What is Investors Underground For? Is Nathan Michaud a Scam?
Investors Underground is one of the largest trading communities online founded in 2008 by Nathan Michaud. Nate, who also goes by InvestorsLive (Twitter handle: @InvestorsLive), started trading in 2003 and went full-time in 2007. His courses and community were originally affiliated with the Profit.ly platform (founded by Tim Sykes), but those ties were cut in 2015.
Nate himself is mainly an intraday momentum trader, but the community as a whole is diverse. There are beginners, veterans, part-time, full-time, long-biased, short-biased, day traders, and swing traders from around the globe. Some trade penny stocks, while others trade NASDAQ stocks, and many do both. What I think is critical to mention right off the bat in order to avoid any confusion is that Investors Underground is a community focused on short-term day and swing trading (not long-term investing, as the name suggests).
Throughout this review, I will detail exactly what Investors Underground has to offer, my personal opinion about different aspects of it, and if their flagship courses and subscription packages are worth buying. I will also provide information about Nathan Michaud and Investors Underground that rarely ever gets shared within the same review. This is so that you can get the full picture – instead of a one-sided or biased review/testimonial, and decide for yourself if Investors Underground can help you improve your trading.
Investors Underground Reviews and Testimonials From Other Sources – Who Can You Trust?
What Other People Are Saying About Nathan Michaud and Investors Underground:
The Investors Underground Website
|Link to Investors Underground Feedback Tab|
If you go to the Investors Underground website and click on the “Feedback” tab in the main menu, you’ll find at least a hundred positive testimonials from Twitter followers. Obviously, these are all going to be positive. IU isn’t going to show negative reviews on their own website. So understand that these are cherry-picked comments. It’s certainly a lot of positive feedback, but ignores any negative.
Popular Review Sites – TrustPilot & Investimonials
|Link to TrustPilot Reviews and Testimonials – 4.8/5 Stars|
|Link to Investimonials Reviews and Testimonials – 4/5 Stars|
If you check out the reviews and testimonials from these two popular review sites: TrustPilot and Investimonials, you’ll find some mixed reviews on Investors Underground. In general, they are predominantly positive, but there are still some 1 and 2 star reviews mixed in. With that being said, it’s hard to judge the validity of these reviews. It’s possible that some of the positive ones are fake or purchased, and that some of the negative ones have been selectively deleted.
In the case of Investimonials, this was a platform launched by Tim Sykes in 2009 – the same person that launched Profit.ly in 2011. And while I like the idea behind both of these sites: Investimonials to provide ratings on various trading and investing services, and Profit.ly to provide a social platform and tracking journal for traders, there’s no doubt that there can be a conflict of interest here. Tim owns the Profit.ly platform, which houses various trading products and services created by himself and a number of affiliated trading gurus, but he also owns Investimonials, a trading and investing service review site.
I’m not saying that he is dishonest or has gamed the system in any way – I have no proof of that one way or the other. All I’m doing is trying to point out potential biases. Any product or service that he is affiliated with, he would obviously want to have positive reviews, and any competitor’s products and services he would probably want to have negative reviews. He has skin in the game, so I’m sure that he wants his own products and services to shine in relation to other ones out there. I’m not saying that he or anybody else has taken any measures to alter, delete, or otherwise misrepresent reviews. All I’m saying is that it’s possible.
Personal Review Sites – DayTradeReview, TopTradeReviews & TradingSchools:
|Link to Investors Underground Review at DayTradeReview – 4.7/5 Stars|
|Link to Investors Underground Review at TopTradeReviews – 4.5/5 Stars|
|Link to Investors Underground Review at TradingSchools – 1/5 Stars|
There are a ton of review sites that write about Investors Underground, along with many other trading products and services available online. This is just a small sample. But understand that not all reviews are completely honest and forthright. My site here is a review site in many ways: I offer some product and service recommendations based on my own personal experiences and what I think can help other traders the most, but not every site has 100% positive intent for their visitors. Some just have dollar signs in their eyes.
