Globe and Mail's Rob Carrick review of stock picking newsletters

Rob Carrick reviews again this year the best stock picking newsletter in Canada. Last year he had recommended Investment Reporter which I've tested myself (they had a one year trial for 97$). It was a good suggestion since it gave me some good suggestions for my non-rrsp portfolio (e.g.: from Aliments Couche-Tard to Canadian National,etc.).

This year, Stock Pickers Digest comes in first position. It seems to be a very speculative newsletter but it came with returns of 26.1% last year and 40.9% te year before. They have a deal that comes down to 74$ a year which is much cheaper than the 300$+ for Investment Reporter.

Investment Reporter came in very good second place at 15.8% returns last year. The nice things about their recommendations is that they tend to be safer, focusing more on blue-chip stocks. So you might sleep better at night with this one than if you're using Stock Pickers Digest.

If you look at the return of the sixth newsletter, 2.1%, it shows you that you have to be really careful when using newsletters as your sole source of investment advice. The Couch Potato portfolio would have given you much better returns. Mr Carrick notes though that the US picks are really what sunk the returns in that specific case....

I might give Stock Pickers Digest a try and compare it to Investment Reporter. I'll let you know how it goes :-) In any case, I never buy blindly what these guys or anybody else recommends. I always do my own analysis and try to target value stocks like those found by using Rule #1 techniques.