The Trading Post: Wendy Kirkland Trading Review: I Looked Inside the Strategy So You Don’t Have To (Backtested over 100 trades)

Before you consider purchasing any of her products or services, I would highly recommend that you read my review below.

I want to start by pointing out that she was barred by the SEC in 2020. Here is an excerpt from the PDF, which you can find here:

False and Misleading Representations Regarding Trade Signal Services

Kirkland stopped trading options in or around 2012 and never made millions through options trading.

“Kirkland be, and hereby is:
barred from association with any broker, dealer, investment adviser, municipal securities dealer, municipal advisor, transfer agent, or nationally recognized statistical rating organization; and
prohibited from serving or acting as an employee, officer, director, member of an advisory board, investment adviser, or depositor of, or principal underwriter for, a registered investment company, or an affiliated person of such investment adviser, depositor, or principal underwriter.”

My experience with her systems

When reviewing any courses, books, setups, or software, I am extremely skeptical of sellers who refuse to provide detailed backtests or who are vague about any part of their methodology.

I first came across Wendy Kirkland’s systems a few years ago on YouTube around 2018. I watched several of her videos, and at the time she appeared to be selling two systems. I made several attempts to contact their support and never got a response back about backtst data she offered to show for her trading but was never provided.

In any event I decide to find her trading setup and run some backtests of her trading setups myself. I watched 4 or 5 videos which gave small clues to piece it all together although they were a little confusing as she kept giving slighlty different versions of her setup. In one video she says to use the ADX with the DI and provides specific settings (see notes). In another video, however, she gives different settings and says to use the standard ADX settings without the DI.

1) CCI Sharkfin System

The first system is based on signals from the CCI indicator (which she calls the “Sharkfin” system) and focuses on identifying overbought and oversold conditions.

2) Merit Paycheck Service (P3 System)

The second is the Merit Paycheck service, which uses her P3 system. This system combines a PPO or MACD indicator with two ADX indicators and again attempts to take trades based on overbought and oversold conditions.

3)Her current system that she is pedallign is call the DNA(Direct Next Action) system. Most of her videos seem to be on the Select Market Services channel. The date of the videos on YT is in 2026 so she is still selling courses and services. I have no experience with this but it loks to be based on another new indicator. But based on all those horribly underperforming ones, and blatant mistating results IDK how you could possibly trust her at this point. Seems like just another scam.

My backtest Results

In her videos she states multiple times that she prefers to use both of these systems on the QQQ daily chart. She says you can use it on other stocks and time frames but mainly on this so I'll show you the real results of a backtest I just did yesterday using the exact same rules she uses on the QQQ. She never gives the exact rules for getting stopped out or taking profit so i made some assumptions and backtested various ways of doing so.

1)CCI system

2)P3 System

What Others Are Saying

Many reviews on Trustpilot where the majority are negative https://ca.trustpilot.com/review/www.tradewins.com
Forum posts on Stockgumshoe where the majority are negative.The hefty $1,997 price tag, combined with the poor performance reported by users, appears to be a common complaint.
https://www.stockgumshoe.com/2014/01/microblog-merit-paycheck-trading-the-qqqs-from-wendy-kirkland/

Another forum where the respondents said the figures she gave to sell her courses were hypothetical and not real https://nexusfi.com/trading-reviews-vendors/28117-past-experience-wendy-kirkland-4.html
In 2020 she was indicted by the SEC. She and her two business partners were each fined $40,000 and banned from selling their investment services in the future.https://www.sec.gov/files/litigation/admin/2020/34-88797.pdf