Dateline 19 Dec 2024. I’m writing this early and scheduling it to post on a day when I won’t be available for posting.
Every now and then we have subscribed to a stock trading service, trying to improve our financial management and our financial outlook for our retirement years. Rarely have these services done anything valuable for us. Most of the time we’ve broken even or done a little better than the cost of the service.
It used to be that people would contact us and offer stock trading tips for $4995 per year, or just $5995 lifetime. Slowly, those numbers came down to $1995 and $2995. Eventually, we started getting pitched newsletters for a few hundred per year. The last time I checked, most of the newsletters were down to $49.99 per year, almost cheap enough to take a risk.
These offers come via e-mails. No doubt the stock trading services we once were with sold out email address to other services, who sold to others. These guys are great at collecting e-mails, but do they really know any more than I do about stock trading?
How many of these gurus are out there. I just went through my email trash folder, and these are the “services” I found in it , all from e-mails deleted from Dec 1 to Dec 19.
- Prime Trading Alert
- Long Live American
- Market Commandos
- Market Trend Alert
- Proud for Profits
- Wave Traders
- Global Income Experts
- Peak Hours News
- Bald Eagle Traders
- Safe Investing Daily
- Daily Gold Index
- Capitalists Today
- Profit Tools Journal
- Strategic Finance Hints
- Market Guru Digest
- Groovy Trades
- Easy Budget Goal
- Fresh Market Data
C’mon, people. There really can’t be that many experts in stock trading. They may be experts in newsletter writing, but they make money off those newsletters and the occasional sucker who buy in for $2995 lifetime.
I unsubscribe to all of these, and they all disappear. But new ones are always there to take their place. The cheapness of transmitting e-mails makes it easy for them to do. The fact that I never asked them to send me an e-mail seems of no importance to them.
End rant.