InvestAnswers and IADSS

REVIEW AND FREE ALTERNATIVE TO EXPENSIVE IADSS TRADING TOOL KIT

Before I start my review, I wanted to disclose that I was subscribed to IA via Patreon at Capitalist Tier (highest until recently) since around June 2021, taking opportunity to save with annual payment on Aug 2021, until recently being kicked out without a warning, most likely due to asking “uncomfortable” questions and pointing out to other members that paying for indicators won’t make them better traders/investors and no one ever sold anything that could make them millions using it. Although series of bans for many other members asking hard questions happened same time and many of us being shocked and angry, I have decided to stay as much from relating to James M. personal affairs, his past endeavours or professional career in the following review, as it’s just few clicks away for anyone wanting to check and many in IA community did already, but it should not matter if his advice was constantly up to a certain good level. Note: This is a long form newsletter and your email provider might truncate it, best viewed in a browser.

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1. Introduction to InvestAnswers

James provides daily YouTube videos with topics mainly focusing on investment into digital assets and equities (mostly focusing on tech companies), giving his opinion on current world events and important from investor point of view news.

Content is well presented and for people new to crypto space giving a “wow” factor, which paired with showing some sensitivity on camera when mentioning donations to animals and general concern for well-being of his followers, creates a very believable persona of an expert trader/investor that has only best intentions in leading you to your financial freedom.

Before I go into more details (worth reading through as I give some free alternatives to IADSS tool) here are the main Pros and Cons of either following free content or/and signing up to his paid services.

PROS:

• Daily videos providing a range of good information mainly on crypto space, useful for those new to it

• Some useful tips/advice on how to plan for long term investment as opposed to finding short term high return risky plays

• Occasional good call like buying Solana or in general having high conviction during Summer 2021 that Bull run is not yet over

• Paid Patreon members (not all tiers) get access to IA discord server and it’s main advantage is the community of like minded people sharing their experience, exchange opinions in majority of cases in a polite and respectful manner

CONS:

• Highly inconsistent advice on Buy levels, risk management and pretty much hardly anytime advising to Sell (I will present few examples of that erratic behaviour)

• Claiming nothing he says is financial advice, clearly knowing that is what he is giving, especially with descriptions on his paid Patreon say he gives you a “guide” to financial freedom and provides “trade alerts”

• Never admitting to any mistakes

• Showing strong bias towards certain projects despite “red flags” - see Celsius example further down

• Adding new Tiers despite early declarations of keeping this service “intimate”

• Publicly ridiculing others in YouTube crypto space, despite not being any better

• Built a false image of an expert investor, TA analyst and risk mgm professional

• Charging 200$ per month for access to what is basically an unfinished product that James discovers its “possibilities” as people paying for it, live test it for him. Claiming its what strikes fear in all hedge funds and institutional investors, so shhh do not share!

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2. Paid Services

InvestAnswers offer its paid services via Patreon in a form of multiple Tiers. Initially there were only 3 when I joined the Capitalists highest available tier that provided the below “benefits”, later James added Investor and in June Executive levels, despite previously claiming he wants to keep the group small as it is not about the money for him.

InvestAnswers Patreon Tiers

The above 3 Tiers give you basic access as described, no access to IA private Discord server, while “Select models & methods” are nothing more than basic spreadsheets for tracking your portfolio and couple of other variations of very little use. There was a promise at some point of “Exit strategy models” that apart from some ADA example never seen the light of day as James did not want people to sell too early (now being too late to sell so…).

Capitalist and Executive Tiers

Up until early June 2022, Capitalist tier was the highest one that had additional benefit of direct access to James via Discord server and to a good community, although only some percentage only used it (over 6k members just for this tier that had access to Discord but usually only 10-15% there). With introduction of Executive tier, the promise of Capitalists getting everything ever “produced” by IA team was gone out of the window. This exclusive new club even had prerequisites you should meet to be able to pay him 200$ a MONTH for the extra benefit of using IADSS, a set of 3 scripts/indicators to make you a better investor. I will go into more detail later.

Spoiler alert - you don’t need MBA or in fact any of the above to look at Green and Red arrows showing you where to buy and sell in confluence with other indis in this package and little to no guidance from the creator.

