Should You Trust Jim Fink at Investing Daily? – Review

Jim Fink works for Investing Daily (InvestingDaily.com), an investment advisory firm, as an investment strategist and analyst. In a nutshell, what he does is provides trade recommendations to subscribers of his different advisory services so that they can follow along without any needed experience or knowledge, specifically in the realm of options trading. He tells people what to invest in and when to invest, similar to a lot of other trading advisory services out there, such as Strategic Trader, The Casey Report and many others.

Background

Jim has quite the educational background. He has a bachelor's degree from Yale, a master's degree from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, a law degree from Columbia University, and a MBA from University of Virginia's Darden School of Business... quite a lot.

Prior to getting involved in investing and prior to his degree in business, Jim worked in telecommunications regulatory law for 9 years. However, the pay wasn't good enough for him and he found that investing was a better choice financially.

To-date he has more than 20 years of options trading under his belt and has supposedly made profits of over $5 million for himself.

Currently he works for InvestingDaily as an analyst/strategist, but used to work for Motley Fool for a brief period of time, as I found out on his LinkedIn profile.

Trading Services

Currently Jim is the chief investment strategist for the Options for Income and Velocity Trader, as well as an investment analyst for Personal Finance... all of which are services offered by InvestingDaily.

Options for Income - $3,000/yr

This service, as the name suggests, is all about trading options. Here Jim tells subscribers what to invest in and when to invest. It is advertised as "conservative options for aggressive income".

A subscription includes:

• 4-6 trade recommendations per month
• Alerts on when to enter/exit a trade
• Access to the "Stock Talk" message board where you can personally ask Jim questions
• Video trading series where Jim goes over his strategies and provides beginner information on trading options

Velocity Trader - $3,000/yr

Velocity Trader is another options trading recommendation service by Jim, but it works a bit differently in terms of strategy and the way the information is laid out. This is built around his Velocity Profit Multiplier system, which finds good stocks based on 5 signals that they send out before moving.

Members get access to:

• 52 weekly issues with 2 trade recommendations in each along with Jim's market analysis and charts
• Velocity Trader bootcamp that is an 8-part training series which goes over the basics of options trading
• Access to the forum where you can ask questions and get answers

Personal Finance - $99/yr

Personal Finance is InvestingDaily's flagship entry-level newsletter. It has been around for over 40 years and has a broad focus, providing subscribers with broad-level market analysis, recommendations for growth accounts, retirement, options trading, etc.

As a subscriber you get access to:

• 12 newsletter issues per year that include market analysis and trends, along with any important updates on the model portfolios
• Alerts to any breaking news or opportunities that become available
• Members area access, which includes access to the database of past issues, special reports released, etc
• Access to the Stock Talk message board

After doing a lot of digging around online I haven't been able to come across all that many good sources of reviews for Jim's advisory services. However, I have found some... and overall the ratings aren't too pretty.

Options for Income Reviews

Stock Gumshoe is one of the best sources of independent subscriber reviews I have found... and there are quite a bit of negative Options for Income reviews on StockGumshoe.

The overall rating is 3 out of 5 stars, not too bad, but you'll see what I'm talking about when I say things "aren't too pretty".

Velocity Trader Reviews

And if you were hoping that reviews for Velocity Trader would be better than you thought wrong. The reviews on Stock Gumshoe are worse overall, which a 1.3 out of 5 star rating...

Apparently Velocity Trader used to be called Death Cross Trader, but it was doing so poorly and getting so many bad reviews that this is likely the reason it was renamed.

But low ratings are sometimes normal..

It is true that people are more likely to leave negative reviews after bad experiences rather than positive reviews after good experiences, and it is also true that there are some good reviews out there for Jim's services... HOWEVER, the bad far outweigh the good here and the good reviews are few and far in-between.

There is even a profile for Jim Fink and InvestingDaily on DirtyScam, where it has an extremely low rating, as expected...

In this promotion Jim specifically states that he guarantees you can "make an average of $5,629 each month".

Now how can he possibly have any idea what any subscriber can make when he has no idea how much money one has to start out with? It's impossible... and a very misleading claim.

And there are plenty more misleading claims where this came from.

Investing Daily Agrees to Modify Advertising Claims

The Electronic Retail Self-Regulation Program (ERSP), administered by the BBB, contacted InvestingDaily in early 2019 and asked them to discontinue some of their misleading advertising pitches.

Some of the misleading claims that ERSP wanted them to change (which you can read more about in this article) included:

• “Give me 9 minutes a week and I guarantee you $67,548 a year.”
• “Look how easy it is to collect thousands of dollars in ‘free money’ every month.”
• “And that’s why selling options is about the closest you can get to never losing money investing.”
• “I ended the year with a cash-flow well over $100,000… which is just plain unbelievable.” –Roger D., Wayzata, MN.

They claimed they would, and supposedly did to some extent, but obviously this wasn't enough because they are still using some pretty darn misleading claims in my opinion.

There are some promotions floating around the internet where Jim brags about his 85% win record, which is quite a bold claim to make (specifically for his Options for Income service).

And yes, it does seem that he actually has a 85% win record... HOWEVER, this isn't as it seems.

Upon looking further into this I found that the reason he doesn't lose trades is because he keeps rolling them out if they go bad, investing more and more capital, as mentioned in a review at UnderpaidOverworked.com that I found...

You can form your own conclusion on whether or not to trust Jim Fink. I think we can all agree that the marketing coming from him and InvestingDaily for his trading services is rather ridiculous however.

Unfortunately, just like Agora Financial, St. Paul Research, Raging Bull, and other investment advisory firms, InvestingDaily and the team (which includes Jim Fink) have fell victim to the lure of easy money by promoting their services as better than they really are just to make some extra money off of unsuspecting individuals who buy into the hype.

So anyways... the takeaway here is that you should definitely NOT believe everything the sales material says and you should always do some additional research. Jim Fink isn't the straight-forward/honest salesman that we would like to see, but there is no doubt he is an educated man who knows what he is doing... although his recommendations don't seem to pan-out all that well.

I hope you enjoyed this review and found it helpful. If you have any comments or questions, please leave them below 🙂