Please note: GorillaTrades is a registered trademark of GorillaTrades, Inc. Neither WealthJunkie.com, its publisher, nor the authors of these articles have any affiliation with the GorillaTrades service.

On May 21st, I sent an e-mail requesting to cancel my free trial of GorillaTrades. I received an e-mail confirmation the same day. No problems.

Since then, however, I have received 25 separate e-mails from GorillaTrades in an attempt to either get me back or get me to subscribe. There were the string of e-mails offering $59.95 per month. There were the $499 per year offerings. There was the public free trial/open house. It just keeps going on and on.

I am still not interested.

GorillaTrades likes to quote a writer from Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, and a May 2004 column he wrote called “Just Monkeying Around.” From a recent GorillaTrades e-mail:

Here is what Andrew Feinberg at Kiplinger Personal Finance had to say about the Gorilla and his GorillaTrades service in the May 2004 issue:

“From the list of closed transactions, it’s clear that most of his (the Gorilla’s) picks do go up. He (the Gorilla) may be into technical voodoo, but he focuses much of his buying on real companies with actual earnings, many of them listed on the New York Stock Exchange….Clearly this is no wild-eyed Nasdaq gunslinger searching for a busted Internet company that might rise 500% in the next day and a half.”
–from GorillaTrades solicitation e-mail dated June 21

How many of you have actually read the column “Just Monkeying Around”? When I was in Connecticut a few weeks ago, I stopped by a local library to find it in their archives. Here is what the column actually says (note how GorillaTrades rearranged the words to make it sound like they are saying something else):

Yes, he may be into technical voodoo, but he focuses much of his buying on real companies with actual earnings, many of them listed on the New York Stock Exchange. One recent recommendation: Campbell Soup. Hubba-bubba. Clearly, this is no wild-eyed Nasdaq gunslinger searching for a busted Internet company that might rise 500% in the next day and a half. From the list of closed transactions, it’s clear that most of his picks do go up. Do they beat the market? The site suggests that they do, but doesn’t provide details. I wonder why?
–from “Just Monkeying Around” by Andrew Feinberg, Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, May 2004

The Kiplinger column goes much further, though. Because the author, Andrew Feinberg, actually joined GorillaTrades and made a few trades based on their recommendations. How did he fare? You be the judge:

Now I’m in a full-body snit. How could I do something so foolish–taking the advice of someone who calls himself the Gorilla? Why didn’t I listen to some guy named Jim or Jack or Elmo instead? Compounding my funk is the fact that I relied entirely on the Gorilla’s black-box technique, which he assiduously refuses to explain. (”Like Colonel Sanders, the exact secret recipe for success is a secret”, he writes ungrammatically. But, hey, he’s a gorilla.) I have no idea why I purchased the damn stock in the first place. And this is galling because it makes me feel helpless. I mean, I’m not even making my own mistakes. I’m making someone else’s mistakes.
–from “Just Monkeying Around” by Andrew Feinberg, Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, May 2004

Feinberg tried three GorillaPicks in total. He closed at a loss. What was his assessment of the service, given that GorillaTrades has twisted around his words for use in their own advertisements?

So how would I have done if I had followed the 34 Gorilla recommendations during a four-week period (excluding the cup-and-handle picks, which the Gorilla does not track)? Not particularly well. On average, the picks declined by 0.5% during a period in which the Standard & Poors 500-stock index rose by about 3%.
–from “Just Monkeying Around” by Andrew Feinberg, Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, May 2004

No matter how many more e-mails that damn Gorilla sends me, I will not be interested. If you have made money with their service, I certainly applaud you. But please accept that it is not right for me.

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