Author/Editor
Byron King
Publisher
Agora Financial
Description
This monthly newsletter focuses on natural resources investments.
Overall Rating
Rating: 2.7/5. From 3 votes.
Please wait...
2.8
Rating from 12 votes
If you’ve subscribed to Outstanding Investments, 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
Rating from 3 votes
Rating: 2.3/5. From 3 votes.
Please wait...
Your vote
- 5 Stars 0 Votes
- 4 Stars 0 Votes
- 3 Stars 1 Votes
- 2 Stars 2 Votes
- 1 Stars 0 Votes
Quality Of Writing/Analysis
Rating from 3 votes
Rating: 3.7/5. From 3 votes.
Please wait...
Your vote
- 5 Stars 0 Votes
- 4 Stars 2 Votes
- 3 Stars 1 Votes
- 2 Stars 0 Votes
- 1 Stars 0 Votes
Value For Price
Rating from 3 votes
Rating: 2.3/5. From 3 votes.
Please wait...
Your vote
- 5 Stars 0 Votes
- 4 Stars 0 Votes
- 3 Stars 1 Votes
- 2 Stars 2 Votes
- 1 Stars 0 Votes
Customer Service
Rating from 3 votes
Rating: 2.7/5. From 3 votes.
Please wait...
Your vote
- 5 Stars 0 Votes
- 4 Stars 0 Votes
- 3 Stars 2 Votes
- 2 Stars 1 Votes
- 1 Stars 0 Votes
I’ve subscribed to Outstanding Investments for about six months now. They are the good, the bad, and the ugly of investment newsletters. The good is they provide some interesting ideas and a good general education into market segments that should have some long term value. The bad is as previously stated, they don’t adjust their portfolio or holdings to account for the substantial market turbulance that we have today, rather sticking to more of a longer term buy and hold philosphy which is risky in today’s bear market. The bad is they have a horrible “read non-existent” statement of risk. I was reading a marketing piece from them yesterday and asking myself is this piece even legal under the SEC regulations? I always thought that every piece of advertising needed a balanced view of the risks and the rewards, but this piece had only the rewards and NONE of the risk even though the underlying assets were options that are hugely risky. This newsletter has value in the information, but certainly buyer beware…
I have subscribed to OI for many years (from shortly after Meyers left as editor). OI picks in the natural resource sector, especially oil/ngas were very good. However, their timing is non-existent. So if you were an early subscriber like me, you might have made 100% or more on some of the picks, but if you didn’t sell you’ve given it all back and then some. I can’t recommend this newsletter because it doesn’t take profits, use stop losses, or use any sort of hedging technique to minimize the risk. However, I do enjoy Byron King’s writing, and Kevin Kerr is a genius/guru.
They had a good run for 5 years on PM, energy, oil etc. but they never sold anything even though their other newsletters warned about the impending doom that came late 08. At the top the portfolio was up huge, but at the bottom? early 09 out of maybe close to 100 stocks only a few were in the black. Stocks went from +190% to -50% in few months!
This newsletter is concentrating mostly PM, oil etc. so until they start moving again there is no hope for it. Only thing that is good is the price: $69.
I just cancelled my subscription after 3 months. With the low price, I did not expect a lot. However, it has less to offer than I expected. I like their areas of focus mentioned in the first review, but their picks are pretty conventional. You can come up with a lot of these yourself without a lot of work. They take a couple of pages to review each pick, but there are very few original ideas in the writeup – most of the info can be found on the company’s website. Also, there is very little follow up of previous picks. Nearly all their active picks are rated “buy” with no ranking. Some of these go back to the early 2000’s with no apparent followup since then. I guess they want you to take their word for – sort of the color by numbers investing style -just do what you’re told. In short, if you’re going to pay for advice, there should be more original content and occasional followup on recommendations.
Overall, I’m a VERY happy subscriber. That is, I’m a happy “$1-per-week” subscriber to a $50 newsletter.
I subscribed to Outstanding Investments in May 2008. It was just as oil was running up to $147. When I signed up, I vowed that I would not just plunge in and start buying stocks just because some newsletter writer was talking about them. For a $1-per-week newsletter, I wanted to spend a couple of months just reading the email updates and other issues. I figured I’d just take it from there. At $50 per year it seemed like a good way to get some education.
