Marl The Stock Trading Robot Is A Scam!

This is new, somebody pointed this out to me as I missed it before, please feel free to read on to see exactly HOW Marl works, but This is quite interesting and sums it up quite well.

Click on the 'disclaimer' at the bottom of the page. In the 'important warning' section (and what a suitable title that is, they're actually warning you that it's a scam!) you will find that:

- they are charging companies to promote them
- the names the two guys use are not their real names
- the testimonials are false (faux)
- they are committed to protecting the privacy of the identity of the 'programmer' and 'trader' (because they don't exist)
- you shouldn't expect results as good as theirs (so why buy the newsletter then?)
- Then there's the following line from the next paragraph:
ANY CLAIMS MADE OF ACTUAL EARNINGS OR EXAMPLES OF ACTUAL RESULTS ARE NOT TYPICAL.
..... wow.... so you mean the claims on the site have just been FABRICATED, or they picked out only the winning trades and put them on the site, right? Because normally, such results are not typical for their system. Enough said.

And that's just ONE paragraph and one line from the disclaimer! I pasted it below just so you don't have to bother going to their site again.

Also, none of the testimonial providers have their own website, and most don't even give an email address (except the one whose job is to scam you through his emails.) The house in Florida, as well as their phone number, could be anybody's - why would they give their real address if they are scamming people and the disclaimer says that they want to protect their identities?)

Some people have had great trouble getting a refund, because these guys have been giving them the runaround.

Try looking for the company registration info - it should exist, if it's a real company, right?

Just to find out if I could 'buy' Marl, I contacted support, and they quickly sent me an email to be 'one of 6 Marl testers', who would only have to pay $97 to download the program. Wow! What a discount from the original $28000 that the program is worth! Lucky me!
So now anyone can get Marl for under $100 instead of spending $28000! What a generous company!
Now if this doesn't have SCAM written all over it right from the start, then nothing does!

Fortunately they can be stopped, especially if you've had a problem getting a refund, because the attorney general normally takes legal action against company owners when several complaints have been filed.

So I've found out that in many cases, all you need to do in order to find out if something is a scam, is READ CAREFULLY what's on the website itself! You don't even have to go doing deep detective work! It's all there on the webpage.

Here's the part of their disclaimer I was referring to:

Information Warning: You need to understand that all information found on the DoublingStocks.com website and email newsletters (past, present, and future) exists for nothing other than general informational purposes. Is should also be noted that if you do choose to pay for a subscription to the apocryphal Michael Cohen's email newsletter, the newsletter does occasionally accept compensation from publicly traded companies for advertising purposes. You should assume that all trading results featured on the DoublingStocks.com website and/or email newsletters are based on hypothetical or simulated performance results that have certain inherent limitations. Unlike the results shown in an actual performance record, these results do not represent actual trading. Also, because these trades have not actually been executed, these results may have under- or over-compensated for the impact, if any, of certain market factors, such as lack of liquidity. Hypothetical or simulated trading programs in general are also subject to the fact that they are designed with the benefit of hindsight. Both "Michael" and "Carl" are pseudynym names, used to protect the privacy of the actual programmer and trader whom created Marl. No representation is being made that any account will or is likely to achieve profits or losses similar to these being shown. Similarly, the faux testimonials may not be representative of the experience of other clients. The testimonials are no guarantee of future performance or success. Results may vary from those depicted. Such results may not be indicative of overall trading success. You should not expect to achieve results as good as those described in the testimonials.
Feliciano is offline

The background story: a young computer geek develops a computer stock trading model, while contracted to Goldman Sachs. He then goes on to develop a piece of home computer software to predict the stocks future direction by analysing a stocks past price movements. The story is plausible, however if you search on Google you will find that a number of people have already shot it to pieces e.g. he was never contracted to Goldman Sachs.

The real problem is in the premise that his new software can predict stock prices based on past price movements. Yes you can use such a model as part of your analysis, but as you can imagine it takes a lot more than that to predict stock movements e.g. overall market trends, news and most importantly reports from the companies in question. Furthermore such a technical analysis of price movement requires and ungodly amount of data an calculations - plus you still have to make your "educated" decision based on the data and the other factors.

