Review by Larry, January 30, 2009

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I was a subscriber to the service in 2007. While he did have many winning recommendations including more than his share of ‘doubles’- my overall record with him was a loss of about 30%. After about 9 months I went back over every recommendation he made and if I had followed each recommendation to the letter, I still showed a loss of about 30%.

The reason I say following him to the letter vs my actual account is two-fold. First, some of his trades I couldn’t perform in the account I was using at the time (selling naked puts, certain spreads etc). Second, and the bigger problem was that many times I couldn’t get into the trades at his recommended price because there was a run before/as I received the release. This was apparently a large problem in that I recall 3 or 4 times when he answered subscribers in his emails who accused him/someone of front-running. He would say the price would normally come back down- but the issue was that if it took a week or longer to come back down- did you give up too much time?

As a positive, he does give both an entry and exit recommendation. The letters are interesting and the ideas worth considering. I still get many promotions from Stansberry that tout how well Clark’s recommendations are doing- so maybe its possible that I just had the worst 9 months he has had - but my personal account (which let me deal with the run on option prices and sometimes hanging on longer or selling sooner) and a review of his actual both were down 30% or so after 9 months.

Review by Tampat, February 7, 2009

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S&A Short Report-Options service from Stansberry and Associates-Jeff Clark

This service was $2000/yr when I signed up for it 6/08, but they have since raised the price to $4k/yr.

The service involves buying calls, puts and selling options also, very rarely will also rec a stock.

Jeff Clark is very good at picking winners and he evidently has a big following. The biggest problem is getting into one of his picks. I would have my broker acct open and ready to go and when his email rec comes and I go to buy, it has already seen a huge spike. Was very difficult to get into one of his picks at the recommended price. And I found that if I could get in due to no price spike, it would end up being one of his few losers.

Provides good commentary, educational, when to buy and when to close out.

So I have a mixed review. He did pick many big winners. But the huge price spike at the time of the rec was a big problem as they often just ran up from there.

I thought maybe some brokers were subscribers as obviously some big money moved in instantly to buy his rec. On the 1 minutes charts I always saw the price spike about 20-30 minutes before I got the email. I complained to them about this, and so did many others as they addressed it in a general email advising to buy different strike prices or months, but those were not as successful. I had the most success when I just jumped in even if the price was higher than the rec price, and could close out the position within a day or two.
Also, some of his picks do indeed trend higher.

He went on a little losing streak and then started rec’s on naked selling of options and I am not interested in doing that. The selling of options he rec’ed was profitable, but I cancelled the service after about 6 months and did get a prompt prorated refund. In hindsight I wish I had cancelled the service sooner.

If you dont mind naked selling of options and can move quickly, the service might be ok for you. Also, I suspect they are after those with high $ trading accounts, hence the $4k per year fee.

Review by Bob, February 7, 2009

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I subscribed 12-07 for special $1250, paper traded for 2 months, before entering live. Buy June had losers > winners. I agree with Tampat reported above as being the whole tamale. Jeff knows his business but yes, most recos were well above his entry even though I tried to jump on them minutes > receiving the email.Net result for the year= losing the 1250+ 64 more = [1320. Ouch! they tout others as making mega bucks, but—–

Review by Bob Brown, February 7, 2009

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I pretty much agree with the other reviewers above. So my comments here will be brief. Jeff Clark is billed in some the teaser ads as being “never wrong.” Of course, we know, a priori, that this can’t be true. And it is certainly is not.

In the brief 3-month trial period that I subscribed, ending on Jan. 19, 2009 (and yes, I did get all of my money back, no questions asked), I bought only two calls, both of them losers. I noticed that some of his other recommendations worked out, and some did not. If you aren’t set up to do somewhat exotic options trades, you won’t be able to follow some of his advice.

