FractalGo: The Billion Dollar Trading System?

FractalGo/Fractal Alerts
  • Honesty
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  • Quality
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  • Cost
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  • User Experience
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Summary

FractalAlerts/FractalGo claims the following:

“For the last 11 years, fractalerts has delivered 28.3% per week for the world’s biggest banks, hedge funds and institutional money managers. No hype. No marketing. Actual results. Every alert, every tick and every result is fully documented.”

Unfortunately, the above statement is an outrageous misrepresentation of actual investor accounts, as per a third party Futures brokerage.

Owner of the company, Rich Clifford, claims that his trading system can also be used to break NSA codes,  and is currently being used by money managers that manage over $1.1 billion dollars. None of this ridiculousness could be verified, except for the massive investor losses.

As per the NFA, Rich Clifford has no reparations, yet he worked at 5 different money management companies. All 5 companies were charged with fraud, some were placed in court-ordered receivership, millions of dollars of investor funds went missing, and now this character reappears with a ‘magical trading’ system that can pay off the national debt in only a few trades.

Only a fool, an idiot, or a financial moron would believe such financial nonsense. Yet it appears that many are willing to fork over thousands of dollars each year, based upon a fancy looking website and glossy marketing materials.

Buyer beware. Avoid like wet underwear.

 

Comments Rating 2 (1 review)

Thanks for reading today’s review of FractalAlerts and FractalGo.

Many readers ask how I decide who gets a review? The answer is pretty simple. I focus on the most ridiculous.

I keep a master list of every known trading educator on the internet and continually monitor the landscape. I sign up for marketing emails using hundreds of dummy email addresses.

All of these marketing emails are funneled into a single channel. Every single day, I wake up and read the nonsense. It’s like a gushing sewer of financial diarrhea. Wildly flowing and spewing all sorts of ridiculous investment promises.

The most ridiculous emails, I mark with a ‘star’ and keep a running tally of ‘stars.’ The trading educators that accumulate the most ‘stars’ move into the ‘outhouse’. That special place where I dig out the kernels and chunks of truly outrageous marketing. It’s dirty work.

For the past few months, I have been silently curating a truly outrageous series of marketing emails and promotional hype from a character named Rich Clifford.

Rich Clifford is the “founder and managing director” of a company named FractalAlerts. Actually, he is the captain of stupidity for several related companies: FractalGo, FractalAlerts, and FractalAlternative.

What this guy has been piping out is some of the most outrageous financial puffery that I have ever witnessed.

Rich Clifford of FractalGo: Financial Puffmaster

According to Rich Clifford, he has designed a trading system that:

  • Has an 11-year track record.  Delivering 28.3% per week.  Every trade alert is documented. Every ruby red cent!
  • The world’s biggest banks, hedge funds and institutional money managers use it.
  • Over $1.1 billion dollars in being traded with this system right now.
  • The system was used to break secret codes in World War II.
  • The system can also be used to crack secret codes from the NSA.

Sounds pretty amazing, right? A system that won World War II!? And it delivers 28.3% per week!?

Geez, that would be 1,471% per year! In only 2 years, this system would have accumulated all of the known supply of money on planet earth! Trillions in profits.

Heck, the United States Treasury could solve the 30 trillion national debt in just a few trades with this super system — that also supposedly won WWII by revealing the secret plans of the Nazis and Japanese.

Who in the heck would be stupid enough to believe such outrageous nonsense? Apparently, there are plenty of suckers and fools willing to fork over thousands of dollars each year, for these supposed ‘super-secret’ trading signals.

Just have a look at this absolutely ridiculous promotional material…

fractalerts_Trade_ReportSure looks fancy. But is any of this real?

Tracking Down the truth about Rich Clifford of Fractal Alerts

With such wonderful performance promises, I would expect that Rich Clifford would be more than willing to share the names of these supposed “Banks, Hedge Funds, and Institutional Money Managers” that are supposedly profiting so greatly.

So we reached out, using an alias email and requested REAL-TIME AUDITED brokerage statements.

