Sykes graduated from Tulane University in 2003 with a bachelor's degree in philosophy and a minor in business. While at Tulane, Sykes routinely cut class to day trade. In 2003, during his senior year, he founded Cilantro Fund Management, a short bias hedge fund, using $1 million mostly from his friends and family. In 2006, Sykes was included on Trader Monthly's "30 Under 30" list of up-and-coming traders in the market, a selection which editor Randall Lane later called "our worst pick" among the chosen honorees. Sykes claimed that the Cilantro Fund was "the number one long-short microstock hedge fund in the country, according to Barclays"; Lane later discovered that the rating came from "the Barclay Group," a small research company based in Fairfield, Iowa, and not the well-known Barclay's British bank. In 2008 Sykes decided to recreate his initial investing success by again starting with $12,415. He named the attempt Transparent Investment Management. Sykes self-published An American Hedge Fund: How I Made $2 Million as a Stock Operator & Created a Hedge Fund in 2007. The book documented Sykes' experiences from day-trading in college to becoming a wealthy hedge fund manager. In 2012, Sykes created "Miss Penny Stock," a financial beauty pageant among the female representatives for his brand and company.
Teaching and other projects
Sykes currently works as a financial activist and educator. In 2007, Sykes launched TimothySykes.com. It serves as its own personal blog and a website dedicated to teaching penny stock trading. In 2009, Sykes launched Investimonials.com, a website devoted to collecting user reviews of financial services, videos, and books, as well as financial brokers. Sykes co-founded Profit.ly in 2011, a social service with about 20,000 users that provides stock trade information online. Sykes said the service serves two purposes: "creating public track records for gurus, newsletter writers and students everyone to learn from both the wins and losses of other traders to benefit the entire industry." Sykes founded the Timothy Sykes Foundation, which has raised $600,000 and has partnered with Make-a-Wish Foundation and the Boys and Girls Club. In February 2017, Sykes donated $1 million to Pencils of Promise to help build 20 new primary schools across Ghana, Guatemala and Laos, to be completed between 2017 and 2018. Sykes is one of the founders of Karmagawa, a charity dedicated to helping animals, preserving natural resources, and assisting those in need around the world. In 2019, Karmagawa worked with documentarian Amir Zakeri to create a documentary called "50 Minutes to Save the World," which documents the state of the coral reef.
Controversy
Sykes has publicly criticized various businesses and celebrities, including Shaquille O'Neal and Justin Bieber, for promoting "pump and dump" schemes, in which an investor purchases stock, hypes others into buying that stock to inflate its price, then sells the shares at a higher price and shorts the profit from the resulting decline.
