Three of our subscribers tell their stories
Jane Chan-Lai didn’t stumble upon investment newsletters. She actively sought them out as an alternative to using financial advisors in her native Canada.
Wanting more growth in her portfolio, Chan-Lai wanted to invest in U.S. stocks. The problem was, most financial firms in Canada were reluctant to add U.S. securities to their clients’ retirement savings accounts. To them, the cost of the U.S. dollar to Canadian dollar currency conversions every time a U.S. stock was bought or sold was simply too high.
So Chan-Lai decided to invest on her own … but with a little help from investment newsletters. A quick Google search led her to Cabot Investing Advice.
Cabot’s newsletters introduced her to some of the best stocks on the U.S. market, and helped her kick a few bad investment habits. “I confess that I’ve made a lot improvements over the nearly a decade that I’ve subscribed to Cabot,” she says.
Rod Kieft, of Anchorage, Alaska, has a similar story.
Fifteen years ago Kieft decided to invest on his own after a financial advisor kept losing his family’s money by “doing stupid things,” he says. He took what was left and started putting together his own portfolio. Early on, there were some hard lessons.
“At first I was floundering badly,” Kieft says. “But I slowly started to make better decisions. Then I found Cabot.”
Kieft signed up for the Cabot Growth Investor newsletter, and liked it enough that he eventually added Cabot Top Ten Trader. From there, Kieft and his son, also a Cabot subscriber, would decide which recommendations they liked most.
“Every Monday night we would read our Cabot Top Ten Traders and then call (each other) to discuss which stocks we liked and why,” Kieft recalls.
Today Kieft is a subscriber to all but two of Cabot’s 12 investment newsletters, regularly holding three or four stocks from each advisory to help diversify his portfolio. And he still uses Cabot’s newsletters as a sort of “pre-screener” before performing his own research on the recommendations he likes most.
Kieft’s biggest Cabot-recommended winners have included Baidu (BIDU), Regeneron Pharmaceuticals (REGN), LinkedIn (LNKD), Amazon (AMZN), Palo Alto Networks (PANW) and, like Chan-Lai, Facebook and Tesla.
Michael Reade says most investment newsletters are way over his head. Cabot was an exception.
“Cabot is very straightforward, very direct, honest—which you don’t find very often in this business,” he says.
A former optometrist who owns several eye clinics in the Houston area, Reade has invested on the side his whole life. Not until he discovered Cabot, however, did he start to feel like he knew what he was doing.
Technical analysis was a particular blind spot for Reade.
“I always thought technical analysis was kind of hocus-pocus,” he admits. “But they explain in a way, giving examples, that over the course of a couple years (of subscribing) starts getting to you. It’s: No matter what you think of a stock, the chart matters.”
Reade also credits Cabot’s newsletters with teaching him the “self-discipline” to sell losers, not permitting any stock to fall more than 20%, no matter what.
As a result, Reade has netted a number of big winners himself from among Cabot’s recommendations—Tesla and Facebook (what else?) have been his biggest meal tickets.
Asked if he thinks Cabot’s newsletters have helped him become a better investor, Reade said simply, “There is no doubt.”
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Shameless self-promotion isn’t the only reason I’m sharing these three Cabot success stories. What I really want to convey is the power of investing on your own—and how investment newsletters can assist you greatly in that endeavor.
Financial advisors usually charge 1% to 2% of your portfolio balance every year. That can really add up. Investment newsletters on the other hand will tell you exactly what to do to meet your financial goals—at a very small fraction of the cost of a financial advisor.
Besides, you have just as good a chance at making money investing on your own. Only two out of 2,862 actively managed mutual funds have regularly beaten the market over the last five years, a recent study found. In the last decade, 82% of mutual funds have failed to regularly beat the market.
Thus, there’s no use forking over 1%-2% of your annual return, plus assorted other fees, to a UBS, Wells Fargo or Morgan Stanley fund manager. Investing on your own costs a mere $10 in transaction fees every time you buy and sell a stock. And if you do decide to let an investment newsletter do the heavy lifting for you, it’s a one-time annual payment—with no hidden fees or agendas. If a newsletter advisor doesn’t make you money, you simply don’t renew your subscription.
It pays to invest on your own. And with 45 years of experience and a track record that trumps almost any mutual fund, it pays even more to take out a subscription to one of Cabot Investing Advice’s investment newsletters.
Just ask the three people mentioned above.
To learn how to become a Cabot subscriber too, click here.