Rich Clifford responded that “Yes, we have banks and brokerages tracking and using our programs, but access to that information is not something we can provide. They use it for their own trading.”

So we are supposed to simply trust this character, and hope for the best? Nope. I needed to keep digging.

Next, I reached out to TradeStation.com, which is heavily promoting this ridiculousness. I asked the broker if he had any supporting documentation that supported these outrageous performance claims. He responded that, “you should be very careful” and “we see this sort of stuff all the time.” He concluded, “I recommend that you check with the National Futures Association and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission for any information on the person running this company.”

Contacting the National Futures Association regarding Rich Clifford

The NFA has a licensing directory, and it shows that Rich Clifford was previously registered as a principle, registered person–which is great.

A deeper search reveals that Rich Clifford has no reparations or regulator actions filed against him. That’s even better!

However, a deeper dig reveals that many of the companies he was registered, were charged with FRAUD.

Is this just some sort of weird coincidence? Look at this list of companies and affiliations–it absolutely makes me shutter. He appears to have moved around like a financial venereal disease, leaving behind an absolute train wreck for investors, in my opinion.

Yes, it is true that he personally has never been fined by the CFTC or the NFA, but this just looks crazy. It’s like he was mysteriously present for 5 separate bank robberies but never caught a charge.

Maybe he is just the world’s most unlucky person? Sure looks suspicious to me.

Digging deeper still…FractalAlerts, it’s not pretty.

During the month of November 2018, an anonymous user reached out, with quite the story to tell.

This person claimed to be a “Chicago Futures Broker” that maintained the actual trading records of many of these so-called financial trading guru’s. He anonymously sent over the actual, tracked trading records of FractalGo/FractalAlerts.

These are actual trading results. With a real trading account. Not the financial puffery and juiced hypotheticals that FractalAlerts sends out via email…as financial bait.

In the fancy promotional materials, FractalAlerts claims the following:

Fractal Alerts

However, “Chicago Futures Broker” was absolutely disgusted with this marketing material. And so he proceeded to send me the following AUTHENTIC performance results, that was achieved by ACTUAL customers:

combinepdf

If you scrolled through this financial shit-show, you can obviously see that FractalAlerts did a wonderful job–of losing massive amounts of investor funds.

And to put this absolute horror show on full display, let’s look at the consolidated performance, based on actual trading results. Not the marketing puffery.

[table id=50 /]

As you can see, the actual net results for REAL INVESTORS was -$115,035 from 2016 through 2018.

This looks nothing like the marketing puffery. Where are the losses revealed in the marketing materials?

An omission of Relevant Facts

An honest vendor would simply own the crappy performance and proclaim, “every system goes through a drawdown.” Which is true. And quite frankly, this is the best way to handle these sorts of losses.

However, when confronted with the actual, real-time losses as reported by “Chicago Broker”…FractalAlerts responded that “Chicago Broker” was actually at fault for the massive losses. That “we realized the programs they had (Chicago Broker) were not correctly following our programs for quite a long time.”

Are you freaking kidding me? FractalAlerts actually had the audacity to blame the broker for the losses over a two year period! Amazing. I will leave it up to the audience as to who to believe.

Wrapping things up

There is nothing wrong with buying a Futures trading system from a vendor.

But there are a few things we have learned:

  1. Hypothetical performance is usually misleading.
  2. Check with the NFA to see if the vendor is licensed and registered as a (CTA) Commodity Trading Advisor.
  3. Check the employment history of the CTA. If a CTA has been employed by a string of companies charged with fraud, then you are probably about to be scammed.
  4. Ask for the brokerage account statements of the vendor. As you can see from this article, actual performance is much more revealing than marketing puffery.
  5. Show the marketing materials to a reputable Futures broker. Ask for his/her opinion of the marketing material.
  6. Use common sense. If someone claims 28.3% weekly returns on investment, it’s probably a fraud.

Thanks for reading. Would love to know your opinion regarding Fractal Alerts and the owner, Rich Clifford. Liberal expression is encouraged.

3 Comments

  1. michael December 25, 2018
  2. Joshua December 21, 2018
  3. Ponzi December 7, 2018

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