Before you buy...
My husband and I spent years building a nest egg in preparation for our retirement. When I saw Ashley's YouTube channel, I thought this could be a great way to make income. In her videos she features members' posts showing profits and talking about how much fun they're having, and she seems so wholesome and down to earth, puppies running around in the background. I believed I'd found a real place to learn options the right way. So I bought her Boot Camp and joined the Inner Circle. If you're like I am — someone who works hard, saves hard, and just wanted our portfolio to grow faster — here's what it's actually like inside. It is not a calm, rules-based education. It runs on excitement, not logic. There's no real risk management — no clear rules for exiting a losing trade, no position sizing, no honest tracking of how anyone does over time. And the losses are there — members post them. Ashley just doesn't feature them. The wins get the screenshots and the videos; the losses stay buried in the chat, and in that kind of environment, losing is common. The Boot Camp is sold as the thing that will increase your wins — Ashley says most people make back the cost in their first month after graduating. But it doesn't teach you to manage risk. It leans into the riskiest corners of options. As a long-term investor, I didn't know what a trade plan was, or that professional options traders follow strict entry and exit rules. So I did what everyone in the group does — I copied Ashley's trades. Copy trading is the whole foundation of the Discord. I told myself I needed to earn back what I'd spent, and when I lost money, I tried to dig out by copying more of Ashley's and the coaches' trades. It only got worse. When someone only ever shows you their wins, it's easy to believe them. Here's what makes copy trading so dangerous: the trades come at you from everywhere — Ashley, her coaches (who all learned from her course), and members in the strategy rooms. You have no idea how skilled any of them are, and since Ashley isn't honest about her own numbers, you can't judge hers either. You don't know how risky a trade is, or whether the person posting it can absorb a loss you can't. Ashley brags about keeping millions in "dry powder" as her safety net — but a new trader with a small account doesn't have millions to fall back on, and that difference is never made clear. Her trademark is "No Trader Left Behind," but it's a handful of people fielding questions for what she claims are thousands of members, on high-risk trades, with no consistent risk framework behind the answers. On the days the market drops hard, the forum fills with panic, and the guidance is often just "if it's too much for you, get out of the trade." That isn't risk management, and advice like it hurt my accounts. The turning point was the SpaceX video. I realized Ashley isn't only cherry-picking trades to get people to sign up — she manipulated the trade data in that video to make a full year of trading look like a single month. The entry dates were cut off, so trades held up to a year looked brand new. When I saw that, I understood the scope of what I'd fallen for. These trades are far riskier than a beginner realizes. Even one of Ashley's own coaches warned everyone about the very SpaceX trades being promoted — that the market makers "purposefully lure you in with attractive premium" and then "your strike has been breached in no time." When one of her own coaches says how dangerous these trades are, it isn't just me being negative. The danger is real and known — it just doesn't make it into the YouTube videos. What turned things around for me was getting independent analysis. Before you buy, watch Ashley's YouTube trades — and don't take her numbers at face value. What helped me was paying a little each month for Claude (an AI from Anthropic) and having it walk me through each trade against my own capital, my timeline, and our goals, instead of copying it because the room was excited. It cost very little for an enormous payoff in understanding. For us, options were just complicating things. I'm writing this for the person I was — a long-term investor following the FIRE movement. If you've worked and saved for this money, protect it. Learn how options really work, and how risky they are, from neutral sources before you pay Ashley anything. After more than a year of feeling defeated, I went back to the index investing that built our nest egg, and I finally feel peace. If this saves even one person the heartache I've been through, it was worth writing.