OrderFlowTrading.com - The truth behind Darkstars latest offer

Hi Guys,

As I am sure most of you are aware there has been an ongoing dispute between Darkstar, myself and several others, concerning the training that he is offering along with how genuine his advertised trades are. Unfortunately to find out the quality of his products cost me $2800. Luckily enough you can read more about my experiences in these posts here and here without having to lose a penny finding out for yourselves. My reason for creating this thread was because A: I feel that this should be public knowledge and B: DS has since banned me from posting in his thread, so I was left as this route as the only alternative.

Now lots of people will accuse myself and others for being a little harsh, perhaps we have but I believe that this is justified given the circumstances. DS has been given numerous opportunities to prove his worthiness by making some real time live calls or to have his results audited and available for inspection. Instead of working to clear his reputation, he has instead of attempted to villainize both myself and others. You can read more here, about how DS was most probably fabricating his results.

Now I don't consider DS to be a a trader at all. Instead I do find him to be someone who is highly skilled with his use of marketing tactics, in an effort to promote his products. Lets start by deconstructing his latest promotion posted here.


Initially he is trying to make the target audience believe that he has a genuine reason for pulling the plug. The Moral Appeal tactic is supposed to remind you that the goal of the negotiation is mutual satisfaction, both on his and your parts. Next he is using scarcity to market his product. Look at the parts in bold below;


Here he trying to cleverly use scarcity to sell the product and push the reader into thinking that this will not last forever and that you really only have one opportunity left to buy this. I am not to sure how trading his personal accounts will go, since the attached was posted and removed from his facbook page. Feel free to form your own opinions on this.

Lets look at the next part;


Notice the use of moral appeal again? He is trying to make it look like he is actually doing you and himself a favour by offering this?

On the linked website you will notice he states the following;


Now with this part I am really not sure if he means this as a joke. Anyhow he is using a deadline as a pressure tactic and once again invoke the feeling of scarcity for his product. Further evidence of this tactic can be found in his follow up post here where he says;


Anyone starting to see a trend here? Its very similar with the "sales ends tomorrow" used by retailers.

Moving on from this advertisement lets talk about DS himself. After reading through his posts, you will notice how he demands superiority and his highly critical of anyone highlighting flaws in his thinking. TheGreatMilenko highlighted one of his posts here that displays this. By acting as superior to others in this way, he is automatically creating an inferiority complex. Anyone who would think about challenging his beliefs would feel very unmotivated to do so. At the end of the day if he is superior then he has to be correct, no? I truly believe that this is why he has continued on for as long as he has. Customers would be more inclined to think that it were themselves to blame, for their own failures in trading and not DS´s order flow methodology. I am quite certain that many of his students are suffering from cognitive dissonance and feel inclined to side with DS, even though they have not achieved profitability.

So hopefully anyone who was thinking about parting with the $5000 DS is demanding will now see right through his marketing tactics and save themselves both the money and time. If you are still thinking about paying for training, please feel free to post here and we can discuss the steps DS would need to take to prove, that he genuinely has a good product to offer and is not falsifying his claims, as I highlighted in the OFT thread.

Good on you...the trouble is FF is full of the Darkstars of this world.

when people advertise without results or trade explorer to support their claim--- RUN

How he trade ?strategy?

I think DS has some serious money problems since his trading sucks.

Maybe he thinks his "final OFT course" could be an easy way out.

In the past i've seen worse and more expensive offers from self-proclaimed mentors & gurus but 5K is nevertheless bold.

Noobs you have been warned!

If you have no money (or lost it all already) getting funded via OPM is a better idea than getting a bank loan.

DS need money to funds his party's with chicks.

​I have not hid my disdain for the commercial section here at FF. Darkstar's thread really represents what the entire commercial section is all about: Hawking uproven strategies under the guise of providing education. The education "clause" supposedly absolves these snake oil salesmen from all responsibility. It is a travesty that FF allows this to continue.

​It cannot be said any better!

Absolutely agree.
From my conversations with mods regarding other members and from what I understand in general from others who have tried to take action, FF takes the position of buyers personal responsibility in selection.
Memberships will only be revoked if a member commits fraud (failure to deliver a service, or incomplete service etc), or uses subversive methods to promote themselves, or collusion with others (multiple usernames and such).