I don’t think I was all that “smart” by not buying into the list of OI stocks. Maybe it’s just me being cautious. All the same, I didn’t buy into any of the OI recommendations until the fall. When the stock market started to tank in August and September, I froze. But in November I figured that stock prices were really low. (Yeah, they could go lower.) But my gut instinct said to start buying, and this time I used many of the OI stocks as a guide.
The end result is that by starting to buy from the OI list last November and December, I’ve done REALLY WELL with the OI stocks. I picked up a bunch of great stocks at super-bottom prices – energy, oil service, gold, others. I’ve been riding the price appreciation through the winter and into the spring.
It’s not just the stock ideas, either. I like the weekly emails from the editor Byron King. He’s incredibly smart about energy issues, and understands precious metals. He must spend a great deal of time studying and learning the subject matter, because he puts things into a great context.
Really, if all you want are the stock picks, you’re missing the best part of the newsletter. You’re not enjoying a great, running dialog with a super-smart guy who understands how the world works. For those of you who complain about how you “lost money” by following an advice newsletter that costs $1 per week? Well, maybe you’re getting what you paid for.
Been a subscriber for several years and just have not got the hang of this newsletter nor made any good profits. Today’s email gave almost 20 sells almost all will be losers so Agora must be planning something new or they think the world is ending.
I will not resubscribe as I am trying to extricate myself from all the Agora Publications which have all been losers for me.
Just look at the stocks on the back of the newsletter – the overall performance has been a disaster for the last few years. You can agree with their long term philosophy, but that does not make them good stock pickers or market timers. They claim to be long term “buy and hold”, but they occasionally give sell recommendations, but always on a stock in which they have lost a fortune. I can not recall ever seeing them give a sell recommendation on a stock which they had made money.
I subscribed to this for one year, but fortunately didn’t buy anything they recommended. The paper losses were about 80% loss in one year! If you note their “up” picks, they picked them several years ago. Anything they have recommended in the last year or two has been an absolute disaster. If you were lucky enough to buy in Jan-March, sure they are up, but so is everything.
Look at their recommended purchase price, and where it is now. Disaster after disaster.
Customer service was non-existant and they refused to answer my emails.
Agora Publishing basically has over 150 newsletters they produce. They loudly trumpet the (very) few that are temporarily up, and totally ignore the poor performers (until they are temporarily hot). When they give poor advice, which is often, they totally ignore it. It never happened. Then they tout their lastest newsletter to get folks hooked and money coming in the door.
Outstanding Investments–Agora Financial Group. Well written. Seems to give in depth analysis, but like all advisors I read, the picks are not up to much. I think advisors problem right now are the tricky times were are in. Wesm
Subscribed early ’08 to Out. Inv., after seeing them ranked so highly in Hulberts. You can imagine their ‘performance’ the next 1-1/2 yrs., however I DID renew since every newsletter(as well as almost every investment)TANKED! I still like them, I subscribe to several newsletters, however THANK GOODNESS I finally discovered “Stock Gumshoe,” cause those Teaser ads drove me crazy! Thank you, Stock GumShoe.
Outstanding Investments Byron King
Picked the beleaguered oils early this decade. Superior performance.
I bought the Outstanding Investments newsletter for the gold recommendation. It said that NG(Nova Gold) was its best gold recc. I have found now that of all of the minor gold stocks available that NG is the very worst of them all performance wise. It has stagnated, gone up and then gone down to about where it started. All I will say is O. I. reccs are not very good on gold.Very disappointed .
This newsletter is about picks from oil and natural resources
industry. During 2003-2008, anybody could have thrown a dart
at any company in these industries and made money since
every company in this industry was going up. After the energy
bubble bust, most of the picks have lost over 70% value.
Unless you think that the energy boom has legs, I would stay
away from this newsletter. My take is that the easy money
in energy industry was made during 2003-2008. From this point
onwards the future results are bound to be disappointing.
An interesting newsletter with a long term view and a focus on natural resource picks (I would say – in order to make the comment relatively short – that it has the same qualities and limitations as, a.o., Leeb’s Complete Investor).
