You try to make the recipients of your messages feel special, yet you and your associate copy/paste the same messages to multiple people.

His first message to me involved asking where he could find his previous sent messages to copy-paste it to me also.

If your goal is to provide free education, you could have posted the first lesson publicly. If you don't want to be public with your name or with the name of your company, just create a pseudonymous account called e.g. "JumpingSquirrel2016" and refer to your company as e.g. "CompanyX". Even if your goal is to find two or three people to cooperate with privately in the future, you can still advertise your skills by posting one free lesson publicly.

Agreed that this is generally a good approach. Not sure if it applies to financial topics specifically, because 1) they're anti-inductive and 2) it's dangerous for people to be half-informed. Telling someone that there's money to be made exploiting inefficiencies in the penny stock market, but not what those inefficiencies are, could possibly lead to them losing a bunch of their money by making dumb bets that they think are smart.