Timothy Sykes
🇺🇸United States
Turned $12,415 of Bar Mitzvah money into $2M trading penny stocks at Tulane, then built the entire modern small-cap-momentum education industry around himself.
Sykes (born April 15, 1981) traded his way through Tulane University, famously turning $12,415 of bar mitzvah money into roughly $2 million by graduation, primarily through short-selling penny-stock pump-and-dumps. After a short-lived hedge-fund attempt (Cilantro Fund Partners, 2003-2006) that did not survive its strategy outside the original brokerage-account environment, he pivoted into education and built timothysykes.com and the Profit.ly-based Millionaire Challenge program — a multi-thousand-dollar, video-and-chat-room mentorship that has produced the cluster of self-styled "millionaire students" who populate the rest of this batch: Michael Goode (first), Tim Grittani, Jack Kellogg, Steven Dux, Michael Hudson, Roland Wolf.
His own trading lane has stayed close to the original game — finding worthless, overhyped penny stocks running on news or social-media pumps and shorting the breakdown. The educational empire is currently structured around Millionaire Media (the publishing arm), the personal site at timothysykes.com, and StocksToTrade — a charting/scanner platform he co-founded in 2012 with Zak Westphal, who now serves as its CEO. Sykes is on the speaker circuit and remains the public face of the brand; lead trainer Tim Bohen runs much of the day-to-day instruction.
Sykes has been the named defendant or party in multiple lawsuits (Scanz Technologies v. JewMon, 2020-2021; Moses v. Millionaire Media TCPA class action, 2025), and his "millionaire students" claims rely on self-reported Profit.ly data rather than audited broker statements. For trading-tournaments.com, Sykes is an unavoidable profile — six of the next seven names in this batch credit him directly — but we publish him with a clear conflict disclosure and treat headline performance claims with care.