Is Petra Picks a Scam or Not?

Let’s take a look at Petra Hess and her Power Trading System.

We like to take a look at as many ‘guru’ type of traders as we can. Admittedly, that does take some time and effort because we want to be both fair and comprehensive when we look at various stock picking gurus.

Petra Hess is somewhat of a unique guru because she didn’t really get started in trading as a guru. She actually appears to have made her money in other industries.

According to Petra, she made her first million at the age of 25 by trading livestock in Europe, transporting ostriches and producing and marketing cosmetics across the globe. She even has experience in the telecommunications industry.

She is certainly a well rounded and highly intelligent person based on her broad and diverse background. Makes us wonder a little why Petra would want to jump into the stock market guru business. I mean if you are already vastly successful in all these other industries and areas, why start marketing yourself as a stock market guru?

The story goes Petra Hess lost a lot of money during the global financial crisis and basically decided she could do a better job managing her portfolio than her financial advisor could. Now, we don’t doubt that, if you want to take the time to learn to trade profitably, we actually agree that on average you can out perform your financial advisor. Especially, if you are unlucky enough to have the average financial advisor who is just interested in making their commission regardless of the performance you are getting.

That kind of makes sense, but we also wonder when we see intelligent people who have successfully started numerous business jump into a new business if they just don’t see it as another business opportunity.

Let’s face it, if you are a successful entrepreneur and you see a way to get into an industry and make a lot of money wouldn’t you take it? When we first looked at Petra Hess’ background we thought, “looks like a serial entrepreneur who sees a new crop of sheep to shear.”

So, perhaps we went into looking at Petra Picks a little on the skeptical side.

This in combination with her association with serial stock market mass marketing guru Jason Bond made us really nervous as we checked out Petra Picks. Not say that Jason Bond I not truthful just because he adversities A LOT, it is just that we see him so much on every platform from YouTube to Facebook that he has become more of a late night pitch man selling ‘get rich’ quick stock market schemes to us.

Hey, we are not saying it hasn’t worked for him, just saying we see Jason Bond so much that it makes us cringe every time one of his thousands of commercials pop up on a platform we are using.

Anyway, back to Petra Hess.

Let’s start by taking a look at Petra’s website petrapicks.com

Petra’s website is nicely done. I know you are probably saying what does that have to do with anything but you would be surprised. When we first looked at Predictive Financial’s website it was awful, which in the end was what we thought about their service even though they have a fairly nice if generic website now.

Petra’s site was nice and goes into her back ground. According to her biography it took her about 8 years to learn how to trade successfully. If you start trying to teach yourself through trial and error that is about right which was highly encouraging.

She also states that she uses an easy to understand system to make her trades. That is possible based on our experience. Trading using rules based systems is a great way to trade. It keeps you out of trouble and lets you know when to get into and out of trades. However, this does not mean trading a system blindly, that does not work. If it did robot trading would continually work. It doesn’t because markets change. Obviously, we were hoping Petra would address this in her courses.

On Petra’s website she says she uses time tested, proven systems to provide consistent profits. She also uses technical analysis to make her trades which is pretty common among the guru’s. Why? There are a number of reasons but the simplest are technical trading is much easier to teach that fundamental trading and the results tend to be faster. Fundamental trading is more of a long haul trading system.

On her site she is nice enough to show us some of the great winners she has had, which is nice. Wonder why these guru’s never show their losses? In fact normally you cannot get them to show you their win/loss percentage or profit/loss ratio, both of which are critically important when it comes to evaluating trading systems and trading guru’s.

One thing I will tell you, Petra’s courses are not cheap. As we write this her Gold Course sells for $1596 per year. Petra Hess’s gold course is geared toward part time traders.

The Platinum course is $3,999 per year and geared toward more aggressive traders who want to build wealth (or lose money) faster.

There is also a Power trader course but we aren’t going into that.

The courses offer a variety of things depending on which one you pick.

Live Group Webinars

Exclusive “Members Only” Chat Room

Video Analysis and Training

Real time Buy and Sell signals

Your normal course and signals offering we have seen in lots of other programs.

Petra states that she is able to make $275,000.00 per year using a conservative approach to trading. Well, it is really hard to evaluate that without knowing a lot more data. I mean if she is managing a $10 million dollar fund then that is not all that great. If she is making $275,000.00 per year on a $500,000.00 account then that is pretty amazing.

We found if difficult with the amount we were investing to come any where close to $275k per year. But, we can’t say it is impossible without more information.

Her courses were good, not sure they are worth $4,000.00 per year if you went with the Platinum package. Most of what she teaches you can find other places from books to YouTube, but there is value in having everything at your fingertips, we can’t really deny that.

Perhaps it was also difficult for us to put a value to the courses because over the years we have seen so many courses that offered similar information. We don’t give away any of the trading systems secrets when we do a review so it is hard for us to elaborate much further on that. We just don’t think it is fair to Petra Hess for us to give away what she has developed.

Probably illegal also.

Does her system work? Yes, there is value in it. But like a lot of trading systems, it depends a lot on the market. We also found that sometimes her real time picks were hard for us to understand based on the courses. Not to say there is an issue there, perhaps we were just looking to hard for correlation. We have had the same problem when we have evaluated other trading systems. We spend all the time engulfing their courses and then can’t figure out where their real time trade signals are coming from.

In fact, that is something we struggled with during while evaluating another trading system last year and we really like that one. It was just sometimes, the trader would make a trade or not exit a trade and we would be saying, “that is not what the course said.”

I think, that really goes back to what we said earlier that there is no trading system that works 100% of the time. You have to pay attention to the market.

We prefer non-directional options trading, which is not what Petra does so that is another reason it is hard for us to say, “Take Petra’s course and you will be rich”. Just wanted to be fully transparent with you. Since we have a preconceived opinion about how you should trade based on our decades of experience, reading too many books to count and probably ten’s of thousands spent on courses like PetraPicks it is hard for us to say this is the best course and real time trading system out there.

However, what you really want to know is if Petra Picks is a Scam or not. Right?

Before we give our opinion, we usually do one more thing before we render a verdict on a system. We like to check to see what other reviewers thought of the system we are evaluating.

When we searched Google for “Is Petra Picks a Scam” we found some interesting things.

One, is that EVERY single review we found was positive. They were all glowing and gushing about how great Petra Hess was. We found this very interesting. Was Petra this great? Then we started reading the reviews and more importantly clicking on the links. Guess what we found? They were all affiliate’s of Petra Picks. Imagine our surprise.

Second, you can’t search for Petra without it leading eventually to Jason Bond. We haven’t officially reviewed Jason Bond yet (but we will) so I can’t say 100% this is a huge negative but because Jason Bond is so promotional it is very concerning.

Third, there really wasn’t a lot of information out there about Petra or PetraPicks.com. We are not saying there are not a number of websites that talk about here because there were. But, they were all the same and either affiliate’s of hers or tracked back to Jason Bond.

So, what is our bottom line?

We don’t think Petra Hess is a Scam. Her courses have value but they are expensive. You can find the information other places if you want to take the time to look. It is great that she packages them for you so you don’t have to put forth any effort, but that is really what you are paying for. In fact, that is what you pay for in most of these courses. So, the question is, “How much do you want to pay?”

Are the live trade alerts worth what you pay? Not for us, but we explained that above, perhaps we are just bias.