Essentially once someone has the label of commercial here, then they are free to sell their wares.
From this point onward, FF considers the transaction to be between the two parties, and that the vendor's disclaimer will be called upon for any further disputes between vendor and client. So, it's at the discretion of the buyer if he/she wants to part with money.

To me this is grossly inadequate. I've previously requested that mods only allow someone to become commercial if they have a valid, live TE or other tracker.
This was unlikely to happen, because the reality of the situation is, this site runs on traffic. If what i asked was enforced, the commercial section would all but disappear overnight, along with it much of the click traffic.

So, I have recently considered a new petition to the mods. Something to balance conscientious and responsible running of a site which clearly is being used as a sales platform more and more each day, while still not employing prohibitive restrictions on the commercial scammers, sorry members.
3 possible options:

1: When any user clicks onto any commercial content on this site, a check box style disclaimer comes up stating something along the lines of
Caution- Commercial content is NOT endorsed by Forex Factory, and we will not assist in any disputes between vendors and clients. Before making any purchase consider the vendor offering, and supporting evidence in the form of verified results. Click to continue.

2: A sticky thread at the very top of the commercial in bolded words "Please read before proceeding!" With the same message as above, possibly in more detail regarding personal responsibility in selection.

3: The commercial be divided into sections- Verified and non verified. Whether it's a system, managed account service, or education program, if there is no live tracker or trades called here there is no verification. No more pussyfooting around application of knowledge...the value of a mentor is in their ability to produce capable students.

I would actually like to see all 3 implemented. I will be contacting the mods with this too...but I don't think this will bear fruit without more people requesting change. Not necessarily my options, but I think most of us agree here that something needs to change with how commercial members are allowed to operate with impunity here.

Regarding DS specifically, Redbaron has nailed him precisely. Everyone should read the above post because it's the modus operandi of almost all of the commercial members here. It's a tried and tested method, made popular by the likes of Greg Secker and his scam organisations.

On this site, if you follow someone commercial from the start you see a common pattern...they start by building a reputation, drawing people in with (sometimes useful) information and creating a professional persona.
Then of course they start selling, and usually this is done off thread here, either in a Skype group or chatroom where the vendor has control, and can quickly delete any unwanted attention. This allows their profile on FF or other forums to be untarnished for longer, sucking more people in.

Of course, the inevitable result is the last 7 or so pages on the OFT thread. Sooner or later, unsatisfied customers will have the courage to speak out, and the response is again laughably predictable! Portraying benevolence, invoking pity, creating scarcity and under it all the desire to take $60k from 12 people while providing zero proof you can back it up.
DS is worse, because the pic Red posted here, and the reason DS blocked me, was his personal Facebook whinge about having "$0 working capital!!" It's right there, thankfully saved before he could delete it!
How is this possible for a seasoned professional trader?
He's admitted having no money, and now want's to use other peoples, in one last grasp for success which he has failed to achieve so far. It would be comical if not so pathetic.

Pathetic but not surprising. Everything about DS is deceptive. He has multiple companies set up, and seems not to be named as director/president of any of them. A William J Carmen is. Does that seem normal for a standard business operation? This makes the conspiracy theorist in me wonder if his name is not a construct too, because of the meaning of each word!

Really it doesn't matter, because as @edge540 says, FF is full of DS's. It's becoming tiresome.

As Red said, there are those who will say we're being too harsh, or worse!
To anyone reading this, especially anyone considering paying for ANY commercial content here i want to remind you:
ALL ANY OF US DID WAS ASK FOR PROOF THAT HIS SYSTEM WORKED!!
When his Facebook post proved that he had no money of his own trading this system, I fail to see how his position is defensible!

And please, no tired arguments-
"There is a cost for education, even if you pay to learn what doesn't work"
"He doesn't need to trade to be able to teach it" etc etc
This is frankly bullshit!

