In March 2018 I reviewed Apex Algorithms and their claim to provide a “low risk” investment which had previously generated between 26% and 90% annual returns. I concluded that the offer was an extremely high risk investment into an unregulated firm, and highlighted inconsistencies in its published results.
Apex Algorithms has recently launched a new website at algocorp.com. There is no mention of Apex Algorithms on the front page, but the offering is substantially identical, and its address and phone number remain the same as Apex’s, along with its “Deliver the Knockout Blow to the Bookmakers” identity. The initial version of Algo Corp’s “Terms and Conditions” page referred to Apex Algorithms throughout; this has since been changed to Algo Corp. At time of writing the apexalgorithms.co.uk still appears to be running with the old brand identity.
Why Algo Corp / Apex has felt the need to create a new brand identity is not clear.
Who are Algo Corp?
No details of who is behind the business are provided on Algo Corp’s website.
Algo Corp Limited was incorporated in December 2017 and is yet to file accounts. It is 100% owned by its sole director, Nathan Burgoyne.
Apex Incorporated’s last accounts (made up to July 2017) showed £592 (pounds, not thousands or millions) in net assets, consisting of £31,495 current assets and £30,903 creditors. Due to its small size, the company was exempt from auditing and was not required to file any information of substance.
How safe is the investment?
Algo Corp claims that this is a “Low risk investment with a maximum of 2.5% of each trade ever risked and we apply an obsessive risk management strategy.”
Algo Corp also states in their website’s FAQ that “On average we tell clients to expect between 1-1.5% a week”.
In reality this is an investment into an unregulated betting syndicate and investors risk losing 100% of their money if the bets Algo Corp places on their behalf fail to come off.
While Algo Corp claims to have an algorithm and “advanced Artifical Intelligence” that can outperform the bookmakers’ odds, it goes without saying that no-one is guaranteed to beat the house.
And while anyone can make 1.5% in any particular week from gambling (in the same way that I can make a 100% return in a few seconds in roulette), the odds of consistently making a 1-1.5% a week – that’s 68% a year – are miniscule.
Even if Algo Corp does only place a maximum of 2.5% of investors’ money in each bet, the potential cumulative effect of repeated failed bets is such that investors should still consider the risk of losing up to 100% of their money.
More dubious past performance
Algo Corp publish two tables of purported past performance results on their website, one broken down by categories of bets, and the other by month. The table is the same as the one I reviewed in my earlier Apex Algorithms review, but with a new column for 2017-18 added.
The problem with these tables in brief: in order to convert a series of monthly returns to an annual return, you take what you started with, then multiply it by the percentage return in month 1, multiply that by the percentage return in month 2, etc… such that the annual return is the product of all the monthly percentage returns. (A break-even month being 100%, a 5% loss being 95%, and so on.)
In order to convert the returns across a series of categories to the total return, you multiply each category’s return by the percentage that category contributes to your total (known as weighting), and then add up all of those weighted returns, giving you the weighted average.
The problem with Algo Corp’s table is that their tables don’t add up properly. A five-second calculation shows that the “totals” of each column are simply the sum of all the numbers above them.
While I have no insight into Algo Corp’s historical bets, it is a fact that these tables do not make mathematical sense.
Apex / Algo owner Burgoyne was unable to explain these discrepancies in a series of comments last year, and my opinion is unchanged that the most likely explanation of this mathematical discrepancy is that these “performance” tables show made-up numbers that happen to add up to the same amounts at the bottom.
This lack of transparency raises serious questions about Algo Corp’s statement that “On average we tell clients to expect between 1-1.5% a week”.
The new column for 2017-18 manages to make even less sense than the old figures. Both the tables showing returns broken down by bet type and returns by month show a ROI of 35.47% for 2017-18. The returns by bet type duly add up to 35.47% – which, as I have explained above, is gobbledygook, as they should be a weighted average. The table for returns by month, however, add up to only 29.18% (despite the same 35.12% being shown in the total row) – so the table isn’t even wrong consistently anymore.
Should I invest with Algo Corp?
This blog does not give financial advice. The following are statements of publicly available facts or widely accepted investment principles, not a personalised recommendation. Investors should consult a regulated independent financial adviser if they are in any doubt.
Over the past year, Apex / Algo Corp has doubled down on its misleading claims. From claiming to provide a “low risk investment”, it is now telling investors, according to its own FAQ, to expect a return of 1-1.5% a week (with compounding, that’s 68% a year).
There remains no independently audited evidence that Algo Corp has any “advanced artificial intelligence” algorithm whatsoever. Their nonsensical “performance” table is strong evidence that they don’t even possess a calculator.
Do not proceed unless you are prepared to lose all your money.
I’m a professional gambler and came across this company the other day. I’m not sure how but I read a lot of stuff to do with trading sports markets so I think it must have been that way.
It’s been very interesting reading about them to say the least.
Anyway I just want to point out that it’s simply not true to say that the chance of making 68% a year in the manner described here (or indeed other ways) are miniscule.
Indeed I fully expect to make more than 68% profit from sports betting /trading this season.
Anyone has a reasonably high chance of making a 68% return in a year from gambling if on day one they walk into a casino, place a few bets on roulette and then sit at home playing Counterstrike for the rest of the year. The chance of making a 68% return in that way is about 60%. If the 40% chance comes up you lose all your money.
