InvestAnswers IADSS Review
A REVIEW OF INVESTANSWERS IADSS PATREON TIER AND UNDERSTANDING THE RIGHT WAY TO USE IT.
First off, let me disclose my biases and motivations for posting this guide so you can factor those into your judgement when reading this guide. I have been a member of InvestAnswers Capitalist Tier since early 2021, and honestly it’s like 10 bucks a month… who cares. In June 2022, InvestAnswers launched IADSS, which is a brand-new tier that’s quite a lot more at 200 bucks a month and it comes with a trading tool as part of the membership benefits. I was lucky enough to snag a spot before it sold out. Full disclosure: I am still a current paying member of the IADSS Patreon Tier and just renewed my membership.
My motivation for writing this is, frankly, I just couldn’t resist the urge to share some of the strategies, ideas, and possibilities that having this tool allows you to employ.
I was inspired by CryptoG’s review of IADSS. I have a different view on it and I can provide you all another perspective from someone who has used it for a longer period of time and has had success with it. Further, I can provide the perspective of someone who has had success incorporating InvestAnswers’ other Capitalist tier membership benefits into trading strategies. Granted, at the time of writing, IADSS has only been in existence for a month so we’ll still have to see how this new tier plays out in the long term.
Here are the answers to some of the questions you might have immediately on your mind:
Have I made money with it? Yes, I have. I made about $8,600 on my trades this month and in a down market. However, I would NOT say it was ALL because of IADSS. But, IADSS did play a part in all my trades this month.
Am I just a InvestAnswers fan boy? Hell NO. And if you read this article fully, you will quickly see the only thing I am interested in is if his products can make me money or not. So far, the IADSS membership pretty much paid for itself for the year even if I don’t make another trade this year. I probably don’t expect to get such results every month, but I am willing to continue to see where this thing goes.
Do I have any reservation about IADSS? Yes, I do. There are things I quite dislike and a good part of this article I get to vent some of those frustrations.
One more thing… in CryptoG’s article he also goes over his thoughts on InvestAnswers the person, the YouTube channel, and his other Patreon tiers. I’m not going to be spending much time on those topics in this article. If you don’t know about InvestAnswers, turn on Youtube, search InvestAnswers. The guy publishes a video like every single day. There is so much information out there on him, do your own research, make your own judgement on the man yourselves. I am going to be focusing the IADSS tier and reference InvestAswers and the other Patreon teirs only when relevant.
Here is my review of IADSS.
Introduction to IADSS
IADSS is a $200 per month Patreon membership tier from InvestAnswers. According to InvestAnswers, IADSS stands for “InvestAnswers Decision Support System”, which to be honest, I have no idea what that means. Also, another thing that still confuses me is: IADSS is also called the “Executive Tier,” in Patreon. I don’t know why they call it a different name in Patreon while in all their other official material it’s called IADSS. From what I can tell, the Executive Tier and IADSS are effectively one in the same. If people know of the difference, please let me know. Semantics aside, here is a list of what you get for this tier:
The IADSS Models – These three proprietary models created by InvestAnswers. They are designed to provide trading signals based on technical indicators within the TradingView.
IADSS Discourse – This is an exclusive forum dedicated for IADSS members within InvestAnswers’ Discourse server.
InvestAnswers’ IADSS resources – These are some more advanced research, InvestAnswers’ opinion, trade alerts intended for IADSS members.
InvestAnswers’ IADSS specific videos - InvestAnswers has been putting out a video almost every other day on IADSS. Most of the videos are on how to use the models and some very basic things that people seem to have trouble with. Occasionally, he’s put out videos of his interpretations of specific signals on assets that he’s trading and walk throughs of trades that he’s made using IADSS models.
Access to all the other benefits of InvestAnswers’ lower tiers. Things like his regular posts, analysis, models, Discord chat, etc.
Oh and one more quirk about IADSS to be aware of: InvestAnswers and his team seems to be very quiet about the IADSS tier. He’s never talked about it in any of his YouTube videos, social media, or anywhere that I am aware of other than one bullet point in the Patreon. The only way people found out about it is if you were already part of his Capitalist tier pre-June 2022. He put out a couple of detailed videos to his Capitalists members sharing this tier and its benefits and the features of IADSS.
