Marc Lichtenfeld’s 23 Enigma is a monthly options trading pitch that landed in the July 20, 2026 Liberty Through Wealth daily email, and the mechanism is more interesting than most newsletter teases. The claim is that a recurring market anomaly on the 23rd of each month — sitting at the intersection of two documented calendar effects — can be traded for payouts of $9,550 to $18,400 inside a month. The product behind it, Technical Pattern Profits, costs $2,023 per year. This is Lichtenfeld’s second distinct Oxford Club product alongside the Oxford Income Letter, and the price tier puts it in a different category from his dividend income work.

What Is the 23 Enigma?

The Marc Lichtenfeld 23 Enigma is a marketing name for a trading system built on two real calendar anomalies that converge around the 23rd of each month. The first is the Options Expiration Effect, where market makers and options holders pin stock prices toward strike prices ahead of expiration. The second is the Turn-of-the-Month Effect, a documented tendency for equities to rise during the last few trading days of one month and the first few of the next.

The pitch is that the 23rd sits in the overlap zone. A stock pinned by options mechanics heading into expiration, then released into a turn-of-the-month surge, produces a predictable breakout window. Lichtenfeld’s algorithm, built with a systems developer named Kristin Orman, scans 30,000-plus data points to find stocks exhibiting a Bull Flag chart pattern in that window. The trade fires on the morning of the 23rd and closes before the 23rd of the following month.

Who Is Marc Lichtenfeld

Marc Lichtenfeld is the Chief Income Strategist at The Oxford Club, the Baltimore-based Agora-family publisher, where he has run the Oxford Income Letter and the “perpetual dividend raisers” income brand for roughly two decades. He is the author of several bestselling investing books. His income investing work is well established; the 23 Enigma is a departure from that lane into technical options trading, which is worth noting as a reader evaluating whether the approach fits your style.

The Mechanism in Plain English

The Options Expiration Effect is real and well documented. Market makers who sell options have a financial incentive to see contracts expire worthless, which means pinning the underlying stock near a strike price as expiration approaches. This creates predictable price compression, and when expiration passes, the pinning pressure releases.

The Turn-of-the-Month Effect is also real. The Financial Analysts Journal published a study finding that the turn-of-the-month window accounted for all of the Dow’s positive returns over a 79-year period. A separate 47-year study cited in the pitch found that investing only during the turn-of-the-month window produced a 5,620 percent cumulative gain, while investing outside it lost 91 percent. Those numbers describe what happened historically, not what happens next, and they measure the effect in isolation — real-world trading adds costs, taxes, and the difficulty of picking which stocks to hold.

The Bull Flag is a textbook technical pattern. Thomas Bulkowski’s Encyclopedia of Chart Patterns, which the pitch cites, studied 307 historical instances and found the pattern averaged a 69 percent gain every 39 days. The “100 percent success rate” figure in the promo refers to the pattern meeting its measured-move target in those 307 instances, not to every trade taken under the system.

The Claims, Quoted and Dated

The July 20, 2026 email and the VSL at the23enigmasecret.com make these claims verbatim:

“I’ve found a rare market anomaly that could hand you windfalls as high as $9,550, $12,150, and even $18,400 within a month.” These are the headline payout figures, tied to a $5,000-per-trade position size.

“The Financial Analysts Journal found that it accounted for ALL of the Dow’s positive returns for 79 years.” This is a real finding from the academic literature on the turn-of-the-month effect. The framing as “all positive returns” is the study’s conclusion; the practical question is whether a retail trader can capture the effect after costs.

“12 triple-digit gains guaranteed in first year or second year free.” The word guaranteed is doing heavy lifting here. The guarantee is a second year of subscription, not a refund and not a performance guarantee on the trades themselves. Read the fine print on what constitutes a triple-digit gain and how it is verified.

“123 spots available today.” Scarcity framing. The VSL has been live since at least July 2024 based on Oxford Club editorial pages, so the spot count is a marketing device rather than a hard capacity limit.

The VSL also names historical trade examples: Bentley Systems at 109 percent, E.L.F. Beauty at 135 percent, DraftKings at 140 percent, Nvidia at 191 percent, Align Technology at 586 percent, Meta at 434 percent. These are presented as the kinds of setups the system is designed to find. They are real stocks and real moves; whether the system identified them in real time or in hindsight is the open variable. Past performance does not guarantee future results; closed-pick examples are not a forecast of what the system will produce going forward.

What You Would Be Buying

Technical Pattern Profits is a 12-month subscription at $2,023 per year, with the publisher noting a suggested retail of $4,000. The subscription includes weekly trade alerts, the monthly 23 Enigma alert on the 23rd, a messaging system, and four bonus reports: The 23 Enigma Guide, an Options Master Class, The World Record Pattern, and The Top 10 Chart Patterns of All Time.

The guarantee is the 12-triple-digit-gains-or-second-year-free structure. There is no stated cash refund window in the public-facing VSL layer; the remedy is a free second year, which means you are committed to the product for up to 24 months before the guarantee pays out. That is a different animal from a 30-day or 365-day cash refund, and the order page terms are the ones to read before subscribing.

This is Lichtenfeld’s second distinct Oxford Club product. The Oxford Income Letter, where the 29% Account pitch lives, is a $49-to-$99 dividend income newsletter. Technical Pattern Profits is a $2,023 options trading alert service. Different lane, different price tier, different risk profile. The 365-day money-back guarantee that applies to the Oxford Income Letter does not appear to apply here.

What the Claims Rest On

The turn-of-the-month effect is one of the more robust anomalies in the academic literature, and it has survived decades of scrutiny. The Options Expiration Effect is also documented, and the combination is plausible as a trading edge. The open questions are the ones the VSL does not answer.

The 5,620 percent figure comes from a study that assumed perfect execution of the turn-of-the-month window with no transaction costs, no taxes, and no selection problem. Real-world options trading on a single day each month adds slippage, bid-ask spreads, and the risk that the selected stock does not move as the pattern predicts. The 307-for-307 Bull Flag success rate describes historical instances that met a specific definition; live trading involves pattern recognition in real time, where the definition is harder to apply.

The algorithm built with Kristin Orman is proprietary, and the track record of live alerts is unaudited. The historical trade examples are presented without entry and exit dates. A reader evaluating the service would want to see the actual alert history with dates, entries, exits, and the percentage of alerts that hit their targets versus those that were stopped out.

Where This Sits

The product is a system — a monthly alert that tells you which stock and which option to trade on the 23rd. That makes it closer to a trading advisory service than to the typical Oxford Club newsletter pitch, and the $2,023 price reflects that positioning.

Lichtenfeld’s income investing work has a documented track record and a long refund window. This product has neither of those scaffolds. The calendar anomalies are real and the chart pattern is real, but whether the system that combines them produces live results that match the historical claims is the part the VSL does not answer.

For the pattern of self-reported newsletter track records that the 23 Enigma alert history inherits, see Investment Newsletter Track Records: Nobody Audits Them. For Oxford Club subscription cancellation and the VIP-tier refund terms that apply to the higher-priced Oxford products, see Oxford Club Cancel Membership: VIP Tier Rules.

For the full index, see Promo Watch.

Flak Jacket Finance covers investment newsletters as an independent third party. We do not reveal paid picks, we do not trash the gurus or products we cover, and we do not sell the promos we cover.