A win-win proposition, but not for the punters
Edie Lush endures a Win Investing' seminar which fails in its promise to reveal the secrets of stock-market success hat percentage of ten trillion pounds do you need to be happy?' asks the young Australian called Jonathan who is instructing the `free' Win Investing seminar I'm attending. You may have heard Win Investing's irritating ads on Classic FM, pressing you to attend one of about 18 free sessions a week available in Bristol, Birmingham, Manchester, Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh and London. You're promised that by spending two and a half hours with a tutor like Jonathan, you'll learn the secrets of trading the £1 trillion UK and £9 trillion US stock markets. Jonathan reminisces back to when he was in the very place we're sitting four years ago — he was on his way to an interview with Morgan Stanley when he stumbled across this tutorial and never looked back. He doesn't actually say how rich the stock market has made him, but we infer from the slick black suit and offhand remarks about the three companies he now runs that we're in the hands of a Win Investing success story.
It becomes clear almost immediately, however, that the free seminar is not going to reveal any hot tips. Rather, it is 190 minutes of heavy sell to get me and 25 other participants to part with £3,100 (or sign up today at the wildly discounted price of £1,970) for the privilege of going on a threeday course where we'll really learn the elusive secrets of the stock market. If you want to 'work less, retire sooner and improve your lifestyle', we're told, you must 'invest in yourselves' — starting by handing over several grand to Win Investing.
Jonathan keeps his promise of imparting some kind of market knowledge with a rattling tour from 'what is a share?' to the slightly more complex concept of writing covered calls options. He tells us that compound interest is the key to long-term wealth: one penny compounded at a daily rate of 1,000 per cent for 35 days would give you £339,456,652.80, for example. The precise trade that might give us this enviable return from the change down the back of the sofa is left tantalisingly out of reach.
Instead, we're offered five steps to making money from the market: understand where you are in the economic cycle, choose quality companies, know when to buy and when to sell through technical indicators and chart patterns, test and improve your strategies and 'have a psychology of abundance'. We're not told where we are in the cycle or how to choose these companies — only that we'll learn the specifics in the full course. But we are shown the delights of the tenand 20-day moving average and a chart movement called a double bottom. A slide with Fibonacci retracements, doji candles and pipe bottoms is dangled before us, then whipped away. We'll see it again, when we're £2,000 poorer, on day two of the full course.
With resonant phrases such as 'get probability building in your favour' (how, exactly?) and 'if you lose money you can get it back, but you can never get time back', the Australian has started to reel in a few fish. A man sitting in front of me starts to nod vigorously when we're asked, 'Who could use £30,000 to get out of a negative situation?' His girlfriend looks less persuaded; perhaps she's the negative situation.
Why, I wonder, is hot-shot Jonathan bothering to spend time with our rag-tag group? Simple: because 'I get paid like a rock star to be here' by 'my very good friend' Darren Winters — millionaire founder of Win Investing. Darren didn't respond to requests for an interview, but he certainly has qualifications for running a stock-market course. He's done lots of courses, read 'over 200 books on investing' and met famous American traders such as John Bollinger and Lewis Borsellino. According to his publicity, it's standing room only whenever he appears at investment conferences.
But neither his website nor his fawning colleague makes reference to his ability to lose money as well as make it. Companies House records show that Winters was a director of the software company Amicus Solutions, which after only two years of operations went bust in 2000, owing creditors £256,012.70. The liquidators' report reveals that the top creditors included the Inland Revenue, which was owed £37,000.
Interestingly, neither Darren nor Jonathan is registered with the Financial Services Authority, as a check with the FSA reveals. This is because Win isn't offering share tips, only systems and rules for identifying shares that might make you millions. There is an intriguing mention on Winters's website of his plan to start an investment fund, but he'd need to pass the FSA test first.
There are some happy success stories from Win Investing which we're battered with towards the end of the seminar. There's the 'designer' who turned a 1,466 per cent profit in just nine weeks. I even felt slightly sorry for the 'housewife' who made only a paltry 30 per cent in two months.
Jonathan says that in seven years of teaching, Win Investing has received over 3,000 letters, not one of them from someone who didn't make money. There's at least one he isn't counting, however. At the free seminar we're all offered a 'money-back guarantee': if we don't make at least twice the cost of the course in our first year of investment, we'll get the course fee back. But the Mail on Sunday cites a sad tale of an investor, identified only as J.H., who paid up for a Win Investing course, yet still lost hundreds of pounds trading. Remembering the money-back guarantee, he tried to recoup his fees, but was told he had to attend regular Win Investing monthly investment meetings at £30 a go after the course to be eligible for the refund. This caveat was not mentioned to him at the time, nor is it relayed to us. (Happily for J.H., the Mail on Sunday's Tony Hetherington was able to recoup his course fee for him ) Instead we are told that 99.99 per cent of people are not 100 per cent happy with their jobs, and that we should try to spot these luckless souls on our way home on the Tube. We're told that after the course we'll only need to spend 45 minutes a day trading and we too can start paving our path to retirement with gold.
In the end, it isn't the random and spurious use of numbers that is the most annoying feature of the heavy sell I endured; nor is it the gullibility of some of the attenders, at least one of whom parted with her creditcard details at the end of the session. It's the refusal to admit that playing the stock market takes time and effort, and that there are no guarantees. In the end there is only one certain winner from your potential trade with Win Investing — Darren Winters himself.
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