Community Investors Mutual

Community Investors Mutual

The little guy, the average Joe, can have a pretty hard time breaking into the HYIP arena. Most undergo the school of hard knocks – in this case hard knocks means realizing that 99% of the crud out there is, well, crud. When eventually the barrier is broken and you start to realize that there are some legitimate things out there three things become apparent – many are closed, many have exorbitantly high minimums (in comparison to your average HYIP – they still fare very well compared to traditional investments), and there's not that many of them.

That last point, the fact that there's not that many of them, becomes all the harder to bear if you weren't able to get in before many of them have either gone private, or their minimum has gone into the stratosphere.

That's why today I'm bringing y'all a new opportunity. Cos, you know, I can. Especially for one who is just starting out or one who doesn't have much startup capital, it looks to be an excellent opportunity.

It is of course an investment pool. Known as CIM, Community Investors Mutual. For now, I'm not going to be going to much into the semantics and details of how it all works. This is all available at the CIM Website. Instead I will go through the steps I've taken to determine that CIM is a great opportunity for the little guy, and take an honest look at the process. The following information is not engineered to snap up a bunch of investors with lots of flash and promise of cash, but it is designed to pique interest for those of you who want a great opportunity and may have missed out on many of the great opps of the past (Feederfund for example, and the programs within. FF will not be opening for new members last I heard, despite the frequently swirling rumours.)

And CIM has a very pleasing minimum - $100. A ton. If I were starting out, and didn't have much to go with, CIM and FX-Experts would be high on my list. No guarantees of course, but they both have their strong points and allow an investor to start off with a diversified diversified portfolio! And yes, I just said diversified twice. It was on purpose. C'mon, believe me.

The admin – who wishes to remain somewhat unidentified for the general public, at least at a personal level – contacted me via PM through a forum, having enjoyed the way I present myself via my blog and posts, and wished for me to check into CIM. At first I wasn't really interested either way, thinking it was just some other dodgy anonymous online pool.

Although I will not identify the admin here, as he has asked me not too, he truly wants CIM to be the “Community” Investors Mutual (which I will get to more towards the end of the article. Trust me, it'll make sense.) I know this may irk some people somewhat, but for veterans of the community or keen investors who sort through forum posts and the like – the information is there. Just so y'all know. (Clue: It's not me. Seriously, that's not a red herring either – it's definitely not me, though as I will explain later I have adopted some minor duties in relation to CIM.)

The admin will be appearing throughout the forums and the like as CIMutual.

What piqued my interest in CIM was the fact that the admin followed up very quickly, and of his own volition sent me scans of all his personal documents. And I mean all – bank statement, driver's licence, power bill, gas bill (we've just got one bill for power, no gas bills or anything where I live, so whaddya know, I learnt something new) and his passport. I got to it eventually, and checked the documents. All the information corresponds. Unbeknown to most, I have fair IT qualifications and knowledge, both on the technical and creative side (though you couldn't tell from my lazy blog!) So I whipped out a few image editing tools and gave each of the documents the once over. I will not lie to you and say I made the most in-depth analysis ever, but there were no strange artefacts, mismatched colours, fonts or the like that I could see. All the information matched up, and the different photographs were of course all of the same person.

I'll take a moment here to point out that the admin is well spoken, well written and personable without bluster. His motivation with this definitely seems to be to help the community out as well – he has done quite well in life (no, he's not Bill Gates) and has just seen an opportunity to help out the little guy with some community spirit – an admirable trait..

So, for something that is a pretty small scale project, and quite discreet, to fake five pieces of identification to this level he would have had to have gone the hard yards on the identification for quite a long time, which just seems frivolous and unnecessary. There are much more effective ways to scam people! All you need is a pretty template for five bucks and an E-Gold account and away you go... Which is definitely not what he has done here.

I received these documents on the 13^th of July, 2006.

