Alson Chew's Price Action Manipulation (PAM)
This is a review of Piranha Profits: Alson Chew’s Price Action Manipulation (PAM) course and his PAM Trader Playbook (PTP). This review is based on my own experience, as well as private conversations with disappointed ex-students. What Alson Teaches Alson’s trading strategy is based on anticipating market moves and entering trades before traditional indicators suggest doing so. He looks at candle patterns on 2D, weekly, or monthly charts, with entry triggers based on the size and shape of candles. Some sub-strategies are fairly obscure—for example, setups that depend on the relationship between small and large bars over a sequence of five candles. These methods may have worked for him, but for most retail traders, the execution, and discipline required are difficult to replicate. The Offerings Alson sells: 1. PAM Course – the standard training. 2. XSPY – essentially PAM plus some monthly Zoom calls. 3. PTP Playbook – a subscription that shows when he enters trades (marketed as educational, but in practice functions like an alert service). Win Rate Based on my experience and PP Discord sources: Win rate is typically 30–42% (this is the PTP portfolio performance). Yes, you read that right. That means 6–7 trades out of 10 are losing trades. The PP website states 60% winning chance. Are they lying? I hope not, but it is vastly different from what my peers and I experienced. I did notice, though, that Alson has a good and strict money management approach using ATR indicators. Drawdowns and Captial with PTP This is where my biggest criticism lies: Students are not really told about the steep portfolio drawdowns this strategy can entail. Unexperienced retail traders (who else would take this course?) don’t typically have the stomach to deal with 20-30% drawdowns while hoping that a few winners will bail them out. I have chatted with people who lost 10 consecutive PTP trades, for example. Many setups run on weekly or even monthly candles, which means capital is stuck in trades for months as well. For people with a small account it is not feasible and it is not how the PTP is marketed; this may have changed by now. PTP Performance: PTP has existed for 2+ years. As of Q3 2025 it has delivered around +20% total profit for 2025. If I am not mistaken, the first year yielded less than 6%. Disappointing: Alson started his PTP service with a 50K account in late 2023 I believe, which quickly dropped 20 to 25%. At that point, he injected another 50K, which conveniently reduced the appearance of the drawdown. This could have eased future marketing of the service as it painted a rosier picture of results than students with smaller accounts could realistically expect. From what I can observe, Alson’s strategy struggles badly during market corrections and relies heavily on rare “pop events” (e.g. Chinese stimulus news, or the Trump-election crypto spike). Without such events, the system is way too complicated to justify the returns in my humble opinion. Teaching Quality Alson seems like a nice guy. His teaching, however, is poor compared with others in this industry. His explanation of his own strategies is not easy to follow. His English is extremely difficult to understand if you are not Singaporean (coming from a native speaker). The slide design is very weak (worse than most basic Udemy courses). This is sadly symptomatic for all PP courses across the board. They could use an in-house designer. He annotates charts during courses and live streams, but since he uses a mouse instead of a pen tablet, his notes are often illegible. Community I passively observed the Discord group, and one thing stood out: Negative experiences with PAM/PTP are frequently met harshly and even with hostility from loyal community members. Some of those defending it, appear to be trading with very large portfolios (hundreds of thousands), which puts them in a completely different league than most retail students. Final Thoughts To be clear: I don’t believe PAM/PTP is an outright scam. However, I do believe it is sold in a misleading way—especially the PTP service. If you’re a regular retail trader looking for consistency, or if you don’t have the emotional resilience to handle continuous drawdowns, this is probably not the course or playbook for you and I would highly advise against it. Many other common trading strategies on the internet work at least as well as PAM. More importantly, you do not get any "edge" through it. This leaves me with no other choice than to give it 1 out of 5 star. One major reason: Adam Khoo excellent educational courses and reputation made me decide to go with Alsons (no way I would have done that otherwise). I don't understand how Adam can ruin his reputation which such sub-standard strategies and course material.