Magic Vault - Trading verified

by Tony Clifton [Your Program In Focus]

It has been a long time without a program "in focus". To be honest I got pissed off to review programs which live shorter than the time I've used to investigate them. Hopefully this time will be different. There are some indications for that.

The Basics

Magic Vault is a Forex based program offering 2 different plans:

• 0.2% daily for 31 days, with minimum investment only $5 and maximum $250


• 12% monthly for one month, with minimum investment $50 and maximum $20,000

The program is very fresh, started this month. The ROI is relatively low and the investment term is only one month - after that the principal is being returned to you.

There is referral commission, but it is very little - only 0.1% and you'll get it only if you refer more than 30 active members.

Trading Audit

The first and very positive thing I have to tell you is that I was allowed to log in to the live trading account at North Finance. As you see from the screenshots (click on them to enlarge), the account starts with a deposit of $300 on March, 7th and has value of $593 on March, 20th. I don't feel competent enough to comment on the trading style, but if you are a trader, please check the screenshots and share your opinion with us (use the comment link).



I noticed of course that the balance is way too small to talk about serious investing. Here is Pedro's (who is one of the admins) response:

"The Forex account which I gave you access to is the one where members' funds are going to be placed. In fact, it has been the first NorthFinance account that I created, and we chose to use it because it offers the possibility of depositing and withdrawing money using e-gold.
I suppose it is quite obvious that the whole project involves much more than $300.00 USD. We have our money distributed among three brokerage agencies (NorthFinance, Forex.com and Alpari)."

Other Due Diligence

We all know that doing real trading is not enough to create a good investment program. It requires also managers whom you can trust. So I wanted to know something about the people behind the program. Pedro provided me with a scan of his personal ID. He is Portuguese, so I was able only to verify that he has really shown me a real card in the format they currently use in Portugal.

Here is also what Pedro added about the management team:

"Magic-Vault has got two administrators and both of them are Portuguese men. I am full responsible for the public relations. I enclose to this message an image of my identity card (both sides), which will give you all the factual details you may need to know about me. I am still young, but I have been working as an investor (Forex, NASDAQ and stocks in general) for the last couple of years with success. At this moment, I consider myself someone with a rich life experience and a very good financial culture. My partner is older than me and he is a true financial expert. He has survived to some big stock market crashes (ex.: 9/11) and he manages to get astonishing profits in national (Portuguese) and international financial markets. I believe you would simply love to have a chat with him, because he is a very interesting and intelligent person. However, he is a very reserved person and he wants his identity to be kept confidential and away from websites; he does not want to talk with anyone besides me, because conversations are keen to put him under great stress and would probably affect his performance in a very negative way."

The Website

There are few potential problems I see with their site. It's hosted on US shared server and since USA hosting does not allow HYIPs, the pages can be taken down at any time. The domain name is bought from the horrible providers RegisterFly which means the domain may get inaccessible at any time too. (Like it happened with Web-life.org forum for a week).

These issues are not very big, because they can just move the site somewhere. But of course such problems can cause slight negative vibes.

General Impressions

I like a lot the way Pedro communicates and that he was ready to provide access to the trading accounts. He was also willing to give me his ID card (of course I won't publish that screenshot) and answer all my questions.

One of the thing which worried me most was the very low minimum for investing - just $5. Here is how Pedro answered my concerns:

"In fact, the minimum amount to participate has been the topic of a long (but healthy) discussion between me and the other administrator. He did not want to accept members who would not spend more than $1,000.00 USD. I found that value too high, because it would probably scare potential new users (the rate of scams appearing - and disappearing - per day is getting so high that people will inevitably stop trusting everything they read). So, we decided to create two plans - the daily plan, which stands for "test spends", and the monthly plan, which stands for higher deposits.
However, it is important that you know that we would keep doing our work even if we had no deposits at all, because we have our own money in the accounts. This means that it would always be "worth the hassle". :)"

We have seen all kind of HYIP failures, so i can't tell you "go invest, this is the best" ;) But for me looks like these guys can trade very well and can bring nice profits. Only time will tell if this will really happen.

Update: Please read the article on eMoneyTalk - Magic-Vault: Dissapointed, Interview asked - you'll find that Pedro seems to be banned from MMG for using multiple usernames. Money is also raising a good question why they claim to use 3 brokers if only NorthFinance works with e-gold. Follow both HYWD and eMoneyTalk for further updates on this matter.

