Well I can't speak to the current fight with ETR. In the reviews section I believe still exists my first reviews of Insider Code (from the forexbastard.com days). I believe the layers of red tape and BS that ETR and their related companies put up is very effective at keeping people from getting any quality service. The people at Insider Code will answer you courteously and promptly if you can get directly to them.
Once I could finally get thru the ETR red tape, the people at helpme@theinsidercode were friendly, prompt and very helpful once I could get thru to them. Insider Code's system ignores all email addresses other than the one that is registered with the purchase. So if you are not writing to them from the same email that was registered with the purchase, they will not answer you because they do not even see your emails.
I believe they will politely say "no" to your refund request if it is over 30 days. Granted, I was not looking for a refund, read the situation in the old reviews.
But I too found the 10 discs to be VERY difficult to get thru in a 30-day period. And I too have "never" seen Mac X trading. I can't find anything in the promo materials that was an out-and-out lie, but boy do they make it sing and dance compared to what you really get!
As to the eBay thing, I bought my set on eBay. I think I won the auction for about $465, in mid-2007. The seller was very helpful in getting the membership logon to the website transferred to me (which simply required him to logon and request the registered email address to be changed from his to mine, that is how I know about the email address thing). Once I got thru the discs a few times, found that I can watch the videos in the members-only room on the site anyway, I sold my set of just the discs on eBay. I recall getting something like $565 for them, with the full disclosure that it would be the discs only, not the membership logon. In fact, if you do not want anything more to do with Mac X, you could offer them WITH your promise to do your best to also transfer the membership logon.
I get Mac's regular emails several times a week, and for over a year I have been just filing them in a separate folder very rarely even looking at them. Many offer more "stuff" for sale, which I tend to take a dim view of, but I think Mac believes he is giving the value for what he sells. After several months of trying to learn how to take any trades from the Insider Code, I finally just set it aside, and went looking for something else.
That's been over a year, and I have paid no attention to Mac X in all that time. Until I happened to read one of the regualer emails here a month or so ago that talked about the Forex Deal Butler. I did get the demo of the Forex Deal Butler, and in fact am still in the 30-day trial now.
The only thing I wish it would do is take the trades for you. You have to open them manually when it signals you, and then the EA will take over and manage the exits. To be fair, Mac says the reason for that is because he has always believed that trading requires trader's attention, and just because a computer can watch multiple time frames for trends and breakouts and reversals, that does not mean you should stop using your brain or paying attention to your trading.
It also is at least fully disclosed before you sign up for the trial that it will be a $2000 purchase for the permanent license if you wish to keep the Deal Butler after the trial. But one thing I do think is way cool, if your card declines the first ~$700 instalment, it will automatically revert to a ~$200 instalment, which puts it within reach for a lot more traders.
And just as he discloses in the video for Butler, it does take more losers than winners. But the average winner is substantially greater than the average loser.
In fact, using the Butler is the first actual insight I have been able to get as to how Mac's trading style actually works. If he trades live like the Butler trades, and then if some videos of some of his full actual trading sessions had been included in the original material, I think the average newb could actually learn his trading style. Nothing in the original 10 discs gave me any clue . . .
If you are stuck with the original course, and you'd like to at least get an idea of how he trades, try the 30-day trial of the Butler. Use it and watch it for at least one full trading session each day for the 30-day period. For $5 you might be able to actually learn what was too hard to get out of the $2000 course.
Even for a year when I had written Mac X off though, I still had to give him props for one thing. If he hadn't been advertising his course thru ETR, I would never have heard of forex. To this day, I have never seen or heard of it thru any other media other than places I went after I knew about it.
Sorry to ramble, hopefully you or others can find at least something useful here - -
Jeff