So, my alarm bells where already ringing at this point, but as I said I had decided to go ahead and purchase it anyway.

The main product is a subscription to their newsletter and it has a $47 price tag. Supposedly you will receive a weekly newsletter with a couple of recommended stocks as calculated by Marl. I paid and entered my name and email - I promptly received an autoresponder email from Michael Cohen (the developer). The email thanked me for signing up and told me that I would get my first newsletter on Sunday - well two Sundays later I still haven't received anything. Again if you search on Google you will find that this is the most common complaint (and I can guarantee you 100% that this was not a junk folder issue on my end).

Bottomline: $47 wasted on getting a thank you email. The so called stock prediction newsletter might have been worth $47 if they actually bothered to send something - Of course if they did I would highly doubt it was based on a technical analysis by a stock trading robot ;-)

After you subscribe to the newsletter you get presented with an offer to buy your own version of the stock trading robot. It sells for $97 and sounds like a very good deal - you can then "predict" as many stocks as you like instead of getting 1 or 2 in your weekly newsletter%u2026 Yeah right LOL, but of course I also had to test this option.

I got my download right away and it was easy to install - a few minutes later I burst out in hysterical laughter!

1) You are supposed to download EOD (End Of Day) files from the various stock exchanges and to analyze movements you, of course, need as much previous data as possible. The stock trading robot offers these EOD files from their website and they are nicely formatted so it's easy to import into your database. Problem: I have checked on a daily basis and they only have EOD's available for April 18th 2008 - they do not update this and of course you can't analyze movement from a one day data set.

2) Big deal, you can get EOD files from hundreds of websites including Yahoo Finance. Problem is that this "state of the art" stock trading robot does not support the conventional formats for the EOD files and it took me forever to get some valid data in there%u2026 No worries, afterall I was ready to get rich now.

3) The stock trading robot does not predict a damn thing. It has a range of filters you can use to analyze the stock movements, but nothing you can't find in your own stock trading platform e.g. etrader. In fact the tools and interface in Marl is the worst I have seen in a long time and the documentation is virtually non-existent.

Are you promoting Marl?

Are you one of the thousands of affiliates who are promoting Marl? I can understand the lure, it sells like hot cakes and pays some great commissions - to be honest that was one of reason why I decided to test it, had it been any good I would have been all over it. But you may want to take a step back and think is a few quick bucks worth risking your reputation? I have seen people destroy their internet marketing career in a single email blast! And can you live with selling a known scam? The decision is yours.

Please Help Me Spread The Word

I strongly believe that these scam artists should not be allowed to get away with their shady business. First of all it's just plain wrong, but at the end of the day it will also hurt the reputation of the rest of us, who are selling quality products and services. Help me spread the word so we can put these guys out of business%u2026 Here's what you can do:

1. Digg this post =>
2. If you have a blog you can write a post about this and link back to this article
3. Use one or more of the small Bookmarking icons below to bookmark this post.

And finally, Please leave a comment below if you have any questions about this article, any comments or maybe you could share your own experience with Marl - thank you.

I hope this post was helpful - I any event you have been warned ;-)

Have a great day!

Jeff

P.S. There is nothing wrong with wanting to earn a significant ROI on penny stocks. But here's what I suggest, http://www.stockassault.com It's SOFTWARE that actually works, no cheesy "robot" here:

Simply let the software run in the background processing every stock symbol, pricing and historical charts using advanced artificial intelligence that an elite team of 25 day traders developed. This state-of-the-art software took 5 years and $3,000,000 to develop. After about a week, Stock Assault 2.0 will give you a stock pick. Then purchase that stock using your preferred broker and sell when the software tells you too. The software will continually monitor the pick it has chosen to find you the best exit which could be later that day or in a few days. That's it! Take out your profit, usually 5% to 50% then reinvest your capital in the next stock pick.

The MARL program doesn't do anything anywhere NEAR what DoublingStocks says. There is no analysis of stocks,
there is no "1,986,832 mathematical calculations per second" as the
website says, it doesn't compare volume, support & resistance
levels, trend reversals, NOTHING. There is ABSOLUTELY no stock computations in this program whatsoever. Zip, Zilch, Nada. NOTHING.