That is my main concern as people are asked to spend their hard earn money, especially where most of his followers are down 70%+ on their portfolios on very expensive subscription that apparently is not financial advice. I beg to differ though if you are advertising providing trade alerts, paired with Decision Support System and a Guide to financial freedom, that is financial advice!

Patreon description of IA services

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3. The Bad and the Ugly

Everyone makes mistakes, bad calls, wrong predictions etc., but most can own up to it and admit, learn and move on, unfortunately not James M. Despite calling every single lower price on Bitcoin starting from 62k (and other crypto as per examples) nailing a bottom, claiming there will be no real Bear market and Bitcoin never seeing more than 50-55% “discount” , he only admits to “missing” the downturn… the most important piece of info anyone paying him for his expertise was hoping to get.

James almost perfect at his craft

Quality trade alerts you paid for.

The above example of a Trade alert was quite common, also quite often mentioned after the fact and YES James was and is an avid Solana fanatic, he did picked it up early enough to buy cheap, but also kept buying and advising it all the way up to 220$ and then all the way down. You can only imagine those that joined him around 200$ how they feel now.

Epic bounce

I agree “those that nail the bottom”, the actual bottom of bear market not every single level in between, will be rewarded.

Yes, I could go on forever showing what other distressed IA community members provided me as proof of very poor judgement and analysis from James that led them to losses.

The ugliest part is what is happening now, as James is a big fan of Alex Mashinsky from CELSIUS and was a big propagator of using their services, getting over 8000 users signing up to Celsius over the last 12 months or so. Most of them, as you are aware unable to make any withdrawals or deposits, still holding their Bitcoin and other crypto there or having unpaid loans that in most cases have been liquidated when BTC got below 20k. Guess what James never warned anyone, holding a Q&A where none of the questions seemed to surprise Alex, shortly before Celsius blocked all withdrawals. You can easily find the videos on IA YouTube.

At some point anyone questioning the motives behind the new Executive Tier or James looking away when Celsius was smelling a mile away and was clear it is not worth keeping your funds there, was and still is just simply removed from Discord and maybe best part, in most cases getting a refund.

The other ugly part is the moneygrab scheme which clearly looks to be IADSS, initially just an exclusive limited access club, quickly (within days of initial launch) opens it doors to everyone.

What happened to keeping it a secret and having a limited number of people using it? I guess someone told James that hedge funds and “bots” don’t care about his simple tool.

Shh its a secret.

Just to finish this part on a high note …

Easy money to be made with this “holy grail”, you don’t even need experience anymore to make money in a “shitty” market.

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4. IADSS review

Ok I admit it took a bit longer than I hoped to get to the point :), but as you can see there is very little to write about when it comes to IADSS. It is a collection of 3 scripts that after paying your 200$ monthly subscription you get access on TradingView plus 3 pdf’s that provide just superficial info on 3 indicators and how to use a Back Tester, plus FAQ on troubleshooting.

The 3 “models” are:

• Confluence Model, that simply shows you buy and sell arrows when price sits outside of Bollinger Bands, only option you can tweak is your bias from bearish through neutral to bullish

• Mean Reversion Model (on screenshots below seen as extra window at the bottom), this helps you determine overbought and oversold scenarios by plotting red and green dots when indicator turns in opposite direction within the red or green zone. Again very limited options of to tweak this to your style.

• Trend Model, claims to “estimate” the directional price movement of an asset. Sounds more serious than what it is, simple two fast moving averages with changing colors, that manages to repaint and you can find a free MA-X indicator that does exactly that

Anyone with few months of trading experience and using charts on a mildly frequent basis, will know straight away this is a pure money grab and a bunch of free indicators packaged, without even a proper guide. You only find out how James is hoping you could use it when reading through Executive forum posts. No wonder as he also uses his paid customers as beta testers for IADSS learning from them you could even scalp on 5m charts, unlike initially advised its “optimised” for 4h timeframe.

BTC chart plus backtester results for each Model

If you look at the above BTC and later ETH screenshot, what immediately stands out is the profit shown by Trend Model backtester (yes you guessed right, you can only backtest each Model individually even though the initial advice was to use them in confluence), that is set to Bullish bias and started with 100k as base capital. Many jumped to conclusion very quickly that this is the “holy grail” of trading and why do they need other two if this alone can make them rich.

