I am bombarded with recommendations to subscribe to investment newsletters. Two of the most persistent are the Forbes Special Situation Survey (FSSS) and the Value Line Investment Survey (VLIS).
These newsletters should consider offering mutual funds that buy stocks when they say to buy and sell stocks when they say to sell (Value Line already offers some mutual funds). Then one could track how practical their recommendations are as compared to just investing in an S&P 500 index fund.
I recognize that a FSSS mutual fund or a VLIS mutual fund would not be very tax efficient (they recommend a lot of buying and selling). Still, if their recommendations are as good as they claim, a FSSS or VLIS mutual fund would make a great ROTH IRA investment.
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I would like to see a way to evaluate these newsletters. I think they would circumvent your plan by frontrunning. They buy first, then publish the recommendation. But even if they stick to legal methods, they would buy when their advice is first published, well ahead of most subscribers.
Then there's the problem of getting customers. They're having to work hard just to get subscribers. How many people would actually put money in their advice?
What I used to do do (in snail mail) was to send back those postage paid envelopes with nothing in them. I viewed it as a convenient way to offer my assessment of their value.
As the writer states, Value Line already does this---and the mutual fund does much poorer than the advisory service. Look up 'value line anomaly' on google sometime.
As for the writer that suggested evaluating the newsletters, check out Hulbert's. That's exactly what they do.