Tim Grittani: The $1,500 to $13M+ Trader Whose Every Move Is Public

Most retail traders won't show you a single broker statement. Tim Grittani has shown you every trade he's made for over a decade — and the public ledger on Profit.ly stretches past $13.5 million in cumulative profits, starting from a $1,500 deposit. That kind of documentation almost doesn't exist anywhere else in retail trading.

Tim Grittani Penny stock day trader · #1 ranked Profit.ly trader · Author of Trading Tickers Photo: timothysykes.com

The Snapshot

In a category overflowing with self-published screenshots and unverifiable claims, Tim Grittani is the rarest thing retail trading produces: a fully documented track record. Every trade he's taken since joining Profit.ly is broker-verified, timestamped, and visible to anyone with an internet connection. The cumulative profit on that ledger has crossed $13.5 million, starting from a $1,500 initial deposit, and the entire journey has been public — including the early years when he was losing money. He's the #1 ranked trader on Profit.ly under the username kroyrunner, and he's the closest thing the penny stock world has to an undisputed champion. Trading Reviewers

Grittani is a graduate of Tim Sykes's Pennystocking Silver program — he joined in 2011 — and has openly credited Sykes with the foundational education that allowed him to develop his own edge. He's since surpassed Sykes in cumulative trading profits, which Sykes himself has publicly acknowledged. His DVD course Trading Tickers is one of the most widely respected pieces of penny stock education ever produced, and he's been featured by CNN Money, Fox News, CNBC, and most major financial media outlets that cover the retail trading space. For broader context on how he fits into the lineage of retail day traders we've profiled, his name appears on essentially every credible list. Timothy Sykes

The Losing Years (2011)

The thing most "$1,500 to millions" articles skip is that for the first nine months of Grittani's trading career, he was a losing trader. He started in 2011 with that $1,500 brokerage deposit and immediately did what most retail beginners do — took too many trades, sized too aggressively, fell in love with stocks that were already overextended, and watched his account balance grind lower over months. He's been transparent in interviews and in his own educational content that this period was the foundation of everything that came later, not because he discovered a magic setup but because he was forced to keep granular records of why each trade failed. Timothy Sykes

The discipline that defines Grittani as a trader emerged here. He kept an Excel spreadsheet of every trade — entry, exit, position size, stop, the reasoning behind the setup, and the post-mortem reasoning behind why it worked or didn't. That spreadsheet became the database he later mined to find his actual edge. The lesson is unglamorous and almost no beginner takes it seriously: the trade journal is the strategy, not a supplement to it.

The 2012 Breakthrough

In early 2012, after roughly a year of grinding through small losses and recording everything, Grittani identified the specific patterns and stock types where his win rate and risk-reward were genuinely favorable. His account began to grow consistently. By the end of 2012 he'd crossed his first $100,000 in profits. By 2013 he'd crossed $1 million, which is the milestone that triggered the CNN Money feature that made him a known name in retail trading. From that point forward, the growth compounded — $2.7 million by the time he released the first Trading Tickers DVD in 2015, $10 million by around 2018, and over $13.5 million in cumulative Profit.ly-verified profits in the years since. Timothy Sykes

The Long & Short Strategy

Grittani is meaningfully more versatile than most penny stock traders — he trades both long and short, in both listed and OTC stocks, across multiple time horizons within the day. His core categories of setups break into a handful of repeatable structures, and his framework is publicly documented in Trading Tickers. Briefly: he hunts low-float momentum stocks with strong news catalysts, identifies whether the broader pattern favors a long or short bias, defines a clear risk point at a chart-pattern failure level, and sizes the position relative to that risk. The setups themselves are not proprietary — they're variations on patterns that have been documented in trading literature for decades. What's distinctive is Grittani's filter for which stocks to apply them to and his discipline around when not to trade at all. Worthpoint

Two specific things separate Grittani's execution from the average penny stock trader. The first is patience around missed breakouts — he's emphasized in interviews and in his DVD that one of the most common beginner errors is chasing a breakout that you missed by 30 seconds. His rule is simple: if you weren't in the first move, you wait for the secondary setup. The second is identification of major resistance levels that have held for two or more days, which he uses both as short entries (rejection plays) and as zones to avoid on the long side. These are not flashy insights; they are mechanical filters that most retail traders ignore. Trading Reviewers

