This has gotten a ton of hits and positive comments, but due to the fact that Matthew Buckley apparently had this shady paralegal guy try to threaten to sue me for two million dollars for trying to save people from being cheated and he did it so incompetantly the link to the original on Google has been messed up.
What actually happened was I reported Whiz’ Twitter feed and it was taken away as hateful. Then I reported the paralegal to the Florida Bar. His reponse was full of lies and he was unable to even spell my name correctly. Looks like he’s going to lose his paralegal license.
I don’t really want any part of this business anymore, but I know it and hate to see people cheated. Raging Bull is another name to beware of as they mess with all my music videos now that I’ve gone after them.
I’d rather write about music, but the people who should be taking these dudes down are in my opinion making too much money taking the other side of their victim’s trades.
I just randomly popped onto this article by Rabbi Yitzi Weiner, who seems like a good guy who wants to be positive.
I am Jewish and was confirmed by a Rabbi I respected very much. This is not an attack against Rabbi Weiner.
A Rabbi’s first job is to know about Judaism and perhaps lead and help their congregations. If they do not have congregations, I guess they can do whatever they think is positive.
Rabbis may know a lot about trading or investing. Rabbi Weiner may.
I was a trader for a very long time and I made some money, but I learned a great deal about the entire business.
I honestly want to be positive.
This IS an attack on E Matthew “Whiz” Buckley.
In any venue especially “investing,” you should be skeptical. I hope that you are. I want you to be.
The first question that you ask should be “What are the motivations of the guy I am talking to or reading?”
The answer is almost always to make money. They are trying to make money teaching you how to make money. Their fee may be worth it.
Here are my honest intentions and facts about me.
1. I have met and don’t really like Matthew “Whiz” Buckley as a person.
2. I don’t like the business that we once shared, and I purposefully no longer share.
3. I really don’t like his business and especially the small investors some of his business target.
Maybe I’d like to make money debunking other businesses. The debunking isn’t hard, but the money making is, especially when your suggestion is not another business or idea, but to avoid all businesses like these completely.
Whales, with lots of money, do horrible vicious things to each other, that’s fine they know the game they play. Mobsters used to say that they only killed other mobsters, that may have been true to an extent, but missed the point of the innocent people they did hurt.
Here would be my stock options advice for small investors looking to use stock options.
“Wow, options are very complicated. Given your income and savings, you can’t really trade them the way professionals do. I could teach you all about stock options and how professionals trade them, but it wouldn’t help you much unless you are just interested in the subject. For you? You could probably write calls on the stock you own, and I can tell you the upside and the downside of that.”
That is true and honest. It would save a lot of small investors a lot of money. It won’t make me much money. You just read it for free, and that’s pretty much all I have to offer you.
People never tell small investors that. Why? Because small investors want to become rich. Almost all of stock options trading is gambling. The smartest people in both businesses either run the casinos or do their best to be on an even keel with casinos through knowledge and assets.
This may have happened to you as a child. You paid $2 for some sea monkeys you thought would be fun and found out that they were not fun or even sea monkeys. If you were smart it was worth every penny to learn it. I’d rather pay that $2 a thousand times than to spend $2,000 for someone to “teach” me and cause me to then lose $10,000 or maybe a lot more trying to use stock options for what they shouldn’t be used to do.
Really rich people do not buy lottery tickets. They often make fun of people that do buy them, but even though the lottery is a losing proposition for the people who play as a whole, someone always wins by hitting that 10,000,000 to one shot. That’s why people play. The people who run lotteries and make a ton of money off of them know that and they want you to play. They may even tell you that you only have a 10,000,000 to 1 shot, but they know that first prize of say $32 million is so enticing that you will continue to pay say $100 a week to keep playing. If you can afford $100 a week, by all means, keep playing and keep dreaming. I hope you hit your number.
Matthew Buckley goes by the name “Whiz” because he was a military pilot, much like Tom Cruise’s “Maverick” in Top Gun, and one of his businesses is Top Gun Options.
I am in no way against veterans or military personnel. I love them. Thank you for your service and long may you prosper. I’m not the one cloaking myself in military terms and experience to try and make money off military personnel past or present. Matthew Buckley is.
For all I know, all of his service was honest and good to the United States, who he probably served well.
My first full-time job was with O’Connor and Associates (OCA) from 1988-1993. That firm was one of the first to figure out the best way to trade options and did very well.
One of the people I started with was Chris Gust, who formed his own company named Wolverine after the baseball team he played for at the University of Michigan and is very rich and ethical. Google his name and you will easily see how rich he is.
I always had an ambivalence for that business. I made a lot of money in it, but due to my ambivalence and choices not nearly as much as Chris or many like him.
