I think I will make this my long term goal for now. Whew, I have a really long way to go before I can reach this target. In order to make money I have to take some risks to grow my portfolio but I have to take a lot of precautions so that I don't lose money left and right. So far the going has been good for me. I have to think twice before I want to invest my money again a second time in a high risk program. If I'm faced with a loss I have to make it as small as possible. I must never get my emotions make decisions for me. It's nice to list all these here. But how well am I going to follow these will remain a question mark for now.

Summarizing my goals
1. On a short term basis - double my portfolio in 2 months.
2. Diversify as much as possible and spread the risk around.
3. Use the short term investments to make money and use it to increase my longterm portfolio value.
4. For the longer term - Earn atleast 1000 bucks of steady income each month.

Home Sweet Home !

2005-06-26T08:15:00.000-07:00

I'm back in my cozy home after my trip to Ottawa. It was a much needed time off for me and this was my first visit to Canada. Ottawa is a very lively and friendly city and it seems to have a very busy nightlife too. One of the things I learned from my visit is that there is a perception among Canadians that Americans are very rude. I guess it's the media which is to be blamed for spreading this around. The downtown is an awesome place to hangout with various kind of restaurants, pubs and bars. I chanced to stay in a hotel with free Wifi and was able to do my autosurfing too.

On my HYIP front I am currently signed up for 3 autosurfs - 4Daily, Ultrasurf and Vivasurf. My current plan is to get out of 4Daily as quickly as possible. I will be able to to this as soon I get my seed back. By the end of the month, I would have made enough to make this happen. The rule changes at 4daily was the main reason for my decision. I am seeing people discussing at forums that these changes will help 4Daily's longevity. But I'm not happy with the fact that my money will be locked down for a long period of time and my inability to upgrade when I want to. Since this does not meet my needs/goals I have decided to get out. After I get my seed out, I will let the upgrades expire and will gladly take any extra money which comes along.

As for Ultrasurf and Vivasurf I'm planning to see how these continue to run as these are fairly new programs. If they live upto my expectations, I will think about upgrading. I will be able to get my initial investment out from these 2 in another 14 days. The deal with Vivasurf was really good as it allowed me to double my initial deposit and get a free upgrade. I have to thank Poqui for this one. I hope that this program will run for a few months atleast so that I can recoup my investment and mine some egold too.

Eventhough I have receieved my payout from 12dailypro, I'm not going to go back there anytime soon. I see that their autosurfing is down and has been down for almost 10 days now. The site is still up and running. I'm really not sure how they can survive this way. So my advice would be to wait and watch if they can return to normality.

12daily Pays...

2005-06-22T23:56:00.000-07:00

I received my payout from 12dailypro today. The payout was pretty fast as it took only 3 days to process. I'm happy to receive my first profit. I was initally doubtful as to whether these guys were really going to pay or not. I saw that the auto surfing had been stopped for sometime since 16th. But these guys lived up and paid for all the days when the autosurf was down. The admins gave timely updates as to what's going on and let us know that we will be credited properly. Now since my principle has been taken out I can re-invest my profits.

I will be going to Canada for a few days. Im not sure how I'm going to get the surfing done these days on 4daily and Ultra-surf. I especially don't want to lose out on 4daily as it might affect my final payment for the month. This is the thing I don't like about these autosurfs. Even a slight change to our monotonous life style and the payments are affected which can have a disastrous effect on the payouts. Hopefully I can find a way to get out of this minor issue.

First profit made from 12dailypro

2005-06-19T22:27:00.000-07:00

The 12 days have ended in 12dailypro and now I am ready to receive the payout. This is the first profit I will be making and I'm pretty pumped up. Well, the profit is still only on paper. I have requested for the payout, but it looks like the site takes 1-7 days for the payment to be processed and this is regular for this site. I have asked for the payment to be made to my E-gold account.

As I had previously indicated, the site had been taken down for maintenance on the 16th. The site was supposed to be up and running by 18th. The site was up, but no one was able to do any surfing. As of this moment the status still remains the same. The only good thing was that everybody was paid for these down days. All these make me a little bit skeptical about my payout, if it will be processed properly or not. I have to wait and see...

