Author/Editor
Chris Mayer
Publisher
Agora Financial
Description
Edited by Chris Mayer, a stock picking newsletter that looks for undervalued and “hidden” stocks. Ceased publishing when Mayer left to write a couple new letters for Bonner & Partners.
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Rating: 3.2/5. From 5 votes.
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3.3
Rating from 26 votes
If you’ve subscribed to Capital and Crisis (defunct), please click the stars below to indicate your rating for this newsletter, and please share any other feedback about your experience using the comment box below.
Investment Performance
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Rating: 3.3/5. From 7 votes.
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Rating: 4.0/5. From 8 votes.
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Rating: 3.2/5. From 5 votes.
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Chris Mayer is great at writing copy to suck you into his service but he’s not that great at picking stocks. If you put $5,000 into each of his 13 closed trades for 2008 you would have $62,050 left from $65,000 invested. Better than most hedge funds or mutual funds, but not as good as Adam Lass with his Wavestrength Options Weekly.
The stocks that Chris looks at are pretty safe bets, with some returning over 100% and some losing 80%. Nothing earth shattering with this service as most of the companies have been around for years with good earnings and a performance record to back them up.
Chris doesn’t work both sides of the market. He just recommends buys, no shorting or options here. It’s not my cup of tea and I left the service during my 6 month trial, as I wasn’t all that interested in his trade recommendations.
Capital & Crisis
Pays no attention to supply and demand and is reluctant to offer sell recos. Return in alphabetical order, Core Portfolio: -17.68, -12.41, -73.15, -1.05, -26.26, -77.63, -27.31, -12.80, -26.50, -34.13, -75.02, -26.44, -47.45, -62.64, -29.22, +39.27 in 2006,
-22.39, +40.75 in 2008, -13.21.
Special Situations Portfolio: -86.04, -76.66, -72.01, -75.45, -51.15, -36.28.
If my performance was this bad I would be fired.
I have lost a lot of money on his picks. So I stopped trading his picks.
Capital and Crisis by Chris Mayer is the best investment newsletter I have ever found. I have had it for 2-3 years at $49 per year/auto renew. He is a value investor and provides great historical references to other great value investors. He calculates the value of the company and compares it to the current stock price and gives you buy up to prices and also keeps you informed with weekly updates. I have recommended this to my kids just for the learning experience.
I highly recommend his book: Invest like a Dealmaker, Wiley,2008. His other newsletter, Mayer’s Special Situations, for smaller companies is also good but at $600 or so last I checked probably not for the starting, small investor.
My only criticism with his work is when we have a tough bear market like we have now. He bases his company values on asset values which can change drastically in this deflationary invironment—commodity prices, real estate, etc. He would improve his service if he did something about that issue but otherwise he is the best I have found for value investing.
Chris Mayer is very conservative in his stock recommendations. He likes infrastructure companies, dividend-paying companies, companies who have money in the bank, natural resource companies, and holding-company stocks. The latter term is how I describe a conglomerate whose business is owning various stocks and other assets, and whose chieftain(s) have a record of successful investing. Think about the Tisch family — they run Loews (L). Mayer’s portfolio has been hit pretty hard since mid-98 (but whose portfolio hasn’t been clobbered?). Mayer’s oldest holding goes back to Feb 05. It seems to me that his turnover rate isn’t very high. My own investment style is fairly similar, so I kinda like this newsletter. The difficulty is that I have identified and bought several stocks before they showed up in Capital & Crisis
One disadv that all newsletter advisories suffer from is making picks every month. I have yet to see someone make only 6 picks for the entire year. So in such cases it is important that the editor look for both buy and sell recos. Chris gives only buys. And so his portfolio got burnt in 2008. His picks are sound for his fundamental analysis which looks diligent. But the timing is off. If he were to use his diligence in making sell recos too I am sure he would come out somewhere near the top.
Chris Mayer hadn’t proffered a new buy recommendation for a very very long time, until this newest issue, for April 2009.
The performance has been awful. Buy and hold hasn’t worked of course, and he doesn’t recommend cutting losses fast enough or often enough. If you are concerned with limiting your downside, you can’t rely on him for such advice. Anyone who actually buys a Mayer recommendation when he recommends it should diligently hedge and expect to have to do that for years to come.
The analysis is interesting, and well articulated.
His timing is miserable, but there is a lot of food for thought if you are not a perma-bear and believe that infrastructure, energy and commodity companies will do well in the decades to come. I enjoy reading this publication. I have found that most of his recommendations are companies that I am already familiar with, but he definitely has some that are on my buy list should we ever see a bottom form in the present market. It’s hard to be a value investor right now, and that is Mayer’s slant.
What folks need to understand is this guy is not a trader he’s an investor… You don’t get very many sell recommendations because he wants to hold great companies for as long as he can. He is a true value investor. Unfortunately these guys have to make picks even if they don’t think it’s great time to buy stocks. Now is the perfect time to subscribe to this letter when Chris can find great companies selling for prices we haven’t seen in decades. Don’t buy this letter trying to make a quick buck. This is guy is rising star… Follow him and ten years you will glad that you did. In addition to his analysis the letters are very educational and entertaining.
CAPITAL & CRISIS is very well written & explains the economic disaster both in historical terms as well as the current culprits.
I think one of these prior reviews hit the key point: the guy is a long-term investor, not a trader. Don’t expect him to swing you in and out of stuff. He is careful with recommendations, sometimes skipping months. In March he doubled up, picking up two gems that have nearly doubles since. He also made some timely swaps, selling one position and buying something else. So, I’d say his timing is not all bad.