Matthew Buckley got his start in stock options with the company mentioned, but not named in the above article.
That firm was formed by two former OCA employees, and they are very rich.
Their first hire was from OCA and he is very rich. We are friends and recently had lunch.
Many of their most valuable employees are ex-OCA. Many are still my friends. Many are rich.
They first hired Matthew Buckley after a company trip where he was hired as a motivational speaker, and they were so impressed they hired him even though he did not know much about stock options, which is pretty much all that they do.
I have no problem with that company. They know the game they play. They do it ethically. They play it well. They to my knowledge only teach young college grads that they hire to trade for them.
Matthew Buckley uses a lot of “buzzwords,” and I’m not a big fan of “buzzwords.” If they help you learn that is fine, but I don’t think they help you learn. I taught classes for that company’s new hires and never used any.
I did not go on that trip, because I had a cat, and the previous trip I went to almost led to the death of my diabetic cat. So I stayed home to take care of my cat. Actually, the previous trip was to New Orleans and was very fun.
I had some success at that company and some bad luck. One of the unlucky things that happened led to me getting fired. I was not happy about that and did not handle it very well. Do I think I should have been fired? No.
But with time and perspective, they were a big company with big goals. Letting me go probably served them well in the long run. It did hurt me, but they aren’t in business for me. They are in business to maximize their profits. We could argue whether they did that when they fired me, but that’s all minutia. They went on making a lot of money, and I have no ill will towards them. We all have our own goals and aspirations.
Remember that whenever someone tries to sell you anything.
When I did get fired, I was mad and mentioned suing.
At that point, they sent in Matthew Buckley, who still knew very little about what we all did for a living to intimidate me to not sue.
I didn’t and never really had the intention to do so. This did make me like him even less.
I did get some money out of threatening to sue. It wasn’t a lot, but it’s like a bankruptcy. The ship has sunk and you fight for whatever there is left to fight.
No ill will. That is just the nature of the business.
I quickly got a new trading job and almost immediately decided I didn’t like the whole business and left it forever, basically costing no one much money except me.
Later, I interviewed with a small company run by one man “teaching” people how to trade options. I didn’t think that he did it well or honestly and told him that I had no interest in working for him.
How much Matthew Buckley learned about stock options while at my old company, I can only guess. It may have been a lot.
If you talk to Matthew Buckley, most things he says that are not opinions may be 100% true.
Here is one thing he said in that article that I’m pretty sure mostly isn’t true.
I was the Managing Director of Strategy at one of the largest equity options volatility arbitrage firms in the world based in the Chicago Board of Trade. One day the traders on the floor were having problems getting correct trade quotes from the Philex (Philadelphia Exchange), costing the firm millions in losses. At the end of the trading day I assembled that 7 technology directors to debrief (more on debriefing below) what happened.
I stood in front of the directors in the board room and asked who was in charge of getting quotes from the Philex to the traders on the floor. Silence. Since many of the directors were Ukrainian or Chinese I assumed it was a language issue. I asked again. Nothing. But I did notice some cheeks in seats starting to shift. Third time was the charm.
One of the directors started with “Well Yuri does this, and then I do that, and then…” I didn’t let him finish. It was clear there was no SPA, and also ultimately why this failed and the firm lost money.
Our firm got quotes from numerous exchanges — NYSE, NASDAQ, etc There was no SPA in charge of any of these important connections either.
Upon completion of the debrief, there was a SPA, along with significant lessons learned about accountability that I transferred throughout the firm and this issue never occurred again, saving the firm millions of dollars.
There are tons of buzzwords in there. I do know that the firm, while based at the CBOT, did not really have many if any traders on the floor there. If they did, they were not trading stock options, because there are no stock options trading floors on the CBOT. They always traded across the street at the CBOE. I don’t know whether a guy named Yuri ever existed. I don’t know if they had a SPA (whatever that is) before or after.
What I do know is I was told from someone much higher up than Matthew Buckley, whatever his position was, that the firm never lost any money from this problem and he never saved them any money if he did solve it.
Matthew Buckley left that company under less than ideal circumstances, and I’m fairly certain threatened to sue them (just like he tried to intimidate me not to do).
If you ask him, he will tell you that it had to do with his military commitments. The people who fired him have a different uglier story. I can’t know for sure, but I side with them given what I know.
What I do know is that no one who routinely saves a firm millions of dollars ever gets fired for nearly any reason. I’ve found that if I make someone a few million dollars a year regularly they will let me take half of the year off and do whatever I want to do with it.
This was resolved in some way as all lawsuits are.
Matthew Buckley then started a lot of businesses. Top Gun Options was I think one of the first. He targeted small investors claiming to teach them how to trade stock options.
I’m not sure what he taught them, but they paid him, and I’m willing to bet almost all I have that he never once pointed out that for most of them stock option trading wasn’t an investment or appropriate for small investors, especially those that had the amount of money that they had at the time.
He seems to have made a lot of money doing that. I don’t think his customers, especially the small innocent ones, did. If they did, they got lucky. Mostly stock options are bets and you can make bad bets and make money via luck.
It’s a pretty simple scam. You get a lot of people to pay you for advice. Most lose money. Some make money. The ones who make money usually do so sheerly from luck, but luck happens.
The people who do get lucky will then be grateful. They will send you tweets or letters being grateful.
Those responses will be retweeted or put on websites.
The losers who are ungrateful? Why retweet or quote them? It doesn’t make Matthew Buckley any money to do that. It doesn’t make money for anyone to do that.
The same thing is true of sports gambling tip lines. Do you ever wonder why someone making so much money betting sports needs to share his info?
I’m not accusing Matthew Buckley of this, but I know that with tip lines it happens.
Tell half of your customers to bet one way, and half of your customers to bet the other. In the end, you will have half of your audience very happy to tell future customers they won.
Imagine that I filled a football stadium up with people and charged them all 50 cents to compete in a quarter flipping contest. I give them all a quarter and keep pairing them up. They flip a quarter and if they win they get both quarters and move on. The loser goes home. Keep doing that and at the end one person will be left with all of the quarters and he will be very happy about his 50 cent “investment.”
Does that mean the guy who won was good at flipping quarters?
No one who does it fairly is good at flipping quarters!
One guy made a lot of money. All the other guys lost.
Me? I ran the event and made exactly as much money as the winner and never flipped a coin once!
One of the first, widely, acclaimed books written about trading stock options left out something very important about options trading. It did so because that “secret” was how the author made most of his money.
I could write the best stock options book ever written. It would take me a long time. I could make it very simple. It would be a very long book.
Why don’t I?
Because it would be of no use to anyone. The people who trade options professionally have certain licenses, a lot of money, get favorable interest rates, and other advantages. They know what would be in my book and have no use to read it. They want to keep those things secret (obviously).
Either way for a little guy that book does him no good. The only thing he needs is what I wrote above about selling calls against the stock they own and perhaps maybe 15 minutes of my time to ask about doing things that are “speculative” (lottery playing) and not “investing.” I can’t make any money off of that. No one can, and that’s why that business does not exist.
Look at this tweet:
https://twitter.com/WhizCheck6/status/1010540032552300544
Note: That link doesn’t work because I had his twitter account suspended, but it should be in the original below. It’s insane. He brags about winning trades and ignores his losers in arrogant fashion.
That is a personal tweet from Matthew “Whiz” Buckley.
Of course, it was retweeted by Top Gun Options.
Here are some facts:
- You probably do not know what an “iron condor” is. I do.
- No one with a brain trades an “iron condor.” It has too many parts to it and every time you trade to build it you are paying a bid-ask spread to do it losing edge.
- Matthew Buckley teaches people to trade “iron condors” because you can’t make or lose very much on them. You just put them on and pray. That was exactly what the guy I interviewed with was teaching and exactly why I had no interest.
- Why does Matthew “Whiz” Buckley “love this clown car?” He loves it because it is his car and his students are the clowns!
Real traders often make two trades that they know will never both win. They do that because they hope the winner will be bigger than the loser. So say a real trader makes $1.1 million on one trade and loses $1 million dollars on the other. They made $100,000.
If Matthew “Whiz” Buckley took the other side of both trades he would lose $100,000, but he will also tweet:
“Just made a million dollars from these idiots! Laying waste to the enemy! @topgunoptions”
Then Top Gun options will retweet it.
He has tons of buzzwords with military references. He will tell you that trading is combat. For big shot traders, it may be. If you are a small guy?
In the upcoming Top Gun sequel, “Maverick” will be flying an “F/A-18E/F Super Hornet strike fighter.”
Matthew “Whiz” Buckley will be flying whatever he can afford to fly.
“Maverick’s” plane actually has two seats because he will now be an instructor.
Ask yourself, how many seats does Matthew “Whiz” Buckley’s plane have? How much will he teach you?
You may not be going into combat against Matthew “Whiz” Buckley, but you are going into combat versus tons of people with tons of really expensive fighter jets and very well paid, educated “Top Gun’s” to fly them. They also have large research departments, tons of statistical models, and the resources to pay others for more of both.