Also, be warned: HE IS A TRADER, and he speaks to the trader mindset and nervous system. (A new addition to his service, at no extra charge, is his direct-line advice in real time during market hours.) If you aren’t able or willing to spend at least a part of your day at your computer in trading mode, this service would probably not be for you. I’m grateful to Mr. Clark for helping me to realize that I am an investor, not a trader.

Review by Steve, February 13, 2009

He’s batting zero every option and every stock he has suggested has gone down.
I paid $3,000 because they claimed 80% of his picks were winners last year. His first 3 option picks; motba went to zero, dobcu got stopped out at a 70% loss and the third, undce is down over 50%. Stocks he suggested dxo is down 10% in 2 weeks.
He claims to shave points on the s&p but when I paper traded his trades with $5,000, his trades he claimed were winners (more then 1/2 were not) didn’t cover ameritrade commissions. You would have to invest 50,000 on his s&p shaves in order to make any money. And if you had in the last 3 weeks you would have lost money.
So I asked to see the spread sheet they used to make the claim of 80% wins last year. I have sent 15 emails to 3 different email addresses and made 3 phone calls without getting an answer. What they have told me is they can’t send any proof to me without sending it to all subscribers. I don’t mind if they have to prove it to all subscribers, but apparently they do.
If he makes the trades he suggests he will be broke soon and will have to stop giving advice.

Review by Dave, February 14, 2009

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Rating is poor due what others have said about getting into the trade. I have found that all the option newsletters are the same way. The newsletter controls the market for that strike. If you want to use these news letter you have to be educated about options and use a different strike strategy. I didn’t experience very much success even using the different strike strategies to make it worth continuing.

Review by Bob Wilber, February 23, 2009

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I have the agree with the above comments. The trades that win are usually the ones you can’t get into, because far too many other people are jumping on the same options. In the past 6 months there are been a lot more losers than winners, including the last three trades. Also, despite the name being the “Short Report” very few put trades are recommended. In a vicious bear market trying one call after another is not the route to riches.

For Steve above: For options I’d recommend a different broker than TD Ameritrade, their commissions are way too high. Try Interactive Brokers. IB’s stock commissions are usually well below TD Ameritrade’s as well, important for short term scalping plays. (No, I don’t work for Interactive Brokers, I’m just a customer. There may be other discount brokers with similarly low commissions, so look around.)

Review by JP, March 5, 2009

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Some winners and a few much-touted “doubles” over the course of 2008 when I was subscribed, but also a lot of impossible entry prices, net losers, and worthless expirations. Significantly more expensive than other options services with no added value over those other services.

Review by Rob L., March 21, 2009

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While I echo the frustration of everyone who has written about the difficulty of getting into his trades (especially when each one comes with the admonition of NOT PAYING MORE THAN x DOLLARS TO GET IN), I would add that the “Direct Line” service, Jeff’s real time blog, has been worth the price of the subscription entirely. He’s generally good for 3-4 updates a day, based on how actively the market is trading, and the real time advice he includes in the blog has been worthwhile.

Review by Joshua, April 9, 2009

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It IS amazing how the prices have spiked by the time most folks can get the order entered. I literally have my account open, a quantity and type of order entered (which, on the off day that we really are short something I then must change), and need only the ticker before hitting “buy”… and yet with my email on constant (literally) refresh I STILL have a price spike prior to my entry.

…as a result I’ve learned a lot about “other” options (picking either different strikes, or going to the put side, or even choosing one of the other companies he mentions that isn’t an “official” recommendation.

If you can get in (or just do it anyway despite the surge), take a double portion, and sell half in a day or so… lots of fade before the trade begins to work as I’ve seen anyway. Been at it about a year now. Lost a good chunk in the beginning, but have been winning more than losing overall.

The “direct line” is an outstanding addition in my opinion.

I don’t trade enough to justify the current price, but if you are a very active trader and want some great ideas I think you could do much worse than Jeff Clark. I know I’d happily give him my money to trade with un-supervised, and that list is limited to about five people on the planet.

