Dr. Terry Allen

Publisher of options newsletter TerrysTips.com since 2001.. Thirty years experience trading options virtually every day. including stint as seat holder and market maker on the C.B.O.E. MBA from Harvard Business School and DBA from Univ. of Virginia Darden School. Author of Making 36%: Duffer's Guide to Breaking Par in the Market Every Year, In Good Years and Bad (4th revision - 2012).

TerrysTips.com is a newsletter that carries out eight different option portfolios which many subscribers mirror on their own or through auto-trade at several brokers who make all the same trades in individual customer accounts. Each portfolio offers something different (bullish, neutral, or bearish), different underlyings (AAPL, ...More SPY, other individual) companies and one portfolio based on VXX offers downside protection in the event of a market crash.

In 2005, the S.E.C. brought an action against Terry Allen, claiming that he was managing money for people without being a registered investment advisor because of the auto-trade service offered by several brokers who placed trades in their customer accounts based on Terry’s Tips newsletter recommendations. A second complaint was for a single statement on his website that they believed was incorrect and therefore fraudulent.

Although two large law firms assured Dr. Allen that if he went to court on the first issue, he would win because there was a Supreme Court decision stating that investment newsletters are exempt from registration requirements - it would be a violation of their First Amendment rights. However, they estimated that his legal expenses would be greater than settling with the S.E.C. (and a year or two of his time tied up in court proceedings), and both firms recommended that he accept the settlement offer while not admitting any guilt.

The second issue (fraud) involved a single statement that was true when it was written but a couple of years later, option prices fell to 10-year lows, and it was no longer true. The S.E.C. argued that the statement was not removed in a timely enough fashion.

For the past eight years since the settlement with the S.E.C., Dr. Allen has have been publishing the Terry’s Tips newsletter (and recommendations are executed in customer accounts at thinkorswim by TD Ameritrade through their Auto-Trade program), and the S.E.C. has not objected to any of his activities.