Wouldn’t it be smarter to stay small, have modest goals, and “invest.” Few people do badly investing. There is pretty much no time in history where you couldn’t just put your money into the stock market and forget about it and then look back 20 years later and see all the money you made.
That is pretty much all Warren Buffett has ever done, and he is worth something around $85 billion.
If you have less than a million dollars, I’m telling you that this isn’t a fight you want any part of, and you really don’t want to pay someone to get you into that fight.
Give Matthew “Whiz” Buckley the benefit of the doubt, and say he knows something about how to trade options. What will he choose to teach you?
No matter what he knows or what the assets his corporation has, he’s way outgunned by the top 1000 trading institutions in the world, who choose to keep things private for a very good reason.
I’m no fan of Goldman Sachs.
In 2008, Goldman Sachs made a fortune shorting the mortgage market and destroying the economy.
Go find me the Goldman Sachs’ tweets that say,
“Trashing economy! These guys are idiots. Clown car! Flyby requested! We feel the need for speed!”
This website may be good or they may not be good. They are called Trading Schools.org and charge you nothing. They make their money through advertising on their website. Maybe, they are great. Maybe, they are horrible too. It’s easier to draw traffic slamming companies than saying that they are good, but look what they say about Matthew “Whiz” Buckley and Top Gun Options.
Top Gun Options: A Paper Tiger
It is all very scary and derogatory, it is much harsher and defamatory than I have been, but they don’t seem to have an aggressive, charismatic spokesperson.
I told you, in the beginning, to be skeptical. Continue to be. I don’t know the name of the guy who wrote that and a lot is opinion. You can see my name. I’m not making a penny on this site (it costs me like $300 a year or so) and I share his opinion.
Takeways
- Mention my name to Matthew “Whiz” Buckley and if he remembers me or not. He will say I’m a bitter loser. I don’t think I am, but honestly he has no reason not to believe that: Point to him.
- I told you that I never liked him personally. I haven’t seen him in over a decade and I still don’t: Point to him.
- He is a veteran. I am not: Point to him.
- We differ politically: Everyone has a right to. Point to us all.
- Since we both got fired by the same company, It appears that he has made a significantly larger amount of money than me. You never can tell, but: Point to him.
- The only thing I can say about my life in and out of the trading industry is that I never willfully ripped anybody off: Big point to me.
What remains true:
- For whatever it is worth, Matthew “Whiz” Buckley is a great motivational speaker! That is the only reason he was hired by a very smart stock options firm in the first place.
- He’s good-looking, passionate, and convincing
- He has a great story.
- He has tons of confusing buzzwords that I don’t even get or understand.
- He appears to have the full endorsement of the military and the impressive Top Gun program. Do they endorse business people? I tend to doubt it.
- Even the best journalists don’t know much about investing much less trading.
- Most small investors who want to learn and make money will be swayed by him. I’d probably recommend a short book. I doubt many people will even read this far.
So this is what will continue to happen:
Meet Matthew ‘Whiz’ Buckley of Top Gun Options & Strike Fighter Financial
That is from 2018 and contains the same old story.
We train young people, retirees, stay at home parents, mom and pop retail traders of ALL experience levels to trade equity options on companies like Facebook, Apple, JP Morgan, and other popular companies as well as ETFs (exchange-traded funds). I accomplish this by applying the methodologies I learned flying the F/A-18 Hornet for the Navy during combat missions over Iraq to my trading.
We have a saying – Trading is Combat. There’s a winner and there’s a loser and with our training, we level the playing field against the Wall Street ‘enemy’ and win.
I may not have learned many things in life, but I do know stock options.
“LEVELING THE PLAYING FIELD AGAINST THE WALL STREET ‘ENEMY’ AND WIN?”
For the people he mentioned?
That is impossible. It is combat you do not want to take part in. You do not want to pay someone for an entry to fee to do that no matter what they teach you even if it is all true and smart.
In my opinion, what he teaches you isn’t true or smart.
I could teach you better stuff. Should you pay me? Not if you want to fight that fight! I will only teach you to stay out of that fight and maybe show you something you can do to avoid fighting and invest your money wisely.
Have some money you are willing to lose and you want to play the lottery with the stock market? I’ll tell you how to do that best for free too.
Here is a potentially limited time free service.
I’ve already had some fun indulging my personal vendetta about Matthew “Whiz” Buckley, and that’s all I need.
Feel free to comment here or email me at brad.laidman@gmail.com if you have any stock options questions.
I will try to honestly answer them with facts or warn you what to be afraid of being offered. Most deals that sound too good to be true are too good to be true.
If at any point, you want to pay me for my help after you found it helpful. I will accept that money.
