TLDR Motley Fool vs. Zaks vs. LevelFields
LevelFields: worth it for any level investor. especially good for trading/big returns.
zacks: entry price is worth it. would not recommend higher level services at 3600/yr
fool: no, better to buy QQQ
IP: no
Tried to be objective about it and lay out the pros/cons as I think different level investors and those with different budgets might feel differently, but my take is the above.
New
- Comparing 3 Different Strategies
- I traded 3 opposing strategies for the last 60 days here’s how it went
- Strat 1: traded events
- Strat 2: used third party
- Strat 3: I consider this my control, I bought the dip in the Nasdaq, every time NASDAQ went down 4% I bought the QQQ. Nasdaq one is weak. (Spy could use here instead but QQQ more volatile)
- Strat 3: I picked one stock that was biggest premarket winner, I bought it at open, and sold by noon. (Cite CNBC, pick one source and stick)
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Titles: I traded on events vs XYZ for 30 days
I traded on events for 30 days, here’s how I did
I Let 3 Stock Screeners Pick Trades For Me For 90 Days
I traded 3 opposing strategies for the last 60 days here’s how it went
I decided to run a short experiment for the last month or two testing out a few different strategies to mix things up. In no way did things scientifically, this was more an exercise to ease some of my recent market frustration and trade in some different new ways.
Here’s the three different strategies and how the performed over the last 60 days
Strategy 1 Identifying Potential Trades with Zacks #1 Rank List:
I used Zacks #1 rank list as my starting point then filtered using the VGM(value, growth, momentum) score. I would sort to view only the stocks with a rating of A(broke this rule sometimes). I did this a few times and would do some DD on the few companies identified, then determine whether to make the trade or throw it on a watchlist.
Here’s a few of my positions and how they’ve done:
09/02/22 HLIT: 09/02/22 - Communication/tech company sol after a few days for ~9%
09/02/22 BAESY: European defense contractor that won some big contracts recently, not much movement exited down -2%
09/13/22 CHK: Energy company play that was intriguing, down -8%
08/04/2022 ESTE: Another energy play here, held onto this one for 2-3 weeks for a return of ~7%
08/05/22 HOG: Always wanted a Harley probably why this caught my eye - exited after 5 weeks for ~10%
08/10/2022 PPC: food company, down ~19%+ on this one and still holding
08/16/2022 SU: Exited this one at breakeven early oct, another energy co from Zacks
Total Return: -3%
Strategy 2: Trading events with LevelFields
Trading on events definitely can be risky and my results here are surely biased due to the stocks & events I ended up choosing. I used LevelFields, which I like because it filters down news to the events that are significant and likely to effect share prices and separates that from all the endless news. I set it to track buybacks as well as government contracts, and mass layoffs, and some other stuff. This strategy can be rough around the edges, but it’s been a unique way to find some companies to watch that I might’ve never seen.
08/03/22 RGA: Health insurance co, dividend increase trade, stock jumped pretty quick, regret selling this one for 4%
08/16/22 CCRN: Healthcare conglomerate, bought on news of buyback, sold a bit early here for 7% gain
08/30/22 FREY: Traded battery manufacturer on day of news about a $3b contract beginning in 2025. A day or two after took profits at 4.7%
09/07/22 TASK: Had been watching taskus for a while, pulled trigger on notification of a big buyback. Up ~5%+ in a few days and took some profits
09/06/22 COUP: Tried another buyback play here, was able to get out ~even 0%
9/21/22 BA: Bearish event but thought Boeing could rally, took loss at -8%
9/20/22 PLYA: Bought this on news(buyback), fell on news, down -9%
Total Return: +3.7%
I enjoyed trading on events and after some early success definitely learned that you have to be careful, as it can just as easily go the other way or an event can already be priced in
Strategy 3: Buying the Dip
This strategy is somewhat of my control, and the least scientific. If I noticed the NASDAQ or S&P dropping by more than a few percent (3-5%+), I would buy the dip. I ended up exiting some of these positions but planning on keeping most and continuing to DCA, looking at each trade individually for purposes of calculating return trade by trade.
08/22/22 SPY: down 9%
08/23/22 QQQ: sold on slight bump, down -2%
08/31/22 SPY: Positive few days after buying dip, sold some SPY pushed towards 410, 2.5% gain
09/21/22 SPY: Sold after qqq climbed back above 300 after a dip, -2%
09/23/22 QQQ: About breakeven here 0% gain
09/30/22 SPY: Little 5% gain here, we’ll see if this will change by end of week
Total Return: -4.5%
TLDR:
60 Day Experiment Results
VGM Zacks #1 Rank List Return: -3%
Trading Events LevelFields Return: +3.7%
Buying the Dip* Return: -4.5%
SPY -8.2%
QQQ -10.5%
Momentum Indicators
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OLD POST;
I Tried 4 Paid Services for Stock Selection: Here are The Results for 2021 and 2022
📷
ZACKS
TLDR
- They make a ton of recommendations. Many products underperform the market
- Their annual Top 10 list did great in 2021 but not 2022, but you pay for it at $3600 per year. You can get a base subscription for $249/yr for just the stock screeners which is reasonable, though many are baked into Fidelity’s platform for free.
- Their stock screeners are great for finding stocks, especially the VGM and Zacks Rank #1 screener. But to do it right, you need to spend 5hrs a week on it seeing what’s new.
Zacks offers a couple dozen different lines of stock picking services plus a few dozen different stock screens. It’s quite overwhelming actually, but also a bit addictive to pour through them to find some good stocks. I found most of their services don’t outperform the market or have so many stocks in them it would be a full-time job to buy and manage them.
For most of the screeners, the time it takes to vet them and look at each of the 50 plus stocks in each is too much of a time commitment, but looking at the first few in the list gives some ideas of what is working.I started just looking at the recent additions to see if there were secular trends and that helped.
I tried out some of their healthcare picks with mild success: I was going to share the names but the bots on here blocked them because they are under 300M market cap. One was bought out for 40% over purchase price. One went up 6X. Two fizzled down -70%. If you want the names DM me.
I did OK using the value, growth, and momentum stock screener but I really had to spend a lot of time separating out the good ones and figuring out what was recently added, which they don’t tell you. If you get them too late, the move has already occurred and you will likely see the stock correct quickly.
A few gems I traded from their list around March of 2021 included SEM (health clinics), DAC (container shipping), BERY (financial), and MT (steel). My target was +100% for each and I made that within a year of buying for each. I bought options. HOLX was an exception. I lost -15% on that pick, though it was mostly due to the fact it soared high from COVID revenues and then sold off quickly as the vaccines rolled out. It’s since back to slightly above the purchase price.
Zacks Top 10 Stocks of 2021 - their premium offering and associated returns. I did not buy all of these - only SPSC and PWR. But I did track them all in a watchlist.
- Percent Winner Rate: 90%
- Avg return: 48%
- SPY Return: 30%
AIMC (transmissions) 2021
Return: -6%
Return To date: - 23%
SPSC (supply chain mgmt solutions)
2021 Return: +31%
Return to Date: +15%
APTV (vehicle parts)
2021 Return: +28%
Return to Date: -15%
PWR (energy generation consulting services)
2021 Return: +64%
Return to Date: +107%
IAA (online vehicle sales)
2021 Return: +46%
Return to Date: -41%
WSC (storage units)
2021 Return: +72%
Return to Date: +84%
Macy’s (clothing retailer)
2021 Return: +144%
Return to Date: +76%
GDDY (domain registration)
2021 Return: +3%
Return to Date: 0%
ZBRA (tech, sensors)
2021 Return: +54%
Return to Date: -7%
ULTA (beauty stores)
2021 Return: +46%
Return to Date: +38%
For 2022’s top 10 stocks, the advice has not been quite so good, but the year isn’t over yet. I didn’t buy any this year because I was short on the market, but I have been tracking the performance to see if they can match what they did last year. So far, not so good.
- Percent Up Since Rec: 20%
- Avg Return of Rec: -8.8%
- SPY Return: -10.3% as of time I drafted
2. LEVELFIELDS
TLDR:
- Event-driven alerts work and I like that the success rate is visible on the website
- There are a lot of alerts you can subscribe to, so it’s best to choose one of their lower volume, higher performing strategies to avoid opportunity overload
- It’s good at finding high shorter term returns with high success rates
- For the biggest companies (AAPL, TSLA, etc), my news alerts arrived faster. For those under 100B market cap, it's very helpful.
- Price is 228/yr but their emails of a big update seem to be hinting a hike is coming soon
Winning Percent: 79%
Avg Return/Trade: 23%
I’ve been using an event-driven research system called LevelFields for about a year now. It was a little rough around the edges in the early days but has gotten much better over time. It’s good at identifying news events early that drive stock prices up and down, often from direct announcements from companies. It shows stock patterns following events, which is cool, especially for the negative events so you can see how far the stock will probably fall.
They effectively filter the noise out of the news and just focus on a couple dozen event types that really shake stock prices: hedge fund investor moves, layoffs, shorts, FDA approvals, leadership changes, Amazon new product launches, and a couple dozen other types. Unlike the technical pattern alert systems out there I’ve seen, it focuses on real news, which I like, as I feel pattern trading is often a lot like staring at clouds and making shapes out of them in your mind.
For the big companies everyone watches, they don’t beat news alerts. But for the bulk of the companies you’ve never heard of or have forgotten about, it flags a lot of opportunities and companies on the rise.
Most of the time I trade with the information. Sometimes I use it to find stocks for longer term plays. Like Zacks, they put out a lot of opportunities so any analysis here is going to be biased by what I’m choosing to act on. But they publish the success rate and show all past alerts so the past performance is embedded in the platform under each strategy, which is nice.
The winning rates for their strategies range from a high of 90% to a low of 50%, with most in the 70% range. You can alter the outcomes by adjusting the filters for the types of stocks. I don’t like to buy commodities and microcaps generally, as the prices fluctuate too much on factors beyond the company’s control, so I filter those out.
Lately, I’ve been trading on their layoffs scenario, which tracks companies firing people. If you filter for just expensive stocks that are firing people to grow earnings, you can get to 80% accuracy in price prediction. I’ve noticed some events cause the share prices to pop right away, so I often wait for the first selloff before entering the trade.
Here are the alerts I opted to act on and how they turned out. I’m noting hold times since it’s not a buy and hold forever system though I supposed you could for some stocks.
10.21.21 - Qualcomm. Return: stock rose +50% in 1 month. Traded options for +300% gain.
11.11.21 - Northern Gas (NOG). Return: +45%. I held for 5 months.
12.9.21 - CVS. return: +60% in 1 month (options)
11.18.21 - BLDR. Return: +67% in 4 days (options)
12.04.21 Signature Bank SBNY. Return: +16% in 1 month. I then traded a couple more times on it as it was doing well until the Crypto crash. It holds a lot of staked Bitcoin.
12.6.21 Silicon Motion (SIMO). +25% in 2 months. Still like this semi and will buy back. They do memory chips and had been killing it. It was hard to find a cheap semi at one point but this one always traded at a reasonable p/e.
12.9.21 Labcorp (LH): +8% in 1 month but I held it too long and exited down -10% due to covid rates dwindling and testing volumes decreasing
12.15.21 - Broadcom (AVGO). Return: 0% Sold off when war started.
2.3.22 - Quest (DGX). Return: +50% in 1 month via option trade
2.15.22 - Upstart (UPST): Return: +30% on options in 1 week. I had owned this stock already and was trading it off and on for about a year..
2.17.22 Blocked by mod bots from showing: +50% in 2 days
2.24.22 - ALSN (Allison Transmission ). Return: +8% in 1 month
3.11.22 - Applied Materials (AMAT). Return: +4% in a week.
3.17.22 - Lockheed Martin (LMT): Return: +70% in 3 weeks (option trade on news Germany was buying planes)
3.17.22 - CMC Steel. Return: +10% in 1 month
3.31.22 - LGVN. Return: +20% in 1 day.
5.9.22 - TWTR. Return +100% on puts in 1 mo. This was the “Elon will back out” trade a big hedge fund was betting on, so I joined them. A short would’ve worked too.
5.24.22 - Digital Ocean (DOCN): Returns TBD. Up 8% on equity but I’m selling covered calls for an extra 20% annually. I really like this company. It’s like a mini AWS that is more cost effective for small businesses.
6.15.22 - Space company. +50% in two days
6.24.22 - Digital Turbine (APPS). +31% in 2 months. I think this was mostly luck given the timing of the bear market rally.