Review by JJ, April 22, 2009

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I also agree with the comments made by other reviewers. I took the 90 day trial period at a reduced rate of $3K/year rather than the full price of $4K/year. My $3K was promptly refunded by Stansberry.

There were a number of trades I could not make because of the run-up after he made his recommendations. I had a few winners, yet more loosers. I entered my trial period because of his stellar track record during 2008, and because I was guaranteed at least 3 doubles in 90 days. There was not one legitimate double during the trial period. I suspect Jeff Clark simply rode the wave during 2008, after all, if you were going short in 2008 how could you loose?

The direct line blog is sort of valuable, but you need to be at your computer, watching the markets all day long, 5 days a week to really make it work. I had my best results when I closed my positions prior to Jeff telling me to do so, or when I sold my entire position at the point where he advised readers to sell half and hang onto the other half.

Jeff frequently tells readers he doesn’t understand what is going on today, the charts look horribly bearish yet the market is up. If he is really the market guru he is supposed to be, then he shouldn’t be telling his audience he doesn’t get it today.

One other comment - he was often right but his timing was wrong. He would make a recommendation with only a week or two left on the option, and the option would get close to expiration and I would sell it for a nickel or a dime to get something back. Then a week after expiration his prediction would come true.

Overall, I would stay away from his service.

Review by Susan, May 25, 2009

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Was very disappointed in this newsletter and some of the recommendations made. I finally asked for a refund. Was not thrilled with the S&A group and their short report at all!

Review by gene, July 13, 2009

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I have taken his introductory offer, $3,000 for 3 months and have as yet not even come close to getting enough back to make it worthwhile. He is waiting, waiting, waiting, wating for the big drop in the market and on options the time erodes away and you have to roll over to the nest month. He does what he calls scalp trades but you can never get into the trade in time to profit from it.

Review by scrabler, July 23, 2009

I’m not a subscriber, but Mr Clark does writes feature articles for The Growth Stock Wire. Last week he said Armagedon was three days away in the market. Early this week he looked for the s&p to test 905 and he was buying puts. Today he said,it was to risky to short, and he wasn’t sure about going long. No wonder his subscribers are ticked off. At 3000- 4000 a pop for his service I would be ticked off. This guy is the king of flip flops.

Review by J.P.L, August 2, 2009

Thanks to all who posted the above.
For some time now, I’ve been thinking about subscribing to Jeff’s service, mainly because of the many teaser spams.
Your posts have indicated that Jeff’s service is really not suitable for me.
Take care, All.

Review by Peter, August 3, 2009

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I can only add my vote to the most recent comments. I had been reading the (free) Growth Stock Wire since January and his recommendations did very well for a while. I also have to give him credit for convincing me NOT to go short early March when I was getting tempted to do so, with all the talk that the Dow might go as low as 4000, talk that analysts’ earnings estimates were still overly optimistic, etc. I don’t know if I would have actually gone short or not but he was definitely a factor in my not doing it. This is a reason why I was hesitant at first to write up a negative review here. But anyway, the regular price is $4,000 and given his high recent success rate (as of April) I was holding out for a promotional rate to sign up. So when $3,000 was offered I thought I’d try the service, justifying it partly with his “Direct Line” service. I thought, “$3,000 is a lot of money, but let’s take it as a trading course” (while I educate myself about technical analysis) and trade alongside him.

Anyway, long story short, I was with the service from mid April till about 20 June, by which time his recommendations had been so uniformly disastrous that I wasn’t even interested in the third month of the free trial and I cancelled. He was recommending shorting the market since mid April, at various times upping the ante and saying that there would be a massive correction (where earlier he talked of a short-term dip to 750 and a longer-term rebound). Having mainly bought puts, I have lost ALMOST ALL the money I invested alongside his recommendations (mainly his daily direct line recommendations, as opposed to his regular weekly recommendations). For instance, early May I bought $10,000 worth of September S&P500 @800 puts. Last time I checked they were worth less than a thousand dollars. I also went short some stocks and long ETFs, again with large losses. I do take responsibility for my own actions, but why pay $3,000 a year to lose your shirt and listen to a lot of excuses that the market action makes no sense?

Technical analysis can be divided into trend-following (getting on board the big trends) and mean-reversion strategies (shorting short-term overbought and buying short-term oversold conditions), and my impression of his service is that he’s mainly doing the second. For long periods of time this may work well (and you can charge mega-bucks for subscriptions), and then a couple of times a decade your subscribers get taken to the cleaners, in which case the newsletter loses subscribers and revenue which is unfortunate for them but not as unfortunate as for the suckers who put their hard-earned on the line, and a new sucker is born… It’s another variant of the lovely “heads I win, tails you lose” culture that pervades the entire financial industry. Stansberry loves to beat up on Wall Street, but is he so much better? I’m done with that whole Agora, S&A, and Investment University lot.

A comment made by another reviewer somewhere on this site made me think and is worth repeating: last year the market was down down down, so almost anyone who made bearish recommendations had fantastic returns to show for it and looked like a genius (and by extension can charge megabucks for his “premium” service). But the tough thing is to stay on the right side of the market consistently, whatever the market does. The S&A Short Report certainly failed that test in my book. As an aside, someone I’ve been following since late 2007 and who’s been uncannily good with his short-term predictions was Marc Faber. Almost every month he offers some specific, perfectly actionable recommendations, and more often than not they’re correct. When he doesn’t know, he’s also not afraid to admit it.

Review by Investor Bob, August 26, 2009

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This guy seems to understand the markets but his timing plain sucks. Lost a lot of money in his trades. Has been touting a market drop for a few months now and if you’d kept on shorting like he recommended you’d have taken a bath like i did.
I don’t know what justifies his extremely high annual price. Definitely would not recommend

Review by Bob Wilber, September 22, 2009

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This is an update (and a downgrade) of my previous review. Simply put, for the past year Jeff Clark’s performance has been atrocious. You’d have cleaned up simply by taking the opposite side of every one of his trades. Throughout the bear market he kept recommending calls, which all quickly withered on the vine. But now that we are in a months long bull market all he does is recommend short plays, which likewise go to zero. The worst play of all was his SRS trade. SRS is a double short real estate fund, so buying calls or selling puts on SRS is a bearish trade. Well, back when SRS was in the mid 20s Jeff Clark recommended buying calls on SRS and selling $22 puts. The calls quickly became worthless but, much worse, the short puts climbed drastically in value as SRS dropped to $16. I stopped out with a huge $6000 loss on 10 puts. It would have been worse if I had followed Clark’s recommendation, which was to roll the puts forward. SRS continued to drop. Those of his customers who didn’t stop out were put to the stock, which now trades at less than $10. That’s a $1200 loss per put.

Review by John, October 20, 2009

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Buy the service and take the other side of everything he suggests! If you did that this year you would be up hundreds of percent.

I wish I would have! Instead I have lived death by 1000 cuts! He has continued to push “market over bought ” and short positions for about 300 S & P points of the rally. The results have been awful. You keep thinking he is due to be right has each week you see all of the chart work and justifications for his positions. So compelling. Then you proceed to lose more money as once again he is dead wrong.

Even more damaging is what he did to your mindset, never mind the option plays, how do you go long any stock after reading his weekly report? You wind up frozen, sitting out the market recovery. Just recently, after many months, he finally suggested a call position saying if the fake rally is to continue through year’s end, this stock should participate. I guess now is the time to go short!

Review by Anaesthetic, November 6, 2009

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This recommendation service is clearly run by someone who understands human psychology; He puts the price up therefore You think the service is one of the best.
Whether you make a successful trade or not, He always will. He already has his trade placed before He `gives` you the recommendation. His trade will always be carried to success as You all pile in to chase the price further up or further down. He always wins and only some of You will because only some will get into the trade before the `spike` occurs.
In addition, whatever He charges for the annual membership can be seen as the `icing on the cake`for him because only a percentage of you will ask for a refund.
Remember He is using you to chase the spikes and He always wins. Only some of You will!