Published at Mar, 26 '07 ; read 3329 times;

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User comments:

clifton at Mar, 28 '07 11:55
Pedro has sent me an email trying to clarify some of the issues. I am publishing his reply here: "I am writing to you because a part of my last message (answering your question about the amount of money involved in the project) is being misunderstood and causing a great polemic. The statement I am talking about is: "I suppose it is quite obvious that the whole project involves much more than $300.00 USD. We have our money distributed among three brokerage agencies (NorthFinance, Forex.com and Alpari)." In fact, we have chosen NorthFinance to deposit our members' funds, because it supports the e-gold payment system. We chose to accept e-gold in our website because it is the most widely used e-currency on the Internet. We have also considered the possibility of accepting credit card transfers, but the fees applied would be much bigger and it would not be a payment system so versatile and easy to use. When I referred that "our money is distributed among three brokerage agencies", I was talking about my money and the other administrator's money, and not about Magic-Vault members' money [I believe this is the most important point to retain]. Members' money will (logically) be stored in NorthFinance. Alpari and Forex.com have some of the administrator's funds, because they used to be our preferred forex trading brokerage agencies."
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clifton at Mar, 30 '07 02:58
Magic-Vault have changed their registrar: "This is just a (very) quick message to let you know that the registrar of magic-vault.com has already been successfully changed (please see http://www.whois.net/whois_new.cgi?d=magic-vault&t... for confirmation). I did not experience any downtime, and I hope that anyone did."
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clifton at Apr, 03 '07 03:01
New update: "As you can check by visiting our website (http://www.magic-vault.com) our script has been hacked. We have not lost any funds with this issue, but the website will not be available very soon, because we will have to wait for the ABCHyip programmers to fix the problem or hire a new script license from a different programmer (do you know of a good and safe one?). However, there will not be any problems (at all!) with our program. We are still generating profits from our members' funds, with Forex results posted in our official forum (URL: http://www.magic-vault.com/forum) and audited by yourself. Our official forum is going to be our headquarters. Withdrawal requests can be made by posting in the section "Withdrawals" in our forum (we have just created it) or by sending a PM to "Magic-Vault" forum users. New members should send their e-gold account number, name, date of birth, country and desired username to support@magic-vault.com. After the registration has been accepted, deposits can be made by sending funds directly to our e-gold account (number 4032790) with the investment plan identified in the "Memo" field."
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Pedro (Administrator of Magic-Vault) at Apr, 09 '07 08:03
Quick update about Magic-Vault: 1) For safety reasons, we have decided not to have a script in our website anymore. The administrators of Magic-Vault will manage all the information offline, so that the risk of our members’ information being stolen is as small as possible. Our website (http://www.magic-vault.com) and our terms and conditions (http://www.magic-vault.com/terms.php) have been changed accordingly. 2) «The document located at was checked and found to be valid HTML 4.0 Transitional. This means that the resource in question identified itself as “HTML 4.0 Transitional” and that we successfully performed a formal validation using an SGML or XML Parser (depending on the markup language used).» [source: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww... The new and simple structure of our website allowed us to easily change it to be fully compliant to meet the requirements of W3C. 3) As you can find stated in our website (http://www.magic-vault.com), we are still waiting for being interviewed by Mr Carlos Aldana, the administrator of eTalkMoney.
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clifton at Apr, 09 '07 09:43
Thanks for the update, Pedro. (I see we have some issues with formatting the comments, will be fixed shortly)
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Pedro (Administrator of Magic-Vault) at Apr, 14 '07 03:28
On behalf of Magic-Vault administration team, I have just answered a group of 18 questions asked by Mr Carlos Aldana, the manager of eTalkMoney. The whole interview can be read in PDF (http://www.magic-vault.com/eTalkMoney_Interview.p... or in eTalkMoney website (http://www.etalkmoney.com/interviews/magic-vault-... It is also posted in eTalkMoney forum (http://www.etalkmoney.net/index.php?showtopic=302... but it requires registration for people to read it.
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archsage at May, 11 '07 03:28
Hi clifton. Thanks for the review. Since you have audited their trading account, I am just curious why you have not included them in your portfolio if they passed your check? Anything we should know about?
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clifton at May, 11 '07 05:12
Hi Archsage, All I need is a bit longer performance record, as it is not a fast money maker. I heard from Pedro recently and he said I'll be able to perform another audit soon
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clifton at Jul, 26 '07 03:31
WARNING: After the initial trading verification at the very beginning of the program I have not given the change to look at the trading again as promissed. I've contacted Pedro asking about another audit, but have not received responce.
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