Are you thinking about paying for a stock advisory service and don’t know which one is worth your time and money? Before spending your hard earned money, you will need to know if they are any good and what their true track record. Not all advisories are as great as their sales pitch. (Makes you wonder if they are great at investing why don’t they just retire from their trades instead of selling advice.)

The truth is that many are not transparent as to their performances and use a hypothetical model or historical back testing with their strategies or “system” which in most case is inaccurate. This can be costly if your trades based on their recommendations turns out to be losers. In addition to your trading losses, the expense of most advisories can be pretty hefty.

Before spending several hundreds or a thousand bucks for an advisory subscription, do a thorough background search. An easy method is asking questions on investment web sites, on blogs or in investing forums for clients that may have used the advisory service and get some feedback.
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If you read our post on High Capital Investments back in October and wondered why the site is currently not accessible; there is a reason for that. Much thanks to one of our readers for providing the information. The reason is not very good news for TC & P Trade dba High Capital Investments.

On February 25th, 2008 the Securities and Exchange Commission of Maryland filed administrative proceedings against TC & P Trade and David Brook. You can read all about it here.

It is a sombering reminder that all investments, on or offline and no matter how good they sound; one must dig as deep as possible with due diligence before investing. Unfortunately, it took government actions before we could find the truth.

If you are cash heavy and sitting on the sidelines because of the current stock market volatility, you might as well put some of that money to work in some safe certificates of deposits. To get yields that are better than the national average, you may want to bid on it through an online auction at zionsdirect.com.

Investors with winning bids for various maturities are getting some yields that are worth mentioning. Some examples are 3.26% for three-month CDs and 3.40% for six-month CDs. There are also one-month and one-year CDs up for bids as well. Currently, there are some one-month CDs priced to yield between 3.1 – 3.60%.

If one-month certificates are offered every month, it does not take a whole lot of math to figure out that if one is successful in winning a bid for them each month, one can make double digit yields over the course of 12 months.
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They are definitely doing something right over at Radiant Capital Advisors with their managed foreign exchange accounts. Out of 8 different leveraged products available, six posted double digit gains and one with a 214.25% total return for the 2007 year. Only one strategy recorded a loss of 6.97% for the year.

Their products are geared more towards the high net-worth individuals. Minimum investments start at $30K for the Alpha X10 and $5M for the EKFX-OP managed account, which incidentally returned the 214.25% in 2007. If 5 million is a bit much for your pocketbook, then 30K might be manageable -Alpha X10 did not do too shabby either with a 90.63% ROI.

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If you subscribe to many investment websites, your mailbox probably gets inundated with stock spam and investment “teasers”. The spam can go straight to the trash bin; however, the teasers are more of a curiosity. These stock teasers are usually from some “guru” or “expert” trying to sell a subscription or membership to their newsletter or stock picking service.

Most of these teasers are nothing more than sales letters. They do not name the stock outright, but give out little hints about this next “big” winner. If you want to know more about this un-named stock and other picks, you’ll have to shell out some money for the info. Prices usually ranges from $99 to over $1000 for a few months or up to a year for this service.

Not everyone has the money to spend on these newsletters or stock picks. In most cases, with a little bit of sleuthing one can figure out the stock they are talking about. So, before spending some money to satisfy your curiosity, check out the StockGumshoe.com site. It’s a great blog that does a good job of deciphering these stock teasers and has some humorous commentaries to boot.
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Occasionally, a hot investment opportunity or situation appears when you are not very liquid in capital to take advantage of it. If you only had the funds, you would get in this sure thing, but where can you get a short term loan to do so? A personal loan from your bank is definitely out of the question because of the high interest charges. Here is one way, albeit a bit gutsy.

First of all, as a fair warning, do not attempt this strategy unless you fully understand the risks, can afford to take a financial hit should your investment opportunity goes south and that you are able to make a minimum monthly debt repayment from current income.

If you are fortunate enough to have low debts, good credit ratings and have credit cards with a generous credit line, you probably have received more than one offer in the mail from these credit card companies with blank checks attached. The offers range from 0% interest for 12 to 18 months or 3.99 – 4.99% for the life of the loan.

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First there was DoublingStocks .com and now a new site PromoStockPicks.com promises to make investors rich from their stock picks. (It makes us wonder if it’s the same people that created the stock trading robot.) The sales pitch is actually convincing and so are the testimonials; unfortunately, it’s all one big blatant lie.

“The following must be read in its entirety before purchasing and/or using any information contained on PromoStockPicks.com”

We don’t have to say it in our own words because they do a good job telling you in their “disclaimers”. So go read it and save yourself $47. If that’s too much work, here’s an excerpt from the Information Warning and Investing/Trading Stocks section of the Disclaimer.
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Gold prices have hit an all time high; so, many investors are starting to take notice of silver and its low trailing price as compared to gold. Depending on the source of data, it is hard not to get excited from reading the articles by experts giving out historical price data of how silver at one point reached a high of $50USD in 1980. Compared to today’s price of $16.89/oz, silver is just plain cheap if adjusted for inflation, but before you start loading up silver, let’s take a step back in time.

There is one piece of information that many of these writers seem to leave out when they talk about the highest price ever of silver that was touched briefly in 1980. The real story behind it will also explain the quick tumble soon after.

Do the Hunt Brothers attempting to corner the silver market ring a bell? Nelson and William Hunt were the heirs of H.L. Hunt, the oil tycoon and were one of the wealthiest families in America at the time. They started buying silver as a hedge against inflation in the early 1970s and continued for nearly a decade.
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