Michael Goode

Goode became interested in trading in 2004, while in graduate school, after he and his wife both inherited money — her from her father, him from his grandmother — and he began experimenting with stock-market accounts. He came to the penny-stock space as an outright skeptic, doubting any real edge could exist in junk that traded sub-$1. In 2008 he signed up for Sykes' Millionaire Challenge, spent thousands of hours on the video archive, and four years later became Sykes' first publicly named millionaire student — a marketing milestone that effectively launched the Sykes-alumni-as-product business model.

His own trading is disciplined and slow by the scene's standards — he focuses on shorting penny-stock pumps using catalysts, chart patterns and float analysis, and has logged career profits past $2.6M on his Profit.ly record. Today he posts long-form analysis at GoodeTrades.com, moderates Sykes' Profit.ly-based chat alongside other senior students, and is one of the public teachers inside the Millionaire Challenge program.

For trading-tournaments.com, Goode is the originating-prototype of the Sykes-alumni profile. The same self-reported-Profit.ly caveat applies. He is publicly accessible on X as @goodetrades and has been one of the more sober public voices about what penny-stock education actually delivers — a useful balance to interview alongside Sykes himself.