What is the Real Value of IADSS?
Ok, let me first cut to the chase and state why IADSS is valuable: IADSS allows you to perfect your front-running strategies. Now, let me take you through the logic.
A membership into IADSS gets you access to three of InvestAnswers’ proprietary models. I’ll go over in depth as to my theory of how each of them works in a later section, but you might be surprised to hear me say that understanding how these models work isn’t actually as important as to understanding what you have.
In his hour-long introductory video, InvestAnswers revealed the most important detail about these models that you need to know. In describing the process of creating these models, InvestAnswers explained that he took all of his technical trading logic and had a team of programmers to build them into TradingView.
What this means is the IADSS models are the programmed logic of how InvestAnswers make trades. Understanding this point is the most important aspect about this tool. Let me repeat, understanding this is the most important aspect about this tool! If you fully appreciate this subtle insight, then you will find that there are so many different strategies you can employ to make money with IADSS.
Let me illustrate, imagine if Warren Buffet hired a bunch of programmers to program his entire investing logic for any asset into a tool, and he called it “WBDSS”. Then he let a select a few people subscribe to it. Think about the power that is in their hands. The possible strategies you could come up employing this tool is nearly endless! For one, you can basically front-run the Buffett army. Heck, if your clever enough, you can use the tool to front run Buffett himself. Now, do you see the potential of IADSS?
Now, InvestAnswers isn’t Warren Buffett, but you need InvestAnswers to be Warren Buffett to make money. The right way to use it is as a resource to help you determine what InvestAnswers and the IA army is going to do, and by extension, what the other investing crypto YouTuber are going to do, and by extension what crypto retail is going to do. While InvestAnswers, obviously, doesn’t have the impact that Warren Buffett has on the stock market, he does have knock-on impacts on crypto retail, especially because the crypto markets are much smaller and the influencer investors in the space is far fewer. It’s been well documented that in this past bull market the way to make money is to get into crypto assets before InvestAnswers starts making videos on it. When InvestAnswers starts making videos on a crypto that he is getting into, you see a spike in activity on the same topic from other crypto trading influencers, followed by a spike in retail activity. More on this later.
A lot of new traders are expecting InvestAnswers’ new tool to predict the future. To paraphrase Matthew McConaughey, I don’t care if your Warren Buffett or Jimmy Buffett, nobody can predict what the future. Therefore, you can’t expect IADSS (or even “WBDSS”) to predict the future. But you don’t need it to. You just need IADSS to tell you what InvestAnswers is going to do before the rest of crypto retail knows about it.
How to Trade Front-Running Strategies?
Before IADSS, the Capitalist tier was the ONLY way you can get the jump on what InvestAnswers was dabbling in next. He publishes his research, his ideas, and, for crying out loud, his TRADES. So, anyone with half a brain can get into positions after he announces his trades to anticipate his video drop and subsequent retail entry in the following weeks. More sophisticated traders would pay close attention to his Capitalist posts, his watchlists, and read the tea leaves to determine which sectors or types of cryptos or specific cryptos he’s looking. Then, just buy those cryptos in anticipation of InvestAnswers jumping in. I know this because I was a part of one group that did this trade. More details on these later.
IADSS basically takes these front-running strategies and puts them on steroids. There are so many ways to incorporate IADSS into a trading strategy. Tool is also only a month old, so in a few months the new meta way to utilize this trading strategy may have already changed. That’s way you should I’m going to share more as examples of how one would go about designing a strategy rather than gospel.
The crypto markets are still fairly small and crypto influencers have an impact on retail which can move prices especially in a bull market. InvestAnswers particularly has an outsized impact on retail crypto investors especially on select cryptos… *cough* Solana *cough* Celsius. The simplest strategy, that even someone with half a brain can employ is a straight up copy trade InvestAnswers with IADSS. You don’t even need the IADSS models to do this. InvestAnswers shares his trade alerts and analysis and signal interpretation with the IADSS tier first. That means by simply copy trading you are already getting the jump.
