Investing is a tricky business, though that’s part of what makes it so fun. For those of us who make a living or a serious hobby out of investing, learning everything we can about the art and discovering what the sharpest minds in the industry have to say on recent topics can be educational and entertaining.
That’s why every serious investor should subscribe to at least one of the best investing newsletters. Far from being simple and vapid digital magazines, the best investing newsletters often contain actionable and useful trading advice. Many of them offer specific stock recommendations or analytics reports that can make a huge difference in your investing strategy.
Let’s break down the top 10 investing newsletters so you can make the most of the market boom we’re enjoying right now.
The Motley Fool
Let’s start with The Motley Fool – the creators of arguably the most well-reviewed and popular investing newsletter on the market. That’s no surprise, either, since The Motley Fool has produced some of the best investing books in the business.
There are actually two investing newsletters to check out: Stock Advisor and Rule Breakers (more on the latter below). Stock Advisor is a better choice for most average investors, especially if you’re starting out or if you already have a little investing experience and want to maximize your gains.
Specifically, The Motley Fool Stock Advisor offers recommendations for so-called “Steady Eddies” – stocks or ETF’s. These are all ostensibly sound investments that combine good growth and stability for long-term goals. Sticking with The Motley Fool long-term, and following their stock recommendations, may very well see you enjoy double or triple gains every 12 months.
Also nice is that The Motley Fool lets you know when you need to sell a stock, whether or not it’s one of the recommendations or several other high-value assets they’ve been looking at recently. Each newsletter comes with two stock recommendations per month, and a few “best of” lists for the best stocks to keep an eye on over the course of the following year.
Another nice aspect of this newsletter is reasonable pricing. You can try The Motley Fool for $19 as a new customer, though you’ll eventually have to pay the regular price of $199 per year after seeing what they offer. They do have a 30-day moneyback guarantee if you aren’t satisfied, but trust us – you will be!
Kiplinger’s Personal Finance
This monthly magazine is more than just a basic investing newsletter – it’s a full-on publication that focuses on investing and money management of all stripes. You can find advice for any monetary subject, including buying the car, owning a home, saving for retirement, and much more. Specifically, Kiplinger’s Personal Finance focuses on low-cost and long-term investing, making it a particularly good choice for new investors.
Every new issue covers topics like:
- individual stock trends
- greater trends across the market
- bond investing in advice
- real estate investing advice
- retirement planning and stocks to look out for
- tips for newcomers to bank accounts and credit cards
As you can see, the information contained in one of these magazines is quite comprehensive. We think it’s a great staple choice if you only have to pick one investing newsletter and don’t want to break the bank.
That’s partially because you can sign up for Kiplinger’s Personal Finance at just $12 per year. The price does go up after you take advantage of the newcomer deal, but it’s an overall solid investing magazine that has something to offer for every investor.
It’s not quite as specific or useful for specific investment strategies, like stocks, aggressive portfolio growth, diversification, and so on. It’s more of a jack of all trades newsletter that, even if you have a few more specific newsletters on your doorstep every month, you can still find quite a bit of value in.
Morningstar
Some newsletters focus more on investing research – as a result, they’re better for more technical minded investors or investors with some academic experience in the subject. Morningstar is arguably the best of the best of these newsletters, and it’s incredibly in-depth, so beginners will want to look elsewhere.
Morningstar contains valuable investing information for stocks, bonds, ETFs, funds, personal finance planning, and much more. But what’s really valuable is that all this investment advice is backed by real research and thorough studying.
As mentioned, economics majors or investing gurus will find a lot to like in this newsletter. Poring over the explanations can get technically complex and be a bit dry for light reading, but there’s no denying the strides you’ll make in understanding the market by reading a few issues of Morningstar.
Unlike many other newsletters, it doesn’t always offer specific investment advice for certain stocks or ETFs. You’ll still have to make your ultimate moves yourself, which could be a good thing if you like to feel that your market gains are all because of your own instinct or intuition.