I found that I had some cash lying around in my E-gold account which were the leftovers from my gifthyip encounter. I wanted to invest some in the feeder fund, but I didn't have enough as they require a 50 dollar minimum. So, as I wait for my other payments, I didn't want this to sit around and do nothing. I signed up for Ultra-Surf, a site which is very similar to the 4daily program. I invested a small amount and upgraded. Im expecting to recover my initial amount in a month. Somehow after the 4daily incident, I have an averse feeling towards these programs. But, I'm not completely quitting on these yet. I'm going to wait and watch and then decide if I have to steer clear of these programs.

I have also added some links on the side bar. These are some blogs I came across recently which are interesting reads and talk about HYIP investing. Check it out when you get a chance. I will continue to add more sites as I come across them.

3x90 cruising along fine

2005-06-18T11:09:00.000-07:00

My 3x90 investment has had no hiccups so far. This site pays 3% interest everday for 90 days. A simple 20 dollar investment will turn into 286 bucks with compounding turned on for the entire 90 days or it will net you 54 dollars if you choose the non-compounding option. The things I like about this site are the compounding option and direct daily payouts to the e-gold account if you don't turn on the compounding.

For the first 15 days I turned my compounding on so that my prinicple would grow. After the initial 15 days I have turned off the compounding effect and have started to get my daily payouts directly into my e-gold account. I'm planning to continue this till I get my seed money out and maybe a little more after which I will turn on the compounding and let it ride till the end of the 90 days. The ratings for this site has been positive so far. I have been receiving my payouts without any problems too. Go Baby, Go !!!

Whew !!! What a relief ....

2005-06-17T21:28:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I just heaved a huge sigh of relief. I wasn't able to log on to 12dailypro on June 16th and 17th. I really thought that this one had been sucked into the huge black hole. I was so happy to see the site back up and running today. There was a message inside which said that they were doing some unscheduled server maintenance. In addition they were going to pay everyone for these lost 2 days. Boy, Am I happy or what? I tried to surf for the 18th but I was not able to yet. I have completed 9 out of the 12 days and should have my payout on Monday. If this goes successfully then this will be the first program where I will be actually making a profit. Let's see how this one goes as I hold onto the reins tightly.

As for 4Daily, I just noticed a few minutes ago that they had re-opened their forum. I just browsed through it to see what the general feeling was. Didn't see too much negativity but, Im not surprised. Well I tried to log on to 4Daily now and the site is down again. I'm planning not to upgrade anymore this month. Let my earnings accrue and by the end of the month I will have slightly more than half of my level limit. I also would have earned enough to take out my seed money which is my most important goal right now. After that I will think about my next step.

My only biggest concern right now is what will I do if they decide to reduce the earnings from 4% to 3% again for the month of June too? This will surely bring my earnings for the month of June to just below the half level limit. I'm hoping that 4Daily will not screw us again. I'm definitely not complaining about them. It is much better to have them around for some more time rather than not having them at all today. But in this highly volatile arena, you never know what is going to happen...

Trouble brewing at 4Daily ???

2005-06-15T20:44:00.000-07:00

I got an email from 4Daily indicating that they were going to change the surfing earnings for the month of May from 4% to 3%. It personally doesn't affect me that much as I enrolled into this only on May28. I earned 32 cents in May and this has been cut to 24 cents. Not a big loss to me. I saw that there were more changes happening when I logged onto their site today. They had to shut down their forum as it was causing an overload. I guess there must have been a flurry of negative postings.

The only change which will be a big concern to me at this point of time is the cash balance update change which is made up of the following :
1. Beginning July 1, cash balance will be updated once every upgrade expires. Currently the daily earning is immediately added to the cash balance.
2. Payouts will be once every 50 days - When the upgrade expires the earnings are released for payout. Still have to wait till the middle of the following month to get paid. This means payouts are going to delayed more.

So, whatever you have earned after upgrading will be locked in and released after 50 days. Can I still upgrade using my earnings or will that be stopped as cash balances are not updated anymore daily? I'm still a little bit confused about the payouts. I have to clear up these things. I spent a lot of time yesterday to work out a strategy for 4Daily and after seeing these changes I am back to square one.

I also see that the 13 day strategy has been banned. I was not planning to use this. But I guess this must have caused some serious problems for folks at 4Daily. I'm not sure if listing strategies on 4daily's own forum is a wise thing to do.