Nicholas Trimble & My Excellent FX Denver Adventure

Nicholas Trimble ‘Nick’ is one of my favorite people, and here’s why …

My name is Jim Gray and I own a successful Denver-based concrete and landscaping enterprise and I am moved to write this memo of endorsement and satisfaction about my friend and investment advisor/partner Nicholas Trimble. My involvement in foreign-exchange currency trading, at the urging of Nick Trimble has exceeded my best expectations.

I am moved to tell this story about Nick Trimble because it’s a great story, and I actually love to write.  I was also somewhat motivated to set the record straight because some degree of unfair controversy arose around Nicholas and this wild FX trading opportunity.

My FX trading adventure with ‘Nicholas’ Nick Trimble

I first met Nick in late 2009 through my brother, who happens to be one of the world’s foremost card counters at blackjack. Needless to say, my brother really knows about making money with numbers. At that time in 2009 my brother was singing the praises of a sophisticated currency trading software system called Gladiator, co-developed by a NASA scientist, and the man who was its biggest cheerleader and held a master-license to utilize this proprietary system: Nicholas-Nick Trimble. Best of all, Trimble was right here in Denver!

I was super-intrigued because I had been considering various ways to “gamble intelligently” in some range of speculative investments like precious metals, commodities, stocks, etc. Though I am not a good casino gambler or card counter, my brother had always instilled in me to seek a quantifiable advantage when pursuing business and speculative endeavors.

My brother has an amazing worldwide network of card counters and other skilled practitioners of what the casinos fear and call “advantage players” – a tiny minority of super-savvy casino players at various games who actually have the mathematical advantage over the casino; like that true story movie a few years ago with Kevin Spacey called 21. That kind of thing, and my brother had become a follower of Nick Trimble’s currency trading technology and strategies, and Nicholas in turn was learning casino advantage play from my brother. 

A gold standard endorsement for Nick Trimble

Nicholas Trimble is an impressive guy.  Upon meeting him for the first time at a local Denver haunt, I was instantly struck with his entertaining demeanor, high bandwidth and his clarity of purpose – and his purpose at the moment was an amazing software creation from a NASA scientist that could expertly make winning foreign currency trades; and when needed at a high volume exceeding the abilities of any top-expert old-school manual trader.

I consider an endorsement from my brother of something to do with using computer-science and math to make money speculating (where others mostly lose) to be a solid gold standard… and Trimble, I was assured, was the real thing!

Nick and my brother patiently took me through the impressive trading histories and graphs they had generated, and it really did strike me as being almost too good to be true. I had a strong trepidation, I’m more of a physical gold and silver type investor, and this felt a lot more like gambling, albeit gambling with a strong mathematical advantage, or so I was encouraged to believe.

Despite my gut-instincts, I decided to throw $400,000 at this opportunity to invest in computer-managed foreign currency trading.  At that time there were three FX investor funding groups using the same system and co-managed by Nicholas Trimble, Capstone FX, JG Fund and Beekeepers; and I wound up in Beekeepers group with my brother. (my best friend and co-worker wound up in the Capstone FX group and wishes he hadn’t, for reasons you will learn)

The Nicholas Trimble Rollercoaster Ride

Well, let me tell you – currency trading with Nicholas and his Gladiator program was a freaking rollercoaster ride, and not what I was expecting or thought I signed up for.  The fund group that I was assigned to had $4.8 million, including my 400K and at its lowest point we were down to $720,000 in total!  Oh my gosh, we are going to crash, I would think to myself constantly! This is why I don’t gamble when I go to Las Vegas, not even on sports that I love – it’s the stress!

And it gets even scarier: there were times when this whizzbang system seemed to be working in reverse; and we had short periods when virtually every trade the Gladiator made turned out wrong… and I was privy to stories about the other groups who at that point apparently were rapidly losing confidence and were beginning to override the decision-making both by the ‘genius’ software and Nick Trimble himself. 

Trimble’s consistent mantra through the worst of it was “Trust the math and stay the course,” and at times I marveled at his steadfastness.  Our group stayed loyal to the programming, but I learned that the other groups had all but mutinied – they had lost their confidence and were beginning to reach out to other so-called experts for alternate programming and strategies, switching softwares in the process, and they were increasingly calling their own trading shots as well, second-guessing the ‘NASA’ system, and even their newer secondary programming, much to the dismay of Nicholas.

Nick’s other Denver groups were not comprised of seasoned trading pros, they were like me, successful in other endeavors like concrete perhaps, but not trained and experienced in financial markets and casino gambling like Nick and my brother; and not experienced with the unbearable stress of big money (for us) financial markets trading, and the emotional drain of weekly and even daily hairy scary rollercoaster rides up and down.

Like a ship in rough seas we found the promised landfall!

Amusingly, it turns out that some of the excessive violent rollercoaster capital fluctuations that we experienced were actually due to a miscalculation that was later corrected. (Oops, our trades were sized as though we were a single trading group rather than three different ones).  We corrected course with new safer trade limits and continued the process even as the others went all squirrelly and ultimately sunk their own ships.

From December 2009 through November 2010 our group executed 18,246 trades and realized a total capital appreciation of nearly 200%! (my $400K became $1,045,000 after deducting Nick’s fee)

Nick would tell us many times and passionately, before this adventure was over, that “the pendulum swings both ways and when it swings in our direction it swings harder!”

Indeed it does! Bravo Nick Trimble, job well done!

A poignant epilogue to the story …

In at least three instances, apart from what I was hearing second hand, I personally observed the erosion of trust and mutiny among the more influential members of the other groups; they reminded me of friends I’ve experienced chasing their losses in a casino and in over their head.  That might even apply to me when I was young a few times, that’s all I’m saying, and why I do not gamble when I go to Vegas; that is unless my brother is at the blackjack table with me.

The panic behavior among the key members of our two ‘sister’ Denver groups is why they failed, in my humble opinion; and I came to learn that three of these mutinous scalawags (one a pillar of his Church community no less) have actually taken to covering their own missteps by distributing spurious innuendos and stories to the detriment of Nick Trimble’s otherwise credible self. 

Let my story bear witness to the truth.