Again, I’m not necessarily bashing any other review sites here. I’m just pointing out their potential biases. I’m not singling anyone out specifically. Everyone has biases and everyone has blind spots – me, you, and everyone else. But my ultimate goal is to provide you with a well-rounded perspective that includes opinions from both ends of the spectrum. For the most part, I actually agree with many of the top recommendations at DayTradeReview and TopTradeReviews, including tools like Finviz, TradingView, Trade Ideas, etc.
At TradingSchools, most reviews are scathing hit pieces with 1 star ratings. Do I think all of the reviews there are entirely accurate and fair – not necessarily. But I do like the attempts to clean up an industry full of deception and fraud. This site clearly has a negative bias in relation to almost every product and service associated with trading. At the end of the day, you have to gather all of the information you can, try to figure out how legitimate that information is, and decide for yourself what is right for you.
Investors Underground Success Stories and Trader Interviews:
Tim Grittani (@Kroyrunner89)
Tim Grittani is one of the most successful members within the Investors Underground community. He started with just a couple thousand dollars in 2011 and turned that into over one million by 2013 trading penny stocks. At this point in time, he’s well past the ten million dollar mark. Since his early years, he has expanded his strategy to trade NASDAQ stocks as well. What sets him apart within the trading community is not only his financial success, but his humility and overall character. He doesn’t run a service of his own, but has developed two extremely popular trading courses: Trading Tickers & Trading Tickers 2.
Michele Koenig (@Offshorehunters)
Michele Koenig started trading full-time back in 2001. At the time, there weren’t really any trading educational services, so she is completely self-taught. This lack of guidance at the start of her trading journey inspired her to launch her very own blog in 2012 called TradeontheFly to help aspiring traders find their paths. She’s mainly a swing trader, but does some day trading here and there. She runs the swing trading portion of the chat room where she shares ideas and helps educate members on a slightly more flexible approach. She also created the Swing Trading course offered at Investors Underground.
[Link to All Trader Success Story Interviews at Investors Underground]
What Exactly Does Investors Underground Offer and What Are the Costs?
Education and Guidance (Standard Membership)
Multiple Chat Rooms – Momentum, Swing, Crypto/OTC, and Trader’s Lounge
There are multiple chat rooms that cater to various styles of trading. Nate spends most of his time within the momentum chat, and this is where the most action occurs. Swing and Crypto/OTC are typically less active. One of the best features about the chat rooms in general is that you can set up alerts on specific tickers as well as specific community members. So if you only want to track a specific member or two, you can set up audio alerts to let you know when they’ve contributed something to chat.
Overall, the chat room is strictly moderated. It’s not a place to ask beginner questions like “what is support and resistance?”. That’s a basic concept covered within the courses and video lessons. When a question like that gets asked, it just shows a lack of initiative to work through the lessons. Newbie questions and off-topic banter should be reserved for the Trader’s Lounge, if anything. It only distracts from the primary goal during market hours of tracking the market and taking advantage of the opportunities it provides.
Video Lessons, Trade Recaps, and Webinars
Along with the courses (mentioned below), there are hundreds of additional video lessons and webinars available for viewing. This includes thousands of hours of educational content to further your understanding and growth as a trader. The lessons cover all kinds of topics like technical indicators, chart setups, and even specific trade recaps. The monthly webinars are also a great opportunity to ask specific questions and work through any obstacles you’re currently facing.
Daily/Nightly Watch Lists and Game Plans
Watch lists are provided by not only Nate, but multiple top members of the community as well (Michelle, Emil, Dante, etc.). This is where you can get an inside look at the game plans and rationales of professional traders. In my opinion, this is where you can start learning the “why” behind potential trades and start building a strong foundation toward self-sufficiency. You can take these insights, see how successful traders use their plans throughout the session, and learn to create them for yourself in the future.