The WHOIS checks out as well, as being owned by who the admin said it would be – a member of the family. The CIM admin stated in relation to this: “This is a temporary arrangement just to get the CIM project up and running without having to go through the entire process of registering a domain. Eventually I plan to establish a dedicated domain site for CIM.”

I was able to look up the admin's place of residence via a government based county assessors office, and indeed the identification all adds up. (So we all know where to go with burning pitchforks if he scams us, as I am entitled to reveal that information if such a thing were to happen. So he's putting himself out on the line, another positive I think which adds towards the legitimacy of it all.) (BTW, the pitchfork thing was a joke. Don't do it. It's not polite.)

At this point it also became apparent that CIM is pretty small scale, and is not registered as an offshore entity or anything of the like. “...my long term plans include setting up an offshore company”, was the admin's reply to this. He has been in communication with trusted members of the community like Rabbit (who is very busy with his own stuff at the moment!) to help guide him with this, but as I said at the moment CIM is basically the best kept little secret out there, and until the fundage grows somewhat, it's a moot point.

Hopefully Rabbit doesn't mind a mention (you can visit his blog here) and I was just using him to illustrate the admin has been in contact with other people then myself.

After some prodding from the admin as I was being lazy, I took the next step and requested screenshots of all the accounts through which the CIM pool was diversified, and asked to be able to log into an account to double-verify.

The admin promptly returned to me screenshots on the 18^th of July, along with a table of his books. I crosschecked all the screenshots, of which there were many, including histories for where it was applicable. Once again, the images seemed to check out, and if they were edited someone had a LOT of time on there hands.

It was time for the next step. I had asked for login details to one of the accounts, and the admin agreed, however first he wanted a little more information about myself. Which was cool, because so far he'd laid a lot on the table putting trust in me, and I was still the epitomy of anonymity. So I replied with some details.

So on the 20^th came an email with the holy grail – login credentials for one of the accounts. I requested the Feederfund login, as of course it has a lot of separate accounts within it. The question now is, would I steal the money and run, or report back to you loyal readers. The gripping conclusion in the next paragraph.

Of course, I did the honourable thing. What, you thought I was going to steal all of CIM's money? For shame. Everything checked out and lined up with the screenshots and numbers I had been provided. I asked him to change the password quickly after my login, to ensure continued security.

So, it was looking good. I'll take a little diversion to give some details and ask some questions some people might be thinking of.

The admin is “happily married with three grown children and two grandchildren. I have an accounting degree and am still currently working as the accountant and finance officer of a company... ...My experience in investments goes back some... ...years when in my early twenties I started dabbling in the stock markets. I eventually got very involved with trading in the stock market and later on moved on to commodities trading and the commodity futures market. I then invested heavily in mutual funds and this is how I learned a lot about the operations of mutual funds which is now serving me a lot of good in the way I have structured CIM. If you have any knowledge or some knowledge of how mutual funds operate, you will appreciate that CIM functions in exactly the same way. From mutual funds I moved on to stock options trading which I find to be quite a lucrative way of earning better returns than mutual funds and even safer than mutual funds. Contrary to what many believe, stock options can be a very safe method of investment depending on one’s trading methods and strategy. It can also be very risky for the aggressive traders.”

That was all from the admin himself, which I find interesting and relevant information (especially in the way he has structured CIM.). He stumbled into HYIPs a year ago now and has created CIM to help the little guy avoid the riff raff.

Contingency plans and the like have been considered. If anything is to happen to the admin, there is a person in place that he knows personally to liquidate all funds. “He is to liquidate all the holdings of the club and disburse all the monies to all the active members at the current MPU price at the time the club is closed. I have instructed him to pay everybody his due and I (or my heirs) should be paid last after all the club’s obligations have been satisfied.”

It might be worth noting at this point that the admin himself currently holds the largest amount of MPUs, following through on the community structure, and he is then of course more 'invested' in making the fund thrive. Pardon the pun.