Perhaps this is all pointless, people will always part with money for a dream. Perhaps we shouldn't care if people are silly enough to fall for the commercial liars here.
Well, to me that's allowing the lowest echelon in this industry too much free reign.
One thing I like in DS's world, is the "Predator trading group" name, because he and his ilk are absolutely predatory!
The sad thing is, all anyone need do to avoid being prey is- Ask for proof!!

I seem to remember DarkStar loosing 50K on a single trade in one of the older orderflow threads from a few years back. Assuming that he was trading large (and he hasn't said that he does) and this loss was 10% of the account then his account should be around the 500K mark - this was a few years ago so even with realistic compounding he should now be in a situation where he doesn't require funding. I suspect that he must have crashed and burned at somepoint or it was all a fabrication from the start... I recall statements about making 'fucktons of money as well' and (or words to that effect)​

Whilst mine isn't an informed opinion I suspect any education he has to offer is not going to be worth 5K but then I tend to be a suspicious type :-)

BBCMicro

Rightfully so.
At the end of the day, the value of anything like this can be determined by ROI. Red and a couple of others have said that DS's methodolgy did not even return their original investment, so by that definition it's not worth it.

Some seem to be of the opinion that it can be just chalked up to a learning cost...what not to do, or some other such thing.
That's not an argument I can reconcile.

When purchasing anything there is an expectancy associated with it.
there can be anomalies, people misusing or misinterpreting the system, but if the product doesn't deliver within an acceptable % in terms of successful clients, then the product is faulty.

Paying $2800 to somebody who doesnt even have a TE or a myfxbook account. Big lol.

You should have used the money to play PowerBall instead, the chance that you get profits would be much much higher

Be glad that you weren't one of the suckers who paid 10K for the "ProTradingCourse" from this guy:

https://www.youtube.com/user/ProTradingCourse/videos

That was by far the biggest scam i've seen for years.

If he is in jail now idk.

So if a guy is even sometimes on CNBC claiming to be a successful trader and offering expensive courses: RUN !

lol

Hi Guys,

For some reason I forgot to post this on the opening of the thread, here is something else I would like you guys to see.

If you take a look at the Order Flow Trading page on Facebook, in particular his final program post, you will notice that it has 382 likes. You should also notice that between the various posts there are obscure high amounts of likes on some posts and then others will have a more realistic figure like 7 etc. The following list is the amount of likes his posts have had, for a handful of recent posts.

382 Final Program
1 Learn Order Flow Trading and start living the life you deserve.
6 New Article Posted.
2 Got to hang out with Ollie Rhen, the Minister of Economic Affairs for Finland today.
7 The Depth of Market.
5 Another day, another 44 ticks.
534 Maybe it's time you learned a valuable new skill:
53 Check out this monster win.
96 Another installment of our awesome new macro lesson series.

Did you guys notice the spuriously high figures of likes for example 382 people liked the Final Program post? If you look further into this you will notice that the majority of these likes come from developing countries such as India, Pakistan, Thailand etc. I am certain that these likes are not genuine and are created by employing a click farm. See this link here for an explanation of click farms.

I have no idea why someone who is forever making claims about how profitable his system, would have to revert to paying others to like his post.

Lies are like ants - find just one and you know theres a thousand more lurking nearby... This is certainly becoming the case with Darkstar....

See the attached screen shots taken from the OFT Facebook page.

It is him I think, back in the day that was his name on his facebook profile (before it was asscoiated with this whole forex thing) and he had family members etc. Also had a real estate website I think? Not sure what other name you're thinking of... Daemon Goldsmith? Now that's a fake name lol.

I normally ignore all social media sites but somehow Darky must promote his s***.

Do you really think that anyone with a right mind will now buy his newest $5000 course except for the 2 fake ones?

No chance!

You can buy facebook likes and twitter retweets easily. The price 4 years ago was only $10 for 1000 likes from fake accounts from the US and Europe.

Most probably not but you can never be 100% certain.

You shouldnt underestimate the feebleness of the human mind. Back in the time I was an online marketer, I claimed I was a former Mr Olympia contestant to sell weight-loss pills and exercise books, then a senior doctor to sell products for colon cleansing, then a former Google engineer to sell SEO books .....

And many people took the bait and I made quite a lot of money back then.

Im not proud of what I did but at least I got tons of experience to spot other online marketers.