What to Look Out For In An Investment Newsletter

By Jason Markum

Making heads or tails of the stock market can be an extremely difficult thing to do under the best of circumstances. Sometimes it can be flat out impossible to know just what to invest in. Many people turn to investment newsletters in order to get ahead of the pack and find investment ideas that you normally wouldn’t be able to find on your own.

There are several immediate problems with these sorts of newsletters. For one thing, they can be extremely expensive, sometimes hundreds or even thousands of dollars per year. They may be well worth it if the advice they render turns into profitable investments. But how can you know that in advance before you subscribe?

Another problem is that some of these newsletters attempt to do little more than sell you other investment products themselves from investment club memberships, to higher priced newsletters, to training videos etc.

Figuring out a good newsletter to subscribe to, or even several good newsletters to subscribe to can be almost as challenging as investing in the stock market itself! In this article today I want to mention a few things to look out for when choosing an investment newsletter to subscribe to. Hopefully, armed with this information, you can save yourself some serious money and heartache (because of bad investment advice) in the long run.

First off, watch out for newsletters that make seemingly impossible claims. If somebody claims to be able to show you 100% returns on your investment year after year or even a 1000% return on your investment then look somewhere else. The smartest investors in the world don’t make more than 20% a year or so, year after year after year on their investments. I’m talking about billionaires who do this for a living. Some guy selling a newsletter out of his basement is not capable of showing you how to make 100% returns ever.

Next watch out for newsletters that don’t offer a trial subscription. The only way you’re going to know whether these newsletters are worth your money or not is if you can read a month or two of their back issues and see for yourself just how well their advice has performed. A newsletter that doesn’t offer a trial is usually up to no good. If they don’t trust their own efforts enough to give you a peek before hand, then chances are their advice isn’t going to be worth much.

Watch out for newsletters that make lots of suggestions for different stocks. It’s an old trick to suggest many different stocks and then forget about the ones that didn’t work out and then point back at the successes and say “See! We really know are talking about!”. If you see this in a newsletter that you subscribe to, consider dropping that newsletter fast.

Finally watch out for newsletters that don’t make specific recommendations. Some newsletters give very broad recommendations that aren’t actual recommendations so that they can be proven to have not given bad advice in the past. If you’re going to pay hundreds of dollars a year for a subscription to the newsletter, you should be getting solid tangible advice and recommendations that you can immediately implement without having to put any more effort into it on your own part.

Finding the right investment newsletter for you can be an important part of your stock market investing mix. I subscribe to several myself and the ones that I have come to rely on over the years are worth their weight in gold. It may take you some time to find a really good one to suit your style of investing, but once you do it will be well worth your effort.

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What to Look Out For In An Investment Newsletter

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