Additional Education – 3 Main Courses
Textbook Trading (8+ hours of content) – $997
Textbook Trading is essentially a Day Trading 101 course that covers Nate’s trading history, basic principles, terminology, technical analysis, brokers, long setups, short setups, daily routines, and various trading tools. Within this course, Nate makes a point of showing a handful of setups with as many chart examples as possible to familiarize beginners with pattern recognition.
Tandem Trader (12+ hours of content) – $1,497
While Textbook Trading covers much of the basic principles, Tandem Trader takes it a step further with real-life recorded trades. It covers intermediate and advanced concepts like level 2 analysis and float rotation, with tick-by-tick commentary from Nate. He takes the theoretical concepts from Textbook Trading and puts them into practice
Swing Trading (6+ hours of content) – Bundled With Membership Subscriptions
The Swing Trading course was created by Michelle Koenig (mentioned above). With over 20 years of trading experience, Michelle is well-respected within the community. She day trades as well, but her main approach is swing trading. This course covers her core principles and methodologies. She is also the head moderator within the swing trading segment of the chat room.
Top 2 Complaints About Nathan Michaud and the Investors Underground Chat Room:
The top two complaints I’ve come across about Investors Underground:
- CHAT ROOM IS NOT BEGINNER-FRIENDLY
- NO OFFICIAL TRADE ALERTS
Having personal experience with close to ten trading chat rooms at this point, it’s actually a good thing that it’s not beginner-friendly. As soon as you surpass the “beginner” phase in your journey, you’ll see just how annoying the constant barrage of beginner questions from newcomers becomes. Unnecessary questions and answers disrupt the chat and decrease its value. There are many other chat rooms that cater to beginners, but doing so destroys the value of it for intermediate and advanced traders.
You might get your feelings hurt if you enter the chat and ask a silly beginner question, but for the sake of the entire community, it’s preferable that they keep it professional. There are many other avenues for getting beginner questions answered: the main ones being the courses, video lessons, and webinars. But you can also private message moderators or any other chat participants for assistance. Blasting a community-wide message in chat that isn’t related to the day’s action is frowned upon.
In regard to there being no official trade alerts, I think this is a good thing as well. I’ve used dozens of newsletters, alert services, and trading programs in the past, and in all cases, specific trade alerts hurt members far more than helped them. In general, alerts tend to give members the idea that they can simply be a copy-cat and blindly mirror-trade their way to consistent success. But it never ends up working well. It’s a dangerous approach. Alerts can be enticing, but simply won’t turn out as well as you think.
How to Best Use Investors Underground to Achieve Consistent Trading Success:
3 Steps to Maximize an Investors Underground Subscription:
When it comes to a popular trading service such as Investors Underground, there will always be devoted supporters and avid naysayers – and everyone in-between. But the truth of the matter is that your ultimate trading success or failure depends primarily on how you choose to use it. It’s much like a gym membership in the sense that simply signing up isn’t going to automatically produce favorable results. You have to actually put the work in. The resources are available, but it still requires effort on your part.
All of the legitimate day and swing trading success stories you see online are a result of traders who chose to become self-sufficient in all three phases of their operations: preparation, execution, and review. They’re not waiting for texts/emails in order to chase “guru alerts” about penny stocks, small caps, or anything else. Instead, they have a strong understanding of position sizing, risk management, and their own trading style. Understanding the “why” and “how” behind good trading is the path to consistent success.
STEP #1: Go Through the Free Day Trading Beginners Course and Use the Day Trading Encyclopedia For Referencing Terms/Concepts
The free day trading course created by Investors Underground is a great starting point for anybody considering short-term day and swing trading. It covers many basic concepts and can help you determine whether or not momentum stock trading is right for you. The day trading encyclopedia offered by IU as well as Investopedia are two great resources for referencing any terms or concepts you don’t quite understand or need clarity on. Using these tools will allow you to start building your foundation at no cost.