Now a more sophisticated strategy is to use InvestAnswers as a point of reference to trade against. One of the traders in the community came up with the strategy called the “InverseIA”. This strategy was inspired by the InverseCramer. The InverseCramer is basically a reversal trade against CNBC’s Jim Cramer, which does remarkably well, continuing to beat the S&P500 by 7%. Similarly, InverseIA employs a copy-reversal strategy against InvestAnswers. InverseIA has a set of specific rules that define when to copy trade InvestAnswers and another set of rules that define when to reverse trade InvestAnswers. There are specific assets that InvestAnswers is amazing at getting you great entries, that’s when the strategy calls you to copy trade him. Often InvestAnswers leaves you in the trade far too long, that’s when the strategy calls you to reversal trade him. Reversal trading InvestAnswers on exits makes sense because he is the perfect point-of-reference when maximum FOMO kicks for the asset, right ahead of the height of retail momentum.
Use InvestAnswers as the point of reference is to get IN a position ahead of InvestAnswers dropping his trade alert and get OUT when InvestAnswers drops his max FOMO or a “jump-the-shark” video that contributes to the rest of retail FOMOing into that asset. You can observe retail rushing in following your exit signal and the market top hits about a week and a half later. I share three trades in the past two years that I was a part of using this strategy as examples, two trades that were extremely successful, and one trade that didn’t work.
Trades Utilizing This Method
The Luna Trade
The Luna trade was one of the successful trades we were able to pull off using our front-running strategy. This is how the trade went down. Around August and September 2021, was already in the lower top 100 and InvestAnswers had posted videos and resources on it for the community. This made Luna a great candidate for the strategy and allowed us to position ourselves to get in should the entry signal come from InvestAnswers. When InvestAnswers signaled to the community that he looking at getting into a Luna position on October 1st 2021, that was our entry signal and when we initiate our trade anticipating InvestAnswers jumping in.
On December 6th 2021, InvestAnswers put out his trade alert to the community that he had entered Luna. Although, ideally we would have liked to see this trade alert a bit earlier, nevertheless the first part of our front running strategy worked. InvestAnswers did mention he wanted to get into the Luna trade earlier, but he just did not get a chance to execute the trade till then.
Not long after, InvestAnswers dropped his “Should I Buy Luna” video and several videos on Luna. This is around the time when we saw the first leg of the Luna run that carried into 2022.
The exit signal for this Luna trade came on March 24 2022. This is when InvestAnswers dropped the “Luna to 80K” video which is exactly what we are looking for in the max FOMO “jump the shark” video and that is the trigger for us to exit the trade.
Pretty much everyone in our group exited the trade in the days following. Sure enough, the top of the market came 10 days later. Personally, I was able to lock in about +155% on this trade.
The Polygon Trade
The Polygon trade was another successful trade we pulled off with this strategy. Polygon was another crypto on the lower top 100 that we identified and positioned ourselves to trade it. InvestAnswers had put out multiple posts on his thoughts on Polygon and subsequently put out a trade alert to the Capitalists on September 21, 2021. This prompted us to enter our positions in Polygon as well.
The exit signal came a couple months later on December 16th 2021 when InvestAnswers put out his video on “Polygon Should I Sell”. This was the “jump the shark” video where he laid out his exit strategy for Polygon where he had it going to anywhere from ~$3.60 to ~$4.60.
Our group exited this trade in the following days and the top of the market hit about 10 days later. I took made a nice +115% on this trade.
The Axie Trade
The last trade I want to show you guys is one that didn’t work and go over where things went wrong. This was one of our earlier trades, the Axie Trade. Around June-July 2021, we had scouted Axie and it was very much a fit for the strategy, it was a lower top 100 at the time and a fast riser and InvestAnswers had talked about it and put it on the watchlist. The entry signal came on August 3rd 2021 when he put out an entry strategy for getting into Axie and we initiated our entry.