I subscribed to this letter a few years back and dropped it, but succumbed to a two-year, $98 come on in late 2008. The result, more money flushed.
As others have noted, it does little good that a recommendation from five years ago is up 300 percent if the subscriber came onboard within the past two years, when most of the recommendations have, to put it charitably, stunk. And, remember if you check the current portfolio, many losers have been sent to loser Heaven, dropped from the portfolio, along with their putrid performances.
But what bothers me most is this: Last year King added MarkWest and in his explanation, alluded to the stock having
“dropped near $10 per share for a short time in December (2008)”
Because it seemed to me that King has a penchant for recommending stocks after big moves, I checked myself, and found that MarkWest had hit a 52-week low of $6.55 in December. I guess that’s near $10, but it’s much nearer to $7 or even $6. Repeated emails, asking for an explanation were not answered.
That silence spoke volumes. My subscription will NOT be renewed. Even if they gave me the thing, the cost in terms of lost capital would be too high.
Call this nitpicking, but my checking reveals that the stock hit a 52-week low of $6.55 in December. I’d have written it “under $7” to provide better context. A run from “near 10” to the current $23.25 is a little better than a double. From the $6.55 figure, it’s better than a triple and pushing a quadruple. I think that’s a significant context difference and am curious why what I believe is a misleading “near $10” description was used? Can you enlighten me?
(NEW MATERIAL)
Also, I just read your email concerning BP and gold. Specifically, I’m asking, are you recommending initiating and/or adding to positions in Kinross, Anglogold Ashanti, Hecla and Novagold now, or waiting to see the extent of the current bullion pullback before doing so?
I subscribed to OI from 2003 to 2007 and consider it a very high quality newsletter for picks in the commodities space. Kevin Kerr is a very bright guy. Reading through the posts here I’m struck by the same issue I’ve seen in ALL the other newsletter reviews. There is a disconnect in people’s ability (or is it willingness?) to view the stock market as an arena that ***regularly*** hands out danger and mishap to ***all investments***. What does this mean? The markets primary purpose is to buck as many “long term investors” off it’s back as possible, and it is very good at accomplishing that. W
Consequently we get a lot of newsletter authors getting panned or praised, based upon how one’s purchased stocks did in the past one, two or three years. People take it as a proved insight that if the stocks dived for two years, this is pure incontrovertible proof that the newsletter was bad. NOT SO! That is THE MARKETS talking back at you – they are telling you that your human’s eye view of their progress is waaaay to short for you to see their larger direction.
When you dial your focus out to the five year term, that is where you can just barely begin to see the macro trend of the investments you are buying! We’ve just come out of the largest market convulsion in 60 years. The last time commodities went through something this large was 1948-1950! So people look at this “giant hiccup” in the stock market, which made mincemeat out of the carefully chosen portfolio that people like Kevin Kerr oversee, and never question their assumption that his picks were garbage.
Now go over to the Hulbert Digest, which tracks what newsletters *really* accomplish, and discover that Outstanding Investments really and truly was the top performing commodities newsletter all through the main part of the past decade (!). No foolin’. Then notice that when you scan the ranks of the top performing newsletters *very few* are MARKET TIMERS. What is going on here is a problem of blurry focus. People look at a market convulsion and their only conclusion is “all the stocks Kevin told me to buy went down big-time”.
This is not an investor’s insight. It is a “hand me my profits on a plate, with a nice bow around it” insight. If you want to invest in commodities, but you are not prepared to avoid the overpowering impulse to sell your commodities stocks during a market collapse that lasted two years, you SHOULD NOT BE OWNING COMMODITIES STOCKS IN THE FIRST PLACE. There is a massive misconception at work here, about what it means to enter into a portfolio of commodities stocks. They are precisely subject to such massive steamroller catastrophic declines as just occurred. People who sell all these wonderful long term commodity stocks like Goldcorp or BHP Billiton or PetroBras because they got seasick from the past two years collapse, will NEVER collect the huge payoff after a decade long or two decade long commodities boom.