Review by JPL, November 6, 2009

Hi, Anaesthetic,
I’m not disputing your comment about the analyst that “He already has his trade placed before He `gives` you the recommendation.” But I am quite curious and like to learn more. Would you share your thoughts what evidence you’ve noticed to support that deduction?

Thanks in advance,

JPL
11-6-2009

Review by Bob WIlber, November 7, 2009

The claim that Jeff Clark is front running his recommendations is a serious charge and I think Anaesthetic had better provide more evidence.

That said, there is no question that Jeff Clark has had a remarkably bad year. In response to John’s October 20, 2009 post: Yes, the most recent long play fizzled out — readers who bought the calls on EGLE stopped out with a 50% loss.

Review by Kim, November 8, 2009

Bob,

Are you really that naive? About 90% of services are front running. There are very few really honest ones.

Review by Quisto, November 9, 2009

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A friend and I subscribed to one of Jeff’s option services 2 years ago. He was wrong on 4 straight recommendations. Maybe we hit the wrong time? Q

Review by JPL, November 9, 2009

Hi, Kim,
It looks like Anaesthetic might not respond to my query.
I’m a small investor presently subscribing to Stansberry & Associates’s newsletters, and they seem quite honest. However, it’s not my purpose to accuse or defend anyone, just curious about how to tell whether any analyst is actually front running or not.
Of course, your comment that “about 90% of services are front running.” isn’t a surprise to me, but what evidence does one look for? I sure like to know your views.

Looking forward to “hear” your response,

JPL
11-9-2009

Review by Bob Wilber, November 13, 2009

Kim, what evidence do you have that 90% of newsletter services are front running? There are some sleazy “free penny stock recommendation of the day” sites I’ve seen that no doubt are front running (they have no other apparent way to generate income), but Stansberry & Associates has a strict rule against their writers having positions in the stocks or options they recommend. Porter’s opinions and rants can be annoying, and Jeff Clark has done worse in picking options than a dart board and a flipped coin, but neither you nor Anaesthetic has provided any evidence whatsoever that they are front running their recommendations.

Review by Kim, November 14, 2009

Bob and JPL,

You are right, I don’t have any proof. And you are also right that big publishers like Stansberry & Associates might be among those who don’t do front running. All I’m trying to say is don’t be so surprised. Front running in general is very common practise among newsletters, it’s very difficult to prove, but you should not be so surprised and talk about “serious charge”.

Review by JPL, November 14, 2009

Hi, Kim,
Thank-you for your response.
I agree with you that “front running … is very difficult to prove.” That’s why I was very interested in your insight, to determine whether one is front running or not.
In my opinion, scruples aside, why wouldn’t they front-run? Generally speaking, if they know of such a good stock, why wouldn’t they buy it first for themselves, before the price is pushed up by the subscribers?

To Bob and Anaesthetic,
I appreciate your comments too. Thanks.

JPL
11-14-2009

Review by Bob Wilber, November 14, 2009

It is a “serious charge” — if it was found out the newsletter sellers could get in trouble with the SEC. I don’t think the more established ones would risk that, when they can just make lots of money selling their newsletters and never have to risk a dime in the markets.

Review by NYCguy, November 16, 2009

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And I thought it was just me. I took a three month trial subscription. However, I got frustrated very quickly because I could never get into one of his trades. Even if I was sitting at my computer, and went to my trading platform as soon as I got an alert, I still couldn’t get in at his limit prices. I finally tried jumping into a couple of trades beyond his limit price, but I couldn’t make money on the trades. I canceled after about 2 months, and got all my money back.

I have a lot of respect for Jeff Clark. His theories on market timing are very good. I know he is not front-running his trades, because Porter Stansberry has a strict rule against it. It is unfair to judge Jeff based on his performance during this epic bear-market rally. What we are experiencing now is a once in a lifetime event.