6.28.22 - Alibaba (BABA). -30% on options in 3 weeks. Can’t seem to get a break on BABA.
7.14.22 - Pinterest (PINS). +30% on hedge fund moves
7.27.22 - Mining company. return: -10% on option puts. Still puzzled why the stock is up.
7.28.22 +4% and holding. They are one of the only medicines for monkeypox.
8.12.22 - Peloton (PTON). +10% in a day on its layoff news
8.15.22 -3%. It makes solar cells in China and is growing revenues by triple digits.
3. THE FOOL
I resisted trying out the Fool for years because they wrote so many articles and ads touting their stock picks that I assumed they had to be full of it. But, when I had enough money in the account, I decided to try it out and see if they maybe could save me some time finding stocks early or if they were the cause of certain pump and dumps I was watching.
TLDR:
- They pick good, overvalued growth stocks but they don’t try to time the market at all because they want 5 year hold times, which can lead to big drawdowns while you wait
- I would’ve lost a fortune had I taken much of their advice. However, if you have a decade long time horizon and can stomach 75% pullbacks, the stocks they recommend will probably come out ahead
- They repurpose recommendations from different subscription tiers, often using lower tier recs to increase the returns of higher level subscriptions
- They make a lot of recommendations. It’s time consuming to keep up.
- Big range of prices from $100/yr to $5,000/yr and they upsell a lot
They had a lot of subscription options to choose from that range from a hundred bucks or so a year to $5K per year. I signed up for a few of them, including their stock advisor, IPO one, and cloud innovators and small caps service. I should note that the lists they provide overlap enormously, so they clearly repurpose their recommendations and charge you more to get the same recs again and again.
For the cloud services recommendations, I found they generally picked out solid growth companies (DOCN, DOCU, ESTC,etc) but too late, after the stocks were already richly valued. So I traded them instead of buying them. Below are the email recommendations they sent out I saved.
12/17/21 Buy Recommendations W/Subsequent Performance Since Then
Intel (INTC): -29%
JFrog (FROG): -17%
Procore (PCOR): -18%
12/14/21 Recommendations W/Subsequent Performance Since Then
Sell Cloudflare (NET). Return since: -41%
Buy Autodesk (ADSK). Return since: -11.5%
Buy Crowdstrike (CRWD). Return since: +1.12%
Buy Docusign (DOCU). Return since: -52%
Buy Ncino (NCNO). Return since: -35%
Buy Twilio (TWLO). Return since:-66%
Buy Zoom (ZM). Return since: -40%
I Tracked Every investment from their Small Caps Playbook List from January 2021. Here are their returns since then.
- Percent Winners: 33%
- Avg return per rec: -25%
- Redacted by mods -88%
- Redacted by mods: +7%
- Camping World (CWH): +20%
- Flugenics (FLGT): 0%
- Ad company (blocked by mods): -68%
- Inspire Medical Systems: +14%
- Blocked by mods: -34%
- NCino: -48%
- Blocked by mods: 0%
I kept emails of other recommendations, though I admit this list is not complete since they only sent emails containing the rec half the time. The rest of the time they send you to their website to watch a 30-minute webinar of their picks in the middle of the work day, which was strange to me and defeated my purpose of saving time digging through stock screeners. I tracked from the next day’s opening price.
StockAdvisor
2.3.22 Buy ABNB. Return Since: -17%
1.6.22 Buy Confluent CFLT: Return since: -59%
12.20.21 Sell Healthequity. Return since: +38%
12.20.21 Sell Biotech company (blocked by mods). Return since: -69%
12.20.21 Sell Grand Canyon Education. Return since: +1%
12.20.21 Sell Markel. Return since: +3.34%
12.20.21 Sell Ollie’s. Return since: +41%
12.16.21 Buy ROKU: Return since: -72%
12.2.21 Buy DOCN: Return since: -48%
10.7.21 Buy SHOP. Return Since: -70%
10.7.21 BUY DOCN: Return since: -42%
9.23.21 Buy UPST. Return since: -90%
IPO Trailblazer:
1.31.22 Buy Digital Ocean (DOCN). Return since: -20%
1.31.22 Buy Confluent (CFLT). Return since: -51%
1.31.22 Buy Roblox (RBLX). Return since: -25%
1.31.22 Buy Docebo (DCBO). Return since: -36%
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