You’d better hope and pray / That you make it safe / Back to your own world. / You’d better hope and pray / That you’ll wake one day / In your own world. / Coz when you sleep at night / They don’t hear your cries / In your own world. / Only time will tell / If you can break the spell / Back in your own world. / Stay with me-e-e-ee-e…
Sorry: I’m quoting the lyrics to Shakespeare’s Sister’s Number One song Stay because for the benefit of Paul Coleman, the man behind the horse racing tipping service Insider Investments Academy, because I think he must be living in the early ’90s.
The reason I think this, is because his tipping service is a telephone-based one. You have to ring up a number that costs 10p a minute (more form a mobile [he’s probably only seen those bricks that only rich people had in the early ’90s]) at 11.00 a.m. every morning to receive that day’s tips.
No email, no posting the tips to a members’ area of a specific website. I wonder if he’s seen Batman Returns yet – that’ll be the most recent Batman film for him.
The explanation behind this is ludicrous: ‘The message is concise and informative. Its content is best suited to a telephone recording. An email or text message would be too short and as we work right up to message time; an email could be outdated and prone to delay.’ Too short my eye (that’s me being polite) – doesn’t bode well for the in-depth explanation of his ‘unique staking plan [which allows you to] multiply this return tenfold using the bookmaker’s money’, which I would hope to hear about.
He goes on about this staking plan a lot in the sales-letter for Insider Investments Academy, from early on in the sales patter – ‘I get the best information because I pay the best price for it. This information combined with my strategy and staking plan will be your guarantee of making handsome profits’ – to the end of the pitch: ‘My staking plan is simple and will explain it as we go along. Mine is a relaxed method of backing horses.’
Simple it is, because there’s not much of one there. Stakes are initially advised at a level £100, which is too much for the vast majority of people, but you can obviously bet less if you wish.
It’s also relaxed, in that there aren’t many selections compared to other tipping services, with an average of 5 to 6 win bets a week. They have an excuse for this too: ‘You will find that when there is better class racing we will be betting more often. Remember we are only involved when it suits us, not when it suits the bookmakers who would like you to back a horse in every race.’ I can’t help but wonder if it really is a case of quality over quantity, or more likely that they cannot be bothered to spend too much time really looking for good selections. Coleman continues: ‘I may not run the cheapest service, but I definitely run the best!’
I agree with the former part of this sentence, but not so much the latter. Costs for subscriptions are as follows: £27 per month; £60 per quarter; £100 for 6 months; £150 per year; or £299 for life membership. There is a 30-day money-back guarantee, but it’s conditional upon you returning the starter pack that’s sent to you, so watch out for any pitfalls there (that’s if you subscribe, which you probably won’t want to do after reading this review).
Coleman goes on and on about his good results for the past 8 months: ‘150 Bets produced 108 Winning Bets (72% winners!). We made our members tens or even hundreds of thousands of pounds during this period to level stakes’, and: ‘With the high winning ratio of 70%+ winners that has been consistent over many years the risk factor is very low […] This is how we constantly foil the bookies. THE DOWNSIDE IS NEGLIGIBLE — THE POTENTIAL FOR WINNING IS IMMENSE, IT’S ONLY COMMON SENSE! I’ll give you the edge every time. You only have to look at my past record to realise that there’s only one way to bet.’
I’d dearly love to look at his past record, but it’s as elusive as Lord Lucan. He even invites you to look at it: ‘See my Complete Results for the last 8 months’; and: ‘Look at my COMPLETE RESULTS for the last eight months. 108 winning bets from 150 bets’, but he provides no link to them – there are no complete results. Therefore the repeated claim that ‘winning runs of ten, twelve or fourteen are not unusual for our clients’ can only be taken with less feasibility than a fairy tale.
In my two-month trial, there were 52 selections and only 14 of them were winners, giving a strike-rate of 26.9%. This is a long way off the 70% strike-rate figure that he repeats more times than satellite channels repeat Friends. The bank ended up at minus 9 points, which could have been worse, but combined with the disappointing service as a whole, means that I wouldn’t want to trial it any longer, nor can I recommend it.
Insider Investments Academy is meant to be based on insider tips that Coleman has paid ‘a lot’ of money to access (even though the middling subscription fees don’t reflect this possibility), but with results like this, I’m forced to question who his insider is.