But the real value in the letter is just the fun and education you get from reading it. His issues are well-written and always interesting. And he also mails out weekly commentary, which is also thought-provoking and well-researched.
For $59, it is well worth it.
Although it’s clear from the portfolio listing in the newsletter that the vast majority of his picks have lost money from the time he recommended them, I happened to subscribe late last year and eventually have bought most of his portfolio. The average over about 17 stocks is an increase of 25%. However, I do set trailing stops on most, and have been stopped out on a few. I think in some cases, but not all, he did issue sell recommendations.
Chris Meyer recommends deep value stocks and is willing to wait years for the market to agree with him. For the price, the C&C newsletters are worth reading just for the educational value alone. When a pick blows up, he doesn’t sweep it under the rug but devotes space to figure out what the flaw in his thinking was. I don’t buy everything Chris recommends but the letter helps me invest more wisely.
Subcribed in July and bought three or four recos so far. TIE, CDE, L, NGD. Can’t complain. But in this market?
Capital and Crisis was marketed under the pretense that Chris Mayer would take his experience and find good companies to recommend specifically during these difficult times. Here are the results for the year 2008 and most of 2009:
BIP bought 01-08 for $19.50, sold 04-09 for $13.80…held for 15 months for 24% loss. CVI bought in 02-08, sold 03-09 for $3.95…held for 13 months for a 85% loss. DEL bought in 05-07 for $51.14, sold 03-09 for $28.78…held for 22 months for 43% loss. GGG bought 03-08 for $34.22, sold 03-09 for $15.06…held for 12 months for 54% loss.
And the real winner in my book is APL. APL bought in 05-08 for $42.22 and sold 08-09 for $6.30 or so…held for 15 months and sold for about an 85% loss.
I am sure Chris is a smart guy and is not happy with these results. He wrote, “My initial recommendation on Atlas, then, was flawed from the get go. To make matters worse, though, I stuck with it”. Later he wrote, “There was far too much leverage here and a hedge book that did not protect investors well. You’d think pipelines would be a simple asset, but the layers of financial engineering made (you’ld think pipelines would be a smart investment? (Are you kidding me? This is what he does for a living and he sounds like a high school student playing with pretend money). Atlas much more complicated than it appeared. I didn’t understand it as well as I should have and it cost us? I am not sure about us…I think there is something about these guys can’t own what they promote…That would have been smart for him.
He ends the APL with this: This latest offering is the final straw, so to speak. I’m finally done with this long, ugly and twisted saga. I am sorry I ever recommended it and even sorrier I stuck with it for so long. All I can say is that I have learned some things in this experience and I promise to do better.
If you would had bought just 100 shares of these stocks when recommended then sell them when recommended, you would have paid $16,658 and sold them for $6783 losing $9875 in roughly one year – roughly 60% losses. This does not include dividends which may have made a small difference but my oh my. This service was marketed as one focusing on making the most of today’s financial crisis – capital & crisis for sure our capital, our crisis for a fee. Many of us paid that fee. It would have been much better for us to just send him lots of money to ask him to not write. We were his ‘on the job training.’ He cost many lots!
Great letter… the above reviews that focus on the losers are just ridiculous. Mayer’s average for 2009 was about 50%… He has six doubles on his back page – out of 10 picks – for 2009 alone.
Besides that, I just love reading it. He often travels and writes about the places he’s been – Australia and New Zealand most recently, but also India, Dubai, etc.
A great deal for $59. Jeez…
My first thought concerning one writer disparaging Chris was simply this: You bought all the losing stocks! No point in getting angry about it. Many of Chris Mayer picks are up and substantially. Only because you picked the wrong ones doesn’t warrant airing your dirty laundry for your lack of intuition and then blaming someone else.
Very interesting and well thought out. However, stocks picks are sometimes very hit and miss. while I usually appreciate the logic of the stock choice, it almost never makes me money so i now rarely buy his stock picks.
I’ve subscribed to this letter (and it’s predecessor; the name escapes me)for 10 years or so. I’ve found his advice to be excellent.Good stock picks and the reasoning behind them, entry and exit points, and he admits his mistakes. Incredible articles giving me more insight and reference material then I could ever use. $49 a year is a gift. Just get ready for the deluge of solicitations from his publisher, Agora. They’re relentless.
I’ve subscribed off and on over 4 years at around $59. I never go for the automatic renewal. I get lots of the Agora stock and advisory e-mails so I see all the teasers. I see the words “revolutionary”, “game changer”, best of the decade, the only one you need to buy, and all the other hyperbole, and then sort though it with skepticism. What I like about Chris is he owns up to his bad calls and explains what went wrong. He keeps a running account of the recommended portfolio, of course with the losing sales no longer appearing. I am in the black with one of his recommendations that he wrote to sell at a loss and instead I held on and the stock came back. (APL). The main caveat with just about all the teasers is they quote with the advantage of hindsight how much money you could have made on their past recommendations, which assumes that you would have been astute enough to hold until it peaked out and sold just at the peak, even though the hyped service didn’t call the peak. I also laugh at the extraordinary gain figures you hypothetically can make on the recommendation since they are almost always not round numbers…..e.g. $49659….
Mayer’s “Capital and Crisis” is one of my favorite newsletters. His style is to include a “story” with his concise analysis of a stock. More of a human touch than other letters. I’ve subscribed for more than 4 years and almost every reco that I’ve bought has been profitable. Many that I didn’t buy have also done very well.
Mayer compares very favorably with other newsletters I receive from Casey Research and Stansberry.