STEP #2: Practice What You Learn and Develop Tactical Skills Using a Realistic Paper Trading Platform/Market Simulator Like TradingSim
Once you have a core level of understanding from the beginners course in regard to setups/patterns, risk management, and various other concepts, it’s a good idea to start practicing in a simulated environment. There’s a major difference between intellectual and practical understanding. On an intellectual level, trading can seem rather simple. But on a practical level, it’s much more difficult.
Trading is both an art and a science. A realistic market simulator provides an outstanding opportunity to build skills and test strategies at your own pace. Most importantly, it’s risk-free. There are free simulator options out there, but they’re not typically all that realistic. What I like most about TradingSim specifically is that it doesn’t require any software downloads or brokerage accounts, and has an authentic feel to it. Most traders skip this crucial step, enter the market unprepared, and end up learning expensive lessons.
STEP#3: Take a Top-Rated Trading Psychology Course to Cultivate the Proper Mindset. #1 Recommendation → Advanced Traders Mindset
The mental component of trading is where most trading services are woefully lacking. Even though trading is almost entirely a psychological game, the typical new trader only cares about patterns and setups. As a result, their own decision-making process gets buried and overlooked. Eventually, years down the line, they find themselves with all kinds of conceptual trading knowledge, yet still unable to achieve consistent success due to mental barriers and self-sabotage.
Ask any consistently profitable trader and they’ll preach about the critical importance of mindset. Unfortunately, working on your mindset isn’t the “sexy” thing to do, so it often gets ignored. But so much emotional and financial pain can be spared with a genuine focus on mindset right from the start. I’ve seen far too many traders spend thousands of dollars on learning setups and strategies, and then proceed to lose thousands more in the market – not from lack of knowledge, but lack of self-control.
Please don’t be a trader (like me, unfortunately) that had to learn the hard way instead of cultivating the proper mindset right from the start. It would have saved me years of time and thousands of dollars on my path to consistent profitability. The mindset course I wish I found before joining any newsletters or alert services, or placing any live trades, is Advanced Traders Mindset.
Conclusion – My Personal Take on Nathan Michaud and the Investors Underground Community:
In my personal experience, Investors Underground is a solid trading community for individuals who are legitimately committed to their own trading success. If you’re looking for some magical system or guru to blindly copy alerts from, this isn’t the place for you. But if you have a high level of personal accountability, work ethic, and perseverance, then the community at Investors Underground can help guide your development on the road to consistent profitability.
Just remember that how you choose to use the available resources can have a substantial impact on your results. Members have drastically different experiences with Investors Underground depending on how they approach it. So if you choose to subscribe, I want you to be going in with the proper perspective. Far too many individuals think that merely paying the subscription fee guarantees their success. But paying that fee is just the start of a long, up-and-down journey to consistent profitability. Can the educational resources and ongoing mentorship help shorten the typical learning curve? Yes. But your ultimate success is largely dependent upon the time and effort that you are willing to put into it. The educational resources are worthless without the proper utilization of them.
The best way to think about an Investors Underground subscription is like a piece of exercise equipment – a treadmill, for example. Merely purchasing it doesn’t produce any favorable results. You actually have to use it properly in order to see the desired benefits. Using it as a clothing rack in the corner of the room isn’t the same as using it to walk, jog, or run. Tossing clothes on it certainly doesn’t provide any of the great benefits of exercise. The same phenomenon happens with trading services. People buy them expecting automatic success. But the purchase is just the start. There’s absolutely no value without your consumption and proper application.
Please share your personal experiences with Investors Underground or any other trading services in the comments section below.
Written by Matt Thomas (@MattThomasTP)
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Waoh. This is one of the most extensive reviews I have read about a trading service. The detail and attention to other people opinions about reviews with the associated biases we all have is so honest. The balanced perspective is quite refreshing bringing in the positive and negative views of other review sites on Investors Underground is so open and transparent. Thank you for this.
Happy to help.
I definitely think it’s important to share all sides within all of my reviews – and then provide my own take based on personal experience. Hopefully understanding viewpoints on Investors Underground from various perspectives will help individuals decide whether or not it’s a good fit for them.