Sorry for the long screed on this point guys, but “they never told me when to sell” is the short term trader’s lament and at the end of another decade of commodities bull market, these players won’t be the ones who collected the really massive reward. The trick is to keep commodities stocks down to a “non greedy” percentage of one’s investments – means a small amount – then you hold them no matter what, for a full decade and you simply add to them at the bottom of the massive collapses. Kevin Kerr and OI are a high quality newsletter with some great picks in the commodities space. Having said that, I will agree with many here that Agora publications in general are a pain in the neck with their endless marketing. But that does not mean there aren’t one or two really good publications in among their garbage.
Steve Sjuggerud’s True Wealth
Kevin Kerr’s Outstanding Investments
Chris Weber’s Global Opportunities
Nothing is black and white. The truth of things is often sitting there “hiding in plain daylight”. The stocks in OI are often superb long term picks. The commodities bull market has another decade of stellar returns up ahead, but 2010 is going to remain a dangerous back and forth market. You could win a bundle but you could lose your shirt. Nothing’s easy. =:-)
BTW – I think this market is setting up for another really ugly decline (for a month or two). Starting right about now. So if you’ve been swearing you were going to get out whenever your stocks recovered somewhat from early 2009, right about now’s your chance. Every investing bet that is short the USD can get thrashed really badly if the “BIG BOUNCE” we’ve seen since March 2009 turns out to have really been only a bounce. Very dangerous moment to remain sitting in the markets with a very large exposure. People who insist on remaining fully invested for 2010 should have 50% cash available to average down. BTW Marc Faber agrees with this. Chris Weber agrees with it also. How many of these really smart guys do we want to bet against?
Lukester,
Interesting “screed.” But …. Kevin Kerr no longer is with Outstanding Investments and hasn’t been for some time. Byron King is flying solo . . . and largely crashing.
So, in case you were thinking of re-subscribing for more Kerr wisdom, don’t bother.
If you opt to sign up, you will be provided losers to sit with for multiple years to give it a fair test.
Downtrodden – Yeah, I know they’ve had quite a bit of turnover at the helm of that letter. Maybe itsa notsa good as it useta be? It’s definitely hit and miss with those Agora guys. And by the same token, it’s definitely “lotsa gravy” for the publishing house owners, with all that big fat river of subscriber subscriptions coming in, eh? Agora are a real “slick” piece of work, no doubt about it. In the pejorative sense. I just plain don’t like them as they are just too darn glib and packaged to be palatable. But a few of their publications are run by reputable analysts. … Just a *few*. Please don’t mistake me for an AGORA apologist!
I stumbled accross this newsletter in 2003 and was very enthused with the theories of its editor – John Myers. Specifically he talked about the inevitability of sky-tocketing prices in the area of non-renewable energy (oil and gas) and precious metals. I subscibed and did extremely well for 3 years. The editor was replaced with Byron King and the portfolio has stagnated and crashed. I still read it, but have stopped acting on the recommendations in the last 2 years. I still own stock i should have sold when it peaked – years ago – VLO, TSO specifically.
I dont like Byron King – i have found John Myers elesewhere
In his article about the oncoming horrible predicted war in the middle east, and in order to stir the fear inward readers,Mr. Byron King narrating funny stories, filled with historical and geographical mistakes such as:
1- Hormuz strait connects Persian gulf with the Indian Ocean but not with Mideterranian sea,(geographical mistake),
2- Bab Al-Mandeb in Arabic doesn’t mean the door of tears, it means the door of feeling bad towards a dead person(interpreting mistake),
3- The coast which is rich of oil is the coast of the Persian gulf but not the Caspian sea(geographical mistake)
4- pointing out all aspects of conflict in the Middle east without referring to the Israeli role in damaging the image of the United States in the region, nor showing the unlimited support given from the US administrations to the dictator regimes in the area such as Egyptian regime and the Saudi family, both are tyrant regimes,
5- No mentioning about the 200 nuclear war head stored in the Israeli arsenal,which provoked the nuclear possessing marathon in the area,
6- Forget to mention the role of the US military invasion to Iraq under the false reasons and leis,which was an invaluable gift to Iran, the main enemy to Iraq, which resulted in enforcing the Shia’ power in Iraq and eastern Saudi Arabia,