ICN Holding, Part 3: Real Results of Investors Who Got In and Got Out
Previous part is here.
I’ve been getting a lot of messages in my inbox from grateful ICN clients – including some who have fully withdrawn their funds from there. I’ve seen reports from investors who received payments from ICN during the recent period of 2021–2025. It’s not exactly that «everyone gets paid everything» (I’ve got messages from folks who’ve had some issues with this), but it’s also not fair to say the money only flows one way.
For two of these «fully withdrawn» investors, I decided to analyze – what kind of final returns did they actually get? Let’s take a look. (Below, I’ll use IRR instead of TWR – methodologically, this is fine since all of ICN’s investment strategies grow smoothly «like a ruler»).
🐌 Investor A. Invested several tens of thousands of dollars in ICN in 2018, withdrew everything after about 2.5 years. The final return was 5.5% annualized – not bad! Of course, this is less than the 23% annualized you could’ve gotten by simply buying the S&P 500 index during that period – but the ICN investment wasn’t entirely useless here.
🐌 Investor B. This one’s more interesting – this person gradually invested several hundred thousand dollars starting in 2020 and finished pulling everything out «to zero» in 2025. And guess what return they earned over those 5 years (including the fully withdrawn «profit» from ICN’s offshore accounts)? None, they ended up with a «loss» of -0.7% annualized, lol. Meanwhile, they could’ve been earning 17.4% annualized with the S&P 500!
The cherry on top is that this investor also worked as a consultant selling ICN’s services for a while. When I carefully crunched all the numbers for contributions and withdrawals, even they were a bit surprised that they didn’t manage to scrape together even a minimal gain. And this is despite ICN’s miraculous, no-loss strategies supposedly growing at an average of 9% annually.
How did this even happen? The thing is, ICN’s memorandum describes a rather convoluted fee system – practically every sneeze and snort gets hit with some kind of fee. On entry, they immediately take an average of 10–11% off each deposit, and then annually deduct a «service fee» which, based on the reports I’ve seen, averages about 3% of the account balance per year (there’s some tricky system calculating the fee based on «the amount you’d ideally want to have in your account in the future,» I’m not kidding).
So, for Investor B, since their largest deposits sat in ICN for an average of a couple of years (until they started withdrawing), all these brutal fees effectively ate away at their capital. Investor A from the example above got a bit luckier: they started investing earlier when ICN’s reports still painted a juicier return of over 15% annualized, which was enough to cover the costs. But later, they probably realized the math wasn’t adding up and toned down the artist’s imagination in their reports to a more «modest» 9% annually.
Well, one silver lining – at least Investor B made decent money from commissions for bringing in other clients (though several times less than they could’ve earned just investing in an index fund)…