How the ‘Harvard of Trading’ Ruined Thousands of Young People’s Lives

When Patrice Rechards entered the Rotterdam arena, pop songs were pumping, strobe lights were blinding and she could feel God running through her. She’d grown up in a relatively poor and religious Surinamese-Dutch family in Amsterdam, and she’d always known she had a higher purpose. But it wasn’t until she discovered IM Academy that she figured out what that was. Since joining the financial education platform three months earlier, the 26-year-old had learned how to trade options, crypto, stocks and foreign currencies, all in pursuit of getting rich—and she would soon share those lessons with others. Along with 15,000 other young IM members from all over Europe, she’d made the pilgrimage last spring for a three-day conference to see Chris Terry, their guru and the chief executive officer of IM, in the flesh.

During the pandemic, IM grew from a small New York operation into a global phenomenon by selling the promise that it could teach anyone, particularly teens and twentysomethings, how to become a savvy retail investor. For a one-time $275 fee and $250 a month, members had access to online courses and coaches providing trading strategies—the “Yale of forex, the Harvard of trading,” as a salesman described IM in a marketing video. When young people weren’t being invited by their friends to become budding stock market mavens, they might encounter Instagram videos showing how others had gotten rich with the IM method or hear about celebrity members, including fashion model Blac Chyna and professional boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr.