What the record shows — and what it teaches.
Trading Academy operates from Irvine, California, teaching stock-led investing education; its member portal still lives at myota.tradingacademy.com and its social accounts still carry the Online Trading Academy name. Its homepage cites 4.72/5 from more than 223,000 reviews, a patented CliK platform, and 85,000+ students served since 1997. It is, by scale, one of the largest trading educators in the world — and it is a US, stocks-focused product with no UK forex qualification, so on keywords it is barely our competitor at all.
The reason this page exists is the public record. In February 2020 the FTC sued OTA, alleging it used false or unfounded earnings claims to sell programs costing up to $50,000, and that instructors were held out as successful traders when the company’s own data showed most purchasers made little or nothing. The September 2020 settlement required debt forgiveness for thousands of customers, payments of $5–9.1 million by the founder and others, and banned contract terms that had barred customers from posting reviews. Under the order, earnings claims now require written substantiation available on request. We include this not to sneer — OTA settled, has operated since, and remains a large business — but because it is the single clearest lesson in this industry: testimonials are not evidence; regulators eventually check. It is also why every page of our own results archive carries the caveat that results are member-reported and most retail traders lose money.