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Member of the month award for May goes to @mccoyb53 May marks 5 years since @mccoyb53 joined SteadyOptions. We would like to thank you for your contribution and your long term loyalty!

I was a student at Sheridan Mentoring in 2006 and built Dan's web site, then worked for Dan from Jun 2007 through Nov 2013. After I left SOM, I did some work with other firms such as SMB and Option Elements (Tony Sizemore) and ended up creating Capital Discussions. Dan has a long history of deleting posts or kicking people out of his community that he doesn't like or deems a competitor as Kim mentioned earlier. Many of us have moved on. Dan is good for teaching the basics but he doesn't trade so you can only go so far with him. In a typical week, Dan used to teach 30-35 mentoring sessions. Now it's 0-3 per week. It's kind of like learning to be a surgeon from someone who hasn't operated in 12 years. As far as the admin fee goes, anyone who paid for mentoring before 2012 does have lifetime access, but you have to ask them to waive the annual admin fee. They sent one email out about this, but only 30% of people open emails on a good day, so the majority of mentoring students are likely unaware of this fact. I'm sure there are people who should get the admin fee waived but are paying it as they are unaware they are entitled to a waiver. I'm attaching the Sheridan Student Agreement from 27 March 2010. Paragraph 7 outlines "Termination of this Agreement." They can terminate your account if you "breach the terms of this agreement" but it never says anything about posting messages that Sheridan doesn't like or approve of or if Sheridan perceives you are a competitor. It is sad to see the SOM community dying as it was once the only game in town and quite active with many traders interacting with each other, similar to the Steady Options forums or Capital Discussions forums are now. Mark Fenton does trade and does nearly all of the mentoring. It should probably be renamed to Fenton Mentoring. SheridanMentoringStudentAgreement.pdf

I registered to Sheridan Mentoring program in 2012. Like others, was told that my $6K fee includes lifetime membership. Then in 2014 I got the following email from Dan: "I love teaching and helping the Community and I wish I could provide this for free, however, in order to maintain and improve our Community a small annual administration fee of $300 will be implemented. In order to maintain your access to the live and archived content, please pay by, October 31, 2014 (use below link)." Which basically means that if you don't pay the fee, you will be banned from the community. Obviously the $6k fee that he collected from 2,000+ members over the years was not enough.. (that's $12M total fees, not including all the extras he charges for single courses and seminars). To me, it was breach of trust and breach of contract, and enough reason to leave the community. Kind of explains why the community went down the hill in the recent couple years..

I'm not personally familiar with other programs. I know that SMB has solid reputation. I would like to share my latest experience with Dan Sheridan. Yesterday I visited Sheridan online forum. To my surprise, the forum is very inactive, with about 20 new posts per month (to compare, we have more than 40-50 a day). I posted three comments which disagree with Dan's opinion. All three comments have been deleted. Dan then emailed me and asked to call him. I replied that I'm a bit busy (which I was - unlike Dan, I'm actively trading). Then I get the following email from Dan: " Kim, I asked you to call me to discuss this. Since you are to busy to talk, for now, I have taken you out of the community." I'm posting a screenshot of the email because some people might be skeptical that this is even possible. I paid $6,000 for a lifetime access, and now I'm banned because I was too busy to call him.. It turns out that this is typically what Dan does if he perceives someone as a competitor. He did it with Seth Freudberg, Mark Sebastian, Tony Sizemore, John Locke, Kerry Given (aka Dr. Duke), Casey Platt and I’m sure quite a few others. So I'm in a good company.. Regardless of my personal case (which is a good reason by itself not to join the program), I feel that at this point I cannot recommend Sheridan Mentoring anymore, for the following reasons: 1. It became too expensive, and covers only 12 months of membership, compared to previous lifetime membership. 2. One of the main benefits was the community, and the community is pretty much dead right now. 3. The courses became very repetitive and don't provide much value anymore. The only reason to join this program might be the mentoring. But paying $7,000 for 12 mentoring sessions sounds a bit expensive to me.