For proof of this, here's a link with C# source code to the decompiled
CheckStock.exe assembly (CheckStock.exe is the Marl program):



click here to download the Marl source code.



I'm going to get technical here, but please stay with me, I'll try to break it down as best I can.



Marl was built using the Microsoft .NET framework, which allows
multiple programming languages to compile down to the same
'intermediate code', which is in turn compiled into platform-specific
code by a just-in-time compiler. In other words, the source code is
turned into something of a 'pidgin' language that will be turned into a
program that will run on your particular operating system (Windows,
Linux, MacOS, what-have-you) when the just-in-time compiler is ran
(this happens when you double-click on the CheckStock.exe file).



The CheckStock.exe program is not in itself a program; it's
intermediate code that's compiled just for your computer when you first
run it. And, just as you can compile the original source code into the
intermediate code, you can reverse the process and turn the
intermediate code back to a particular programming language which is
easily readable by humans, such as C#. And that's just what I did.



For the explanation below, I've included screenshots where relevant. If
you're not a programmer, here's a rundown of the Marl program from the
source code and what it does:





1. It connects to a MySQL database running on host.wealthymarketer.com
and downloads a list of ticker symbols. See image below for a shot of
the Windows Task Manager showing this connection.



This image has been resized. Click this bar to view the full image. The original image is sized 801x608.



2. It wastes time in a loop until it gets to 100; this is what fills
the progress bar. This is the "Analyzing Stock" section of the program.
There is no code in the Marl program that analyzes anything, it's just
wasting time right now. If it were REALLY doing anything related to
calculating/comparing, this would take up A LOT of CPU time. As you can
see in the screenshot below, it's not using any processing power at
all. How's it supposed to crunch all those numbers when it's using
basically no CPU time?



This image has been resized. Click this bar to view the full image. The original image is sized 1068x606.



3. When the "Analyzing" is complete, it displays a pre-determined
ticker symbol & recommendation message from the database that
corresponds with the current date. Today, 03/09/2008, it happens to be
ETrade Financial (NASDAQ:ETFC). I've included a screenshot from a MySQL
database query browser I'm using that shows all past recommendations
from 02/08/2008 until today. It goes as far back as 09/08/2007, but I
don't want to take the subsequent screenshots to show all those. I'll
include instructions on how to view the database using the MySQL Query
Browser tool later. Anyway, screenshot below:



This image has been resized. Click this bar to view the full image. The original image is sized 1077x799.



4. People buy into this pump & dump stock recommendation that is
sent in an e-mail blast later by "Michael" and can lose/gain a fortune
depending on their timing.





So in other words, you're paying $144 for a program that connects to
a database and downloads a pre-determined ticker symbol for the current
date.





For those who want to view the database manually (as opposed to paying
$144 for the privilege), download the MySQL Query Browser from here:



Click here for the MySQL Query Browser



If you don't feel comfortable with a direct link, this is the page that leads to the download links:



Clikc here for the MySQL Query Browser download page





Once you download and install the MySQL Query Browser, start it up and you'll be presented with a screen like this:







Input these values, which I pulled from the source code (which is included above, download it):



Server Host Box: 69.16.242.83

Username Box: stocks_botuser

Password Box: botpass

Port Box: 3306



Leave all other boxes blank. Click OK. On the right side of the
program, click the arrow beside "stocks_robot". Click the arrow beside
"foundstock". Double-click on "ticker", "message", and "date". Click
the green Execute button. To view all ticker symbols, click the arrow
beside "stocks", then double-click "ticker" and click the green Execute
button.





So yeah, I you can definitively call this a pump & dump scam.





P.S.

The Marl program doesn't include a license agreement when you download,
install, or use it. You don't have to click any "I Agree" buttons
anywhere, and as such this would fall under the Public Domain. It
doesn't say you aren't free to redistribute or reverse-engineer it. In
other words, it's completely legal for me to upload and post a link to
the source code. If you're "Michael Coen" or "Alex Hunter" or whatever
the hell your name is and you're reading this, and you want to sue me, please, by all means, do it. I'd LOVE for something like this to go to court.

Thanks to the folks at http://www.onlinetradersforum.com/showthread.php?t=14607&page=38

For bringing most of this information forward to the public!