Tramita Funds has finally closed its door for good and disappeared without a trace. If it were not for an empty website and registered domain name, one would assume the company had never existed before. Some questions on the minds of its many investors have been left unanswered. Late last year, Tramita stopped communicating to its investors and redemption requests were unfulfilled.

We tried contacting the company for some answers via phone and email to no avail. This left us wondering if Tramita was really another one of the numerous ponzi investment scams that eventually left its investors high and dry. However, doing some research we came to the conclusion that this was not the case, but the alternative scenario is of no consolation to investors.

According to Hedge Fund Research, about one in 10 hedge funds disappeared last year. Seven percent of the industry closed its doors in the first three quarters of 2008, that’s nearly 700 funds. The bleeding will not stop this year as thousands more are expected to die in 2009 as nervous investors line up for redemptions of what is left of their funds. It is our belief that Tramita Funds was one of these casualties.
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In April of 2008, we wrote about HugeROI and their plans in revamping the website and offering their own in-house investments to the members. A year later and the contents of their homepage has not changed, except for the announcement that the “new HugeROI is around the corner”.

If you missed it, the revamped website came online in early fall of 2008. HugeROI did offer some investments with incredible returns. Maybe you have seen this message from one of their founders, Clifton Alexander, in various investment forums.
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It seems like the marketing buzz words in the past year for money making systems were filled with such  things as “autopilot” and “robots”.  Be it such areas as online marketing, stocks or the foreign exchange. The latest one to be unleashed is the FapTurbo system released in early November of 2008. If you haven’t seen the marketing video, check it out below and to follow is our review of this product.

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Andrew Lahde the 37y.o. manager of a small California hedge fund, Lahde Capital, made a killing last year betting on the subprime collapse. Last month, he called it quits after the fund had amassed a whopping return of 866% in a little over a year. Tired of the stress, he closed the fund.

On October 17th, Lahde passed along his “goodbye” letter, a biting “F-you” message to the financial establishment, hedge funds, government and privileged “prep” school kids.

It’s really entertaining. Below is the letter in it’s entirety as found on FT Alphaville and Portfolio.com. Few can disagree with his sentiments in our current economic crisis.
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We wrote about the litigation initiated by the SEC against GlobalOnlineDirect a year ago in July 2007. As predicted, when the government gets involved issuing a cease and desist order for these types of online “investments”, any hopes of recovering lost money for the majority of the investors is only wishful thinking. The biggest losers are usually the small investors, and the biggest winners are the hired hands that the government has on the payroll to supposedly recover the missing money.

According to the original litigation, Global Online Direct Inc. took in $45Million from at least 9000 investors. On October 6, 2008, the latest declaration from the Grassmueck Group, the court appointed receivership, only $1.5M is available to return to the investors from what has been recovered.

Now for the bad news, only investors that had invested at least $2000 are authorized to submit a claim. This would leave out at least 50-90% of the investors because when this program was online, the minimum investment to participate started at $150 and later raised to $500. Most people will usually go in with the minimimun to “test the waters”. Unfortunately, the majority of them will receive zilch from the recovery efforts.
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It is official. We are putting Worldlpp.com and Worldlpp.net into the scam category. Numerous attempts to contact the admin, Conrad Addison, and the company itself have been fruitless. It appears that the program had run away with the investors’ money, shut down the sites and no longer communicating with their investors.

The last email sent out from Worldlpp.net was rather ominous. It was purporting to be from an employee of ITConsultinglive.com on behalf of Worldlpp because Conrad Addison was incapacitated as a result of a stroke. The employees of ITConsultingLive had now taken over the management and operations of Worldlpp.

No explanation was given as to what will happen to all the investor’s money and as to the future of Worldlpp. Investors are entitled to know as much since it is their money that funded and capitalized ITConsultingLive as one of the investments.
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A question often asked by our readership is where we come up with some of these alternative investment ideas. Well, besides being bombarded by a ton of financial related snail mail and newsletters, we get quite a bit of investment newsletters that we are subscribed to. If we see something interesting, we will take a closer look and write about it.

Unfortunately, we also get a ton of unsolicited emails regarding investing opportunities as well. Some are either promoting their programs or asking us to review it. It’s a jungle out there in the online investment world and we are not always capable of doing an in depth due diligence on every single one of them.

Here is an example of a recent paid advertisement for NetVestFund.com that was attached to a newsletter that we are subscribed to. This is neither an endorsement nor a recommendation by OWI, just information. We have not done a complete due diligence on this company. Attached below is the actual email ad from the newsletter.
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