The CNN Money Moment

In December 2013, CNN Money published a feature on Grittani titled around the framing of a young trader who had turned $1,500 into more than $1 million in three years. The piece was significant because it was one of the first instances of a major financial publication actually verifying a retail trader's results — they reviewed his broker statements, confirmed the numbers, and reported them as fact rather than as a marketing claim. The article opened doors to Fox News, CNBC, and a cascade of trading podcast appearances that established Grittani as the most-credentialed young retail trader in the country. World Top Investors

Trading Tickers: The DVD That Set the Standard

Released in 2015, Trading Tickers is the closest thing penny stock day trading has to a canonical text. It's a 16+ hour DVD-format video course that walks through Grittani's entire process — from market preparation through scanning, entry rules, exit rules, position sizing, journaling, and the psychology of holding through both winning and losing streaks. The DVD has chapters that cover the basics (reading a stock quote, market hours, order types) and chapters that go deep into specific setups (overhead resistance shorts, parabolic exhaustion plays, dip buys after morning panics). It's been called one of the highest-rated stock trading courses in the penny stock community, and the case for that is straightforward: nearly every successful penny stock trader who came up in the mid-2010s onward cites it as essential study material. Worthpoint

In 2022, Grittani released Trading Tickers 2, an update covering how the market had changed after the 2020–2021 retail mania, the rise of new brokerage platforms, the proliferation of low-float SPAC tickers, and the shifts in pre-market volume dynamics. The sequel is less a replacement than a supplement — the original DVD still holds up because the underlying patterns it teaches are essentially structural to penny stock markets and haven't fundamentally changed. Timothy Sykes

The Verified Profit Curve

The single most credible thing about Grittani is also the easiest to verify: his Profit.ly account is public, the trades are broker-linked, and the cumulative curve is plotted in real time. Below is an approximation of the milestone progression based on widely reported figures from his Profit.ly history and published interviews.

What Changed After 2020

The 2020–2021 retail mania changed the structure of the penny stock market in ways that affected Grittani's edge — and how he's responded is a useful study in how serious traders adapt rather than ride a fading regime. The combination of zero-commission brokerages, stimulus checks, social-media coordinated buying, and the SPAC bubble produced a volume environment in low-float stocks that Grittani has said was the most lucrative period of his career. Then 2022 brought rising rates, the IPO/SPAC freeze, and a sharp contraction in retail volume across the small-cap space. Timothy Sykes

Grittani has been candid that profitability in this newer environment requires more patience — fewer setups, longer waits between them, smaller position sizes when the available pool of stocks isn't volatile enough. He's described his post-2022 trading as a more selective version of the same playbook rather than a new strategy, which is consistent with how most long-term retail edges actually evolve. The patterns don't disappear; they just appear less often.

What Traders Can Actually Learn From This

Three lessons from Grittani's career are worth absorbing whether or not you have any interest in trading penny stocks. The first is journaling. The single most consistent thing Grittani has said in interviews, in his DVD, and in his blog posts is that the Excel spreadsheet he kept from day one was the foundation of everything that followed. Most retail traders skip the journal because it's tedious and forces uncomfortable self-honesty. Grittani's track record exists because he didn't skip it.

The second is patience around missed setups. The instinct after missing a trade is to chase, which is how most blowups happen. Grittani's discipline of waiting for the secondary setup — and being willing to take zero trades for an entire session — is mechanically why his win rate stays high even when the broader market is quieter. Sitting out is a skill, not a failure.

The third is the value of public verification. Grittani didn't have to link his accounts to Profit.ly. He chose to, and it's why his name carries weight in a category where most people's claims evaporate the moment anyone asks for a statement. If you're learning from someone in this space, ask for the broker-linked record. If they don't have one, you're learning from a story, not a track record. For broader perspective on how verification standards separate real traders from marketing, see our trading education resources.

Frequently Asked Questions

Disclosure: This article is editorial and contains no affiliate links. Trading involves substantial risk of loss. Grittani's verified Profit.ly track record is publicly accessible, but his stated results are atypical, and Profit.ly itself documents that the median user does not approach his level of profitability.