Zeal post their yearly performance and have a fairly good breakdown by various categories like number of profitable trades vs non-profitable ones, average gain, average loss etc. http://www.emergingstocks.ca does as well. By constrast Chris’ performance page seems skimpy. And there’s Adenforecast that doesn’t even bother to post yearly results as they just have a one liner that says they produced double digit returns X out of the past Y years.
But I don’t think Zeal and EMS’s numbers are audited; or at least they didn’t say so on the site. I guess since subscribers can request previous issues of the newsletters, one can trace back 12 issues of recommended picks and check the performance and cry foul if they don’t match the published performance. And that perhaps is a big enough business risk to make sure they are more often honest about it than not.
I haven’t visited enough newsletter sites to know whether audited performance is a convention or whether they’re more likely to disclose more details like Zeal or less details like Chris. Anyone here seen enough newsletters to know what the convention is ?
I suspect it’s probably a wide range … sort of a if you don’t like what you see you don’t have to subscribe kinda deal … how “friendly” the newsletter writer is then depends on how much he wants your business.