Unfortunately, for us InvestAnswers never ended up entering a position. We had put in our positions waiting for his trade alert, but that alert never came. InvestAnswers did put quite a few metaverse videos and metaverse related posts in the following months, no entries. As for us, our positions actually performed really well in October and November, nearly doing a 3x. Sadly, December and January had pretty much whipped most of those gains.
We decided to pretty much give up on the trade and capitulate. I exited around January locking in around a +40%, still in the green, but the trade was a dud since our strategy on this trade did not work. InvestAnswers did give us an exit signal in March, with his quite bullish video analyzing Axie and Axie would make another small pump not long after. However, this signal was pretty much meaningless we had long exited this trade. The key lesson of this trade is, if 2-3 months later and InvestAnswers still hasn’t entered, then your trade failed front-run anything. Even though your position might look amazing at that point in time (in November, the Axie trade looked ingenious), the actual strategy failed, therefore we should have just taken our profits, closed out, and moved on.
Perfecting Your Strategy
IADSS is an amazing resource that allows you to perfect your front-running strategies. The two keys success with these strategies are having the best intelligence possible and having it first. IADSS helps you with both. Here are the main ways that IADSS takes front-running to the next level.
The three models that come with your IADSS membership are very useful in positioning your entries and exits, saves you a lot of time in identifying opportunities to implement your front running strategy, and excellent for developing your strategies. One of the models, the Confluence model, has a pre-signal functionality that will let you know ahead of time if a buy/sell signal is on its way. Hello?!?! Front-run heaven right there!! If you’re positioning your entry or exit ahead of InvestAnswers, this just makes life easy, because while everyone else exiting on signal, you exit on the pre-signal. The cherry on top is the backtest that comes with InvestAnswers’ models. This lets you test different time periods to see exactly how your entries and exits would work out and exactly how your trades would behave in different market conditions. This just saves so much time and energy when coming up with your trade ideas.
The IADSS tier is also much smaller with a limited membership pool, way smaller than even the Capitalist tier. It’s great that this tool is kept quite closed and among very few traders. The more people that use IADSS to front run the more this tool becomes diluted and no longer tradable. IADSS has maybe 500-600 members vs Capitalists of around 10K members at its height.
The IADSS tier also grants access to the discourse forums and discord chats which are extremely useful resource in their own right. The size of the IADSS group is so much smaller and more sophisticated traders. These resources are the key to determining what other community members are trading and discussing. Also, InvestAnswers is a lot more active in the IADSS forums. That means you can see what assets he’s looking at and chatting about before the rest of other tiers know about it and way before the rest of YouTube knows about it. Further, the members in IADSS are overall more active and higher quality traders than the ones in his lower tiers. It’s a great place for networking and connecting with other likeminded individuals.
InvestAnswers also shares a lot more exclusive resources, signal interpretations, and trade alerts in the IADSS tier. He shares videos on his thoughts on specific signals on the assets he’s trading. He’ll share demonstrations on how he uses the tool for trading a variety of strategies: day trading, swing trading, scalping, trend trading, etc. All experience levels of traders can find something useful in there. For any front-running strategy, this is a gold mine of good stuff to get you the jump on where the next moves are going to be.
Agreeing and Disagreeing with CryptoG
In this last section, I’ll go over some of the areas where I agree with CryptoG’s review and areas where I disagree. Like I said earlier, CryptoG’s review is half on InvestAnswers and half on IADSS. I’m only going to focus on the part about IADSS. For me, I don’t have any opinion on InvestAnswers, whether he has good intentions or bad intentions or what. The only thing I care about is if InvestAnswers provides useful tools and information for me to make money or not. Here are my thoughts.
How Does the Confluence Model Work?
In CryptoG’s review, he argues that the confluence model simply gives a buy / sell arrow when the price sits outside the Bollinger Bands. I have to disagree with him on this one. After analyzing the model and using it for a month, there is definitely more that’s going on within this model than just “throw a signal when price is outside the Bollinger Band.”