What you don’t get to do is call this “low risk investment”. If you try this repeatedly you will lose money in the long run, because the expected return is negative, which means it’s not an investment of any kind.
The chance that anyone can consistently generate a 68% annual return week after week from gambling is miniscule, and the claim that this is a “low risk” investment is gibberish, like Apex / Algo Corp’s made-up past performance tables.
Well done. Are you soliciting investment and claiming that other people can make a 68% low risk profit by giving you their money?
I am certainly not soliciting. If you weren’t so closed minded on the subject I would happily show you exactly how I will make 68% plus and yes in my case at least I wouldn’t be taking very much risk !
There are plenty of other readers of this blog. If you won’t talk about it for my sake then maybe you could tell them more about your low risk system that generates 68% per year returns from gambling and exactly how it works.
I have to say, I, like Tony, was interesting in this company, I’m very dubious as to their claims, and all the glowing reviews for them on the web seem to me to be likely embellished or engineered by someone involved with the company. However, after reading your review for a few lines I realised you really don’t understand anything about professional betting or sports trading. Of course if you’re betting on something like roulette, you cannot negate the house edge. This is negative expectation gambling… and you cannot label it as ‘investing’, in any way shape or form. But the company is clearly not alluding to negative expectation gambling. They are talking about horse racing and sports betting which are not negative expectation games unless you’re taking the wrong prices. There are many ways to make money through betting, and yes, consistent money. I make a consistent 8% ROI on turnover, day in, day out. That doesn’t mean I make a profit every day, or even every week, but over tens of thousands of bets and years of betting I have achieved and still achieve an 8% average ROI, and that’s not per annum, that’s on everything I turnover. I’m not going to explain how I do it, but this equates to potentially many hundreds of percent profit over the course of any year. To say what they claim has to be nonsense just shows a lack of understanding of how professional gambling works. And it is as high or low risk as one wishes to make it. Professionals use proper money management to accommodate the inevitable variance and risk relative to their strategy. You are basically just saying it can’t be possible because it’s ‘gambling’, you clearly have no concept of professional betting or sports trading of any kind if you lump it all in with roulette or casino based games that are mathematically leveraged against the punter.
In fact I’ve spent several years on gambling forums off and on telling people about it only to be constantly told I’m completely wrong and I’m a fool and that it’s impossible to make money doing what I do .
And I’ve reached the point where I’m just trying to reach the goal of £3 million overall profit -I’m £2,400,000 up – whereupon I will simply inform journalists about this method because I think it’s scandalous that many more people don’t realise that what I do is in fact by far the easiest way to make money from betting not to mention far more entertaining than most other forms of betting and almost certainly less potentially addictive .
However I am happy to simply state what I do and allow people yet again to rubbish it.
The easiest way to make money from betting, by far, is to bet on long term markets in multiples during the season.
There is of course a bit more to it than that but it’s all based on what is apparently a little known secret :
that long term sports markets really aren’t very difficult to trade.
Messi and Ronaldo for Champions League top scorer have paid my bills for several years for example.
Betting on horse racing and sports also has a negative expectation. Bookies don’t work for free.
An 8% ROI “day in, day out” equates to not “hundreds” but 105,782,537,709% per year. If you started with £100 on January 1st and earned 8% day in, day out you would own the wealth of the entire planet (c. $200 trillion) by Christmas.
We peasants can hardly demand explanations from the guy who owns the entirety of the world’s wealth.
Your idea that bookies don’t include a margin when they make their book (which is the equivalent of the house edge on a roulette table) is why the UK gambling industry makes billions of pounds a year.
In any case this is beside the point of the review. Are you soliciting investment in your system that makes 8% day in day out and claiming it’s low risk?
You think “I made £2.4 million from gambling and you can too” won’t interest newspaper journalists but “I made £3 million” will?
Go for it. Alex apparently isn’t going to explain his system that made him into Gilgamesh so the stage would appear to be yours.
Congratulations on earning £2.4 million by predicting the result of a series of coin flips correctly. When Messi and Ronaldo retire are you going to do the same?
Are you soliciting investment in your system that accurately predicts the result of end-of-season awards and claiming it’s low risk?
This is a scam. First done by Daniel Burgoyne (twin brother of Nathan) with Sports Alpha. Surprise Surprise As soon as it collapses, Nathan launches a football syndicate. I hope people know the definition of a Ponzi scheme? They just use existing funds to repay people and then run off with everything once it’s grown enough. Get your money out fast!
This is a scam. First done by the director’s twin brother, Daniel Burgoyne, convicted fraudster. Surprise Surprise. As soon as it collapses, the other brother launches a football syndicate. I hope people know the definition of a Ponzi scheme? They just use existing funds to repay people and then run off with everything once it’s grown enough.
Ask yourself before investing.. this is an unregulated investment or a fixed income (bond) product. Despite any argument put forward, there is nothing to stop the owner / directors from running off with the money.
They have no respected accountants or auditors of results. Has any client ever actually ‘seen’ anything close to an algorithm in practise trading matches with large sums of money in an account? I am guessing… No.
They are great salesmen I give them that. But behind it all, there is nothing. They have been reported to the FCA and Action Fraud.
Get your money out fast and don’t be so easily deceived!