I must admit, I don’t think online day trading is for me, but it’s one of those things I like to keep an eye on anyway. Especially with so many so called experts offering their ‘expert training’ these days, you really dont know who to trust. So it’s always great to see detailed reviews like this.
As your review points out, and from what I can see in the content is that it doesn’t seem to be beginner friendly at all. So as it’s aimed at those who are already versed in the game, I should imagine one would be able to far better judge the value of the program should they be at that higher level of experience in the day trading game.
I appreciate you sharing your thoughts, Kev!
I would like to quickly point out that Investors Underground on the whole is actually quite beginner-friendly. It offers free beginner and intermediate courses on YouTube, premium courses (Textbook Trading, Tandem Trader, and Swing Trading), additional video lessons and webinars, daily watch lists, and more. But what’s not necessarily beginner-friendly is the chat room – and this is actually what makes it top rated.
In my experience, most other trading chat rooms are loosely moderated, so new members are constantly posting the same beginner questions over-and-over again, or even completely off-topic comments. And this takes away from the main purpose of these chat rooms – finding great trade opportunities. There are plenty of other resources for getting those basic beginner questions answered (the courses, video lessons, webinars, etc.), but the chat room is completely focused on finding opportunities and executing on them. So overall, Investors Underground offers a handful of resources that are certainly beginner-friendly, but the chat room is all business.
I am not good when it comes to online trading. I most likely will fall as a beginner for awhile so sadly investors underground chatrooms I will have to avoid so that I can learn more of the trade. In the lessons, do you learn the basics for online trading complete?
Hi Bernard – thanks for sharing your thoughts. It’s definitely a good thing to acknowledge that the beginning process won’t be easy. I’ve seen far too many beginners jump straight into day trading based off posts they’ve seen on social media or misleading marketing campaigns. It’s usually some variation of the fear of missing out that makes them dive in completely unprepared. And while there are definitely some great traders out there capturing consistent profits, much of what you might see on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and similar platforms is distorted or false. You can’t just blindly jump into the market and be consistent – consistent success requires specific skills, experience, proper risk management, etc. Building the necessary skills and gaining experience can certainly be expedited with resources like courses, mentorship, and market simulators. But I haven’t heard of any successful trader who has ever achieved immediate and sustainable success without having to overcome the learning curve.
For any individual interested in short-term trading and potentially joining the Investors Underground community, I highly recommended the free day trading beginners course and day trading encyclopedia – both of which I mentioned above. These video lessons will cover the basic terms, concepts, and even a handful of setups, but just so you know – there is no such thing as a “complete” trading course. I say this because there are innumerable patterns, setups, strategies, indicators, and overall trading styles that can potentially work, but no course can cover every single one of them – that would be impossible. But the free course definitely provides a solid foundation for those just starting out – and gives you an idea of how the majority of traders within IU operate. From there, IU offers 3 premium courses (Textbook Trading, Tandem Trader, and Swing Trading) that take things even further than the beginner course. The chat room is only one aspect of the service, but there are a handful of other potentially valuable tools if used appropriately – especially for beginners.
In addition to that, it’s worth noting again that there are many courses out there that briefly discuss mindset (including the ones offered at IU), but if you decide to seriously pursue trading, I can’t stress enough the importance of taking a dedicated trading mindset course. My #1 recommendation is The Advanced Traders Mindset Course at 2ndSkies. The reason I recommend taking a mindset course right off the bat is because trading is mainly a psychological game. You might not realize it now in the beginning stages, but trading is 80% mental/20% tactical. Almost every single trader, however, enters the market solely concerned about the tactical (specific setups, patterns, strategies, etc.), but then consistently sabotage themselves by failing to follow their rules/plans/systems. These things happen all the time: removing a stop order to avoid taking the loss, adding to a losing position hoping for a turnaround, strategy-hopping in fear of missing out, failing to pull the trigger on your setups for lack of confidence, and the list goes on and on. But a mindset course can arm you with the tools of self-awareness and self-control to avoid or better handle these psychological hurdles. The best part of all is that they are all fairly cheap in comparison to most trading courses (about $300 for lifetime access) and can help you outside the market in addition to inside. They provide the most value out of any trading courses in my opinion because they actually prepare you for long-term success. Learning setups or patterns, and even finding a strong statistical edge, means nothing if you can’t stick to following your plan and executing on that statistical edge. It sounds so simple, and everyone thinks their own mindset won’t be an issue, until they jump into live trading situations with real money on the line and start acting irrationally/impulsively.