Until someone looked a bit closer at the backtest running it in “replay” mode on TradingView, just to find that indicator repaints (changes colors after the fact or mid bar) and trades appear and disappear from results as they please.

Buy trade opened on candle close

You can see above that BackTester opens a buy trade on current candle close and clearly Trend Model shows it is a bullish trend marked with blue filling. Look what happens next.

Buy trade closed and Sell opened

As the next candle tanks, trend turns bearish, yet somehow our Buy trade made a profit and we also see a Sell order in play. Many automatic backtesters are flawed like that, showing unrealistic results, but this combined with Trend Model (seriously who came up with calling this a “model”) is probably one of the worst examples I’ve seen.

Other indicators do not repaint and I did not have enough time to examine the backtester results to know what is showing is true reflection of what you could achieve using it or not.

ETH showing massive profit and Win rate from Trend Model

You can see 2 Buys (dark green arrows coming from Confluence Model) on main chart and both also confirmed by Mean Reversion indicator below (two green dots). You might say, oh but the Trend model shows orange, so only second buy is valid. Well you are right its showing orange now but was not when candles were closing. You can see that my template that uses two moving averages and its crosses to find buy and sell preliminary signals overlaps with the above and the Mean Reversion is nothing more than any common oscillator with a set of ranges for oversold and overbought areas.

I agree it does not look as clean as IADSS, as it does not filter crosses that happen inside Bollinger bands but if you read through the end I am giving easy to follow steps to achieve exactly the same or better result with free tools.

Free indicators overlap same signals

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5. FREE alternative to IADSS - CryptoG template

Below is a link to a chart template you can copy, save and then do whatever modifications you see fit to match your trading style, but for those that want a very similar idea to what James is selling, here is a set of rules on 4h timeframe that if followed with discipline, patience and proper money mgm will help you become a better long term investor (and you can spend 200$ per month not spend on IADSS, buying Bitcoin or taking your family out to a restaurant).

https://www.tradingview.com/chart/hleqw2hu/ - Link to template

SHORT and LONG setup examples

SHORT/SELL SIGNAL:

• WT_LB (Wave oscillator) outside of upper boundaries (overbought) and fast line crossed the dotted line below

• AO (Awesome Oscillator) shows at least 2 consecutive Red bars

• RSI (red line) was above 70 and preferably for stronger signals its MA (blue line) also was above 70. RSI crossing below MA, but at the time of entry its not 50 or lower

• MA-X indicator both lines were above upper BollingerBand indicating asset was overbought, before the actual cross signal (Red arrow) comes up as your last confirmation for entry

LONG/BUY SIGNAL:

• WT_LB (Wave oscillator) outside of low boundaries (oversold) and fast line crossed the dotted line above

• AO (Awesome Oscillator) shows at least 2 consecutive Green bars

• RSI (red line) was below 30 and preferably for stronger signals its MA (blue line) also was below 30. RSI crossing above MA, but at the time of entry its not 50 or higher

• MA-X indicator both lines were below lower BB indicating asset was oversold, before the actual cross signal (Green arrow) comes up as your last confirmation for entry

With the above simple rules you will get very similar if not better signals than IADSS. As James presents you with backtest results here is an example (at least you can see the actual valid entries) on ETH if your mind was set with long term investment and low risk profile. Starting bank 100k, just because IADSS also has that value as default.

ETH investment example based on CryptoG free signals

The above assumes 10% of your “free capital” invested when BUY signal shows and 10% of your ETH holdings sold when valid SELL signal shows. You can even clearly see the waves of red and green showing where Bull and Bear cycles happen. The only additional rule to taking the signals is you Never take a BUY if a price is higher than your last SELL and never take a SELL if price is lower than your last BUY. You can see that your “free capital” apart from the start of your investing never gets even close to depleting, so you always remain with a good cash position that you can spread across a number of assets.

There are many ways to improve that but I will be covering various examples in my regular newsletters. Of course if I wanted to sell you my indicator toolkit I’d show you the below result, starting ETH investing based on same signals starting in late 2016.

ETH investment example starting Nov 2016

Remember we are in a Bear market this is the best time to start buying in a smart way, as you can see no need to even deploy your whole capital to turn in a good profit, of course all depends on an asset you decide to invest in and its potential to grow.