I am in conversation with the admin as being a backup to the liquidator, in case anything should go wrong. I personally will not be considered the liquidator, but should have the details needed to enact such a secondary contingency plan.

Which brings us to my current relationship to CIM. Being in a position of knowledge about CIM and the inner workings, to an extent, and having been in thorough conversation with the admin, I have been 'appointed' some minor positions and duties in relation to the club.

I have many points of contact (phone numbers, email addresses, etc.) with the admin, as well as his address and much more above and beyond that. This is why I have taken the mantle of co-liquidator, or whatever you want to call it, in an extreme emergency. Although I will not be first in line, I will be able to follow up anything we need to know, and even enact disbursement of funds in the one in infinite-trillion chances that was necessary and the main liquidator was unable to complete such an act.

I have also been appointed 'communicator for the club.' Other people will also be communicating on behalf of the club, keeping with the communal nature of it all (this is good communal, not hippy-communal style stuff by the way.) I will not be going extreme on this duty and answering every email or query every ten seconds, but if you have a query and don't have another way of getting an answer, you can always throw me an email or ask me in the forums. I should be able to get you a direct pipeline to the man in charge, as well as a prompt answer.

This brings me to a little bit of commentary – Global Mutual and NES are in constant state of flux, and might pay us something. One day. The problem is that Gordon is a very bad communicator and keeps telling us all it is a co-op and for us to help him out yet he doesn't really seem to understand what this means.

The admin of CIM however has actively sought to create a community based mutual fund that you can help out with if you want. I offered to help out Gordon time after time and he'd say yes but not really understand or he'd answer a completely irrelevant question. With the right hands on deck and better communication and connection with his investors, Global Mutual could be swimming along a lot better right now.

CIM seems to understand this. I know these comparisons aren't exact but there are similarities. Requests are understood, and his finger is on the pulse of the community.

Now would be a good opportunity to disclose that the admin has issued me with 16 MPUs (the minimum basically) out of his own holdings. This will allow me to keep an eye on how the club actually works in action, rather than just be on the outside looking in. This was all done in the community spirit (the units coming from his own for example) as I most likely would not have invested, as I am in most of the programs already and was fortunate enough to be able to get into them when the opportunity arose.

By the way, this page has a list of funds. Basically, the CIM portfolio consists of various investments in these programs. JoyFund is the newest addition, via Feederfund, and is the smallest as of now – just to give y'all a 'newsworthy tidbit.'

I can make no guarantees, and if you're a vet and have a nice stash in most of these programs, there's not much point in being in CIM. However, it might still be worth putting a ton in. (A ton is a hundred bucks for those of you who are wondering what the hell I'm talking about.)

The only problem with the fund is trusting the admin. He is doing what he is saying he is doing, as far as I can tell, and I have all his details. I see no need or point for him to be using this as an extremely elaborate ruse.

“For right now the only guarantee I can offer the members is my good name, my experience, and the fact that you have all private and personal information about me. I believe this is more than what many funds out there are offering their members. As you well know, many of what we consider legitimate funds are one man operations just like me. Yet investors have put their trust on these programs only because they have apparently satisfied the due diligence done by some known personalities in the HYIP field. As I said above I am not opposed to have you or anyone act as a watchdog over CIM.”

Rating: 7.5/10.

Verdict: It is due to the fact that some of the vets might already be in these funds, and the fact that I can make no guarantees, that I award CIM a very healthy score, though not a perfect one of course. Add an extra point in six months when CIM has gained some community trust. It is the perfect entry point for the 'little guy' and I believe a great opportunity for us all.

The main problem I can see is with many members not personally being allowed to know the admin's details. Unfortunately I have no answer to this, and for now the admin wants his identity as CIM admin separate to anything else.

It's great to see something like this which encourages community. Anyone can take a part in the structure if they are determined and can prove themselves, and the admin himself will only be getting his main renumeration from his own investment in MPUs.

Community Investors Mutual