When I initially saw it in InvestAnswers’ video, I thought the same thing as CryptoG. I figured I would replicate this quite easily using a Bollinger Band. I sat down with it for an entire evening, messing with in TradingView and Jupyter Notebooks, and I could not recreate the signal production. What I did find is that the signal production has a relationship with volatility on the average deviation of the bands. This is what I believe is the closest attempt.
While there is only one band displayed, there are actually two or maybe three bands invisible bands within the model that are derived from some calculated lookback period. And the way it throws the signals is it waits for a break and then a re-integration across multiple bands. This is how I think the Confluence Model actually works. This model is definitely an enhanced indicator and it’s not something you’re going to find among the free indicators that people have built in TradingView.
How Does the Mean Model Work?
The Mean Reversion model is a model that determines overbought and oversold scenarios. CryptoG doesn’t analyze this model too much, but overall, I agree with his observations about it. In playing around with it, I am pretty sure this model is a momentum oscillator that’s been standardized and driving towards some price moving average. I’m not sure how it produces the signals when it’s outside the thresholds though. In any case, this is also quite a sophisticated model. That’s about the extent of what I can observe about it.
How Does the Trend Model Work?
CryptoG’s says the Trend Model is simply 2 fast moving averages that change colors. I totally agree with CryptoG on this one. There is nothing sophisticated about the trend model. In fact, I think there are better models to help determine direction and momentum reversal. For that, I prefer looking at something like an Elliot Wave, Wave Trend, or ADX.
Is there an Expertise Requirement?
Totally agreed with CryptoG, you shouldn’t need to be an MBA, or hold a Series 7, or the like to be in IADSS. Anyone should be able to join IADSS and can extract benefit. However, as I have shown, the optimal way to use it is to incorporate it into a front-running strategy. That is what makes this tool unique. And in order use this tool optimally, you really have to be an experienced trader.
Is IADSS an unfinished product?
I agree and disagree with CryptoG on this one. I have to say, there are parts of IADSS where you can see the scaffolding, especially when it first launched. Like when CryptoG said there was no guide or documentation when it first launched. It was sort of just plopped into your hands. However, I’m reminded of a quote from Bill Gate: “If we had waited till Windows was a finished product, it would have never been launched.”
As a paying customer, while I want a complete product and get full value for my money, I also just want the damn thing ASAP so I can trade it. The sooner I have it in my hands the sooner I can make money with it. Ultimately, that is more important to me than if it’s missing features here and there. InvestAnswers was talking about trying to create this product a year ago. And hell yea, I would have like to have had this last year. At least for me, I don’t mind that it was missing some stuff on launch and even now it’s missing things I’d like to see. But as long as it’s working, I can use the product for trading, and they are making iterative improvements (they added a guide, added documentation, added missing features, fixed the stuff that needed fixing), then personally I am good with it.
Repainting Issue on the Trend Model
This was initially an issue, but they fixed it along with a couple other fixes in the Version 2.0:
Conclusion
In conclusion, I’ve liked IADSS so far, mainly because it’s made me money. The uniqueness of IADSS is that it allows you to supercharge your front-running strategy against crypto retail. It’s another resource for you to obtain better information on InvestAnsers and sooner than general retail. Our group already have my new strategy incorporating IADSS, which I’m not going to share here :). The key is to realize that this tool is not a silver bullet, but it can help you make money if used in the right way.
IADSS really isn’t for new traders to be honest. If you’re a new trader considering IADSS, I’m not sure how much value you will get out of it. The only thing I can think of is, perhaps you get to learn how to be a better trader by diving into the deep end. If you are a shark, however, you probably don’t need me to tell you how awesome this tool is. Happy feeding.
Using IADSS to trade stocks, I have found it particularly useful for end-of-day trading and scalping on lower timeframes. I hadn't thought about using it as a tool to help you front run. It can probably work with mid cap crypto, I wouldn't try to use it to front run with stocks. And you probably have to be in that trade for a few months for it to play out.
Good to see they have fixed up some of the more obvious problems that were pointed out by early adopters of the indicator. How did they thank those users? Kicked out with no notice or explanation. I am really glad to hear you're having success front-running the trade alerts. Following the alerts themselves certainly isn't the way to anything but financial ruin.