Fraudulent marketing and customers misinformation
I have attended the webinar by Altos Trading company (incorporated in Boise, Idaho) and have purchased Zillion dashboard to try it out, which has been marketed as a breakthrough development in trading solutions.
For what I have found upon exploring the possibilities of the dashboard and included trading indicators, this boils down into the malicios practice of misinforming customers and not fully disclosing the functionality of the product and its limitations. The dashboard has been advertised as a tool which is suitable for both long term and intraday trading, however it was found by me soon afterwards that the market data which the dashboard uses is not real-time but is delayed 15 minutes. This has not been explicitly told or shown during the webinar, as the presentation was held after market closed this day. In live version the notification of 15 minutes delay in the data is shown on the chart, whereas of course it was not there during the presentation.
This makes the dashboard unusable for any offered timeframe 1 hour and shorter, because the indicator signals are delayed 15 minutes, as well as the chart itself is drawn with the same delay. So far, any metrics regarding the performance and profit factors provided by it are not relevant on these timeframes and cannot be relied upon.
Needless to say, this limitation is not described at all in the provided documentation (which is by all means pretty poor). Most sections of the documentation on the website also appeared to be just Wordpress stubs filled with “Lorem ipsum”.
During further mail exchange after my initial request the company representative kept asking me why exactly I wanted a refund, if I have my own trading tools comparable to Zillion dashboard, and kept mentioning more than once that they ‘don’t usually have refund requests’ so my request ‘was sent to thorough review’, and also telling that there is no refund mention on the checkout page.
Also, in the course of mail exchange with support it was discovered that live data can actually be incorporated in the dashboard by means of integrating Tradier, ThinkOrSwim or TradeStation brokers. However, once again, never a necessity of having an account with these brokers has been explained in the documentation and during the webinar, not mentioning that it is not necessary true that a dashboard user will ever have an account with any of these three brokers. I am not able to confirm this as I am not a user of any of the three. And I am specifically emphasizing that ‘live market data’ has NOT been mentioned AT ALL during the presentation (I have checked the full transcript of recodred video for this).
At the time of writing (Wednesday) since my first refund request on Friday previous week and numerous reminders to support I only got an answer that they are able to issue partial refund (for 1 year subscruption) which is ‘to be processed in a few business days’ but not full refund (including lifetime membership which I have cancelled whatsoever), even though I have explained my concerns and reasons for the refund to a support representative during our mail exchange. The reason indicated for declining full refund was only a written statement on the website: “(Lifetime licenses are non-refundable)”, which is, in general, has no legal force, as I never received any invoice or receipt after my purchase, though I explicitly requested it in the mail.
I believe this is completely unfair and malicious practice of misinforming the customers offering a product while keeping customers’ eyes off its critical limitations by all means. Even the dashboard itself also has a specific visual layout where the bottom of the chart with the timescale is always below the lower bottom of the browser window at ALL screen resolutions, which seems to me like yet another attempt to hide the obvious limitation and chart data delay, so some users may only find this out much later and purely by chance.
Last important thing to mention, their product is not completely worthless. Probably one can use it for stock screening, managing portfolios or make longer term trading decisions, though certainly not for the price offered. But the company’s attitude towards customers and deliberately misinforming them completely devalues this.
By all means you should stay away from Altos Trading and its Zillion dashboard product for the reason it is mostly maliciously marketed and misleads the customers.
UPDATE as of 2023-10-26 I have received refund for 1 year subscription purchase but not the remaining part for lifetime subscription, which they claim to be non-refundable because of T&C.
UPDATE 2024-02-01 I had a chargeback claim resolved in my favor by my bank so now I got a full refund including the lifetime subscription part.