You can check out the free resources page as well as this day trading article I just published for a list of my top recommended resources. I hope this helps – take care!
I really appreciate your in-depth look into Investors Underground. I think it is a great idea to learn trading in a community and this sounds like a great group. I was surprised but agree that any newcomers need to be aware of not asking basic questions in the community chats – I’ve seen annoying questions asked in many other forums. It seems a sound plan to do the courses, learn, read and listen. Any service is going to have a mixture of reviews over this amount of time. I also hear your concerns about the conflict of interest with Profit.ly/Investimonials. Really enjoyed the spotlight on Michelle Koenig. I wonder how many women are in trading?
Hi Lily – thanks for sharing your thoughts. Trading is an endeavor where people have to match their own personality with a preferable trading strategy – so it’s not a one-size-fits-all type of thing. But what I like about Investors Underground is that the community is fairly diverse – so there are certainly individuals to learn from whether you lean toward day trading, swing trading, longing, shorting, small caps, crypto, OTC, etc.
For beginners, the best resources to take advantage of are the free day trading course and encyclopedia offered by IU – those can provide a pretty good picture of what the community is all about. After using those, I think potential subscribers can get a much better understanding on if the IU community is right for them. The premium courses and monthly subscriptions are essentially just an extension of the free course.
And you’re completely right about the mixed reviews. No matter how great a product or service is – there will always be critics. But what I’ve found over time from using and reviewing multiple trading services is that there are clear ways to improve your odds of success with all of them. Like I mentioned above in the review, your ultimate success is dictated by how you choose to use the resources. Merely subscribing won’t produce success. Trying to blindly mirror somebody else’s trade alerts in chat won’t produce consistent or sustainable results.
The majority of people who join trading services usually want a shortcut, so they end up taking a copy-cat approach. But by failing to learn and develop your own trading skills, you’re only cheating yourself. Typically, the individuals who are looking to be spoon-fed hot alerts and merely copy are the ones who struggle, fail, and complain. But the individuals who take learning and applying the concepts seriously and are focused on achieving self-sufficiency are the ones who eventually succeed (like Tim Grittani, Michele Koenig, Eric Wood, Alex Sposito, Phil Goedeker, etc.)
To answer your question about the number of women in trading – I don’t have any statistics on it, but it certainly seems like there are a lot more men than women in my experience. I’d guess that it’s about 10-20% women, 80-90% men. But there are certainly some great female traders out there – Michele from TradeontheFly, Shay from HumbledTrader, etc.
I see that Investors Underground is a solid platform for traders that want to take their skills to the next level. However, I am just starting. And one of the worst things for me is to join a platform where everybody talks with very technical phrases. I would like to start somewhere else and when I have gained experience then join Investors Underground.
Hi Ann – the chat room during market hours is all business, which makes it not so beginner-friendly, but pretty much everything else offered at Investors Underground can help someone just starting out. Like the beginners day trading course, as well as the day trading encyclopedia for looking up terms/concepts you might not understand. They also offer a chat room terminology guide.
In addition to that, the video lessons, courses, webinars, and watch lists are all great resources for beginners to learn from. There’s no doubt that people would abuse the chat room with silly questions and off-topic banter if it wasn’t so strictly moderated. Trust me, I’ve seen this happen within other chat rooms – and it only reduces the value of it for everyone. The good news is that the beginner phase can be quickly surpassed by focusing on all of the other educational resources at first.