Zeal launched their service pretty much at the start of the current commodity bull. Before I subscribed, I went back to look at a lot of their weekly essays and as far as I could tell, so far they’ve launched 4 campaigns 1) precious metals 2) oil 3) base metals 4) general stock market.
The general stock market campaign was launched in mid-2002 as the stock market bottomed. Too bad it was a “short” campaign and they screwed up big time.
The other 3 (or you can say one as they’re all commodities) have been generally profitable and they continue to recycle capital between profit taking and stop losses.
I would agree with the claim that so far they’ve only proven themselves to be capable of riding the commodity run and nothing else. It’s interesting to see how well they’d fare when the commodity bull ends / takes a breather.
With newsletters in general, I prefer writers that write in a way that I understand and can learn from, instead of just getting their picks. With Zeal in particular, I learned how to use what Zeal calls relativity (basically an asset’s price vs its own moving average) to help determine whether an asset’s price is resonable. I also enjoyed Zeal’s discussion of long valuation wave (basically stock market oscillates between extremes in terms of valuation like a sine wave) and I look forward to a period in the future when the S&P500 trades at 9x PEs and the headline “Sell All Your Stocks Now” appears on the likes of Businessweek. And that’s when I’ll sell my last underwear to plunge into the market.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with not following 100% of the advice even you choose to pay for it. Newsletter advice is meant to be one size fits all. Obviously we’re all different. However, if all you care about is performance to judge a newsletter writer’s capabilities, it’s better to look at the performance of the whole portfolio, and over a longer period of time, rather than focusing on a few picks over just a few months. Warren Buffet unwound his FX shorts last year probably at the worst possible time. I haven’t heard anybody say he’s a lousy investor because of that.