Not sure if you want to take the plunge? The good news is that Morningstar offers a two-week free trial, so you can check out a free issue before committing any money to the newsletter. If you do decide to enter a paid contract, it’s $29.95 per month. This is quite pricey, especially compared to many other annual-bundle newsletters.
But we feel it’s still very much worthwhile for anyone with a technical mind for stock market analysis, or for those who want to be able to predict where the market will go over the next few months to a year.
Motley Fool Rule Breakers
The Motley Fool returns once again, but we wanted to specifically point out their Rule Breakers newsletter, which is more oriented for aggressive investors with an instinct for high risk, high reward strategies.
Like the Stock Advisor newsletter, Rule Breakers offers two stock recommendations per month, and each recommendation is based on the group’s predictions for future market leaders. They specifically focus on a few major aspects to identify their titular “rule breaker” assets, including:
- emerging industries
- past price appreciation
- excellent management
- sustainable advantages
While these stock recommendations are normally quite solid, and the methodology for arriving there as well explained, there’s no guarantee that you’ll make huge money using this newsletter. The very nature of these stock recommendations means that they’re volatile, so it’s to be expected that there are more losers with this newsletter than Stock Advisors.
But there’s also no denying that using The Motley Fool Rule Breakers will accelerate your growth if you end up betting on winners. The focus on aggressive investing means that Rule Breakers is certainly better suited for long-term investors or those with a little more disposable cash compared to younger folks looking to build up for retirement.
The cost for Rule Breakers occasionally dips down to $99 a year with certain savings promotions, but it’s normally around $299 per year under regular pricing. Try to grab it during one of the promotions before fully committing.
Tim Sykes Penny Stock Alerts
The focus of this investing newsletter can be seen right in the name – penny stocks! It’s also the rare newsletter focused more on a single investor compared to larger investment groups or firms. Because of this, it has a slightly different subscription model.
You pay Tim Sykes Penny Stock Alerts $2.50 per day, or as a bundle of $74.95 per month, and you get a daily email by 8 AM EST. That email will contain key information to supercharge your penny stock trading efforts. The email has a special penny stock “watchlist” that includes stocks to check out when you open up your market tools for the day.
Furthermore, you can visit Tim Sykes’ personal blog, where he talks all about how to trade penny stocks and updates his progress throughout the day. Sometimes include information about flash-in-the-pan trading opportunities, the likes of which are common with penny stocks around the world.
Subscribing to this newsletter also means you can track Tim Sykes’ trading activity. It’s basically a kind of opt-in copy trading, and new penny stock traders can play the market and at be rest assured that they’re making trades that are approved by an industry veteran.
Granted, penny stock trading has the potential for big eventual losses and winnings take a while to accumulate. This investing newsletter is also, obviously, only suitable for penny stock traders. But if you want to make your fortune in this particular market, there are few newsletters more worth your time and money.
Trade Ideas Trade of the Week
This investment newsletter is particularly valuable for budget-minded traders because it’s totally free! That’s right – unlike the vast majority of other newsletters, you don’t have to spend a penny on this one to get actionable market trading advice.
Subscribe to Trade Ideas TOW and you’ll get a weekly newsletter that contains a unique trading idea. These ideas are original every time (so you don’t have to worry about repeats if you stick with the newsletter over the long-term), and each idea is generated using market analytics statistics.
Of course, as a free newsletter, Trade Ideas TOW doesn’t offer the same kind of immediate value as other investing newsletters. The ideas the newsletter provides are sometimes as specific as a single stock (buy or sell), or maybe more general for a certain industry or company.
Additionally, Trade Ideas TOW’s messages are far from the most technical or out-of-this-world amazing. Many of them are just that: ideas, and more experienced investors probably have no shortage of those. Thus, Trade Ideas TOW is one of the better newsletters for beginning investors that are both more likely to need help finding ways to play the market to their advantage and who might not have a lot of disposable income.
Even for experienced traders, this is never a bad newsletter to add to your weekly inbox, especially since it doesn’t cost a dime to take advantage of.
Cotton’s Technically Speaking
Investors seem to love naming their newsletters with a clever reference to their focus. This is also the case with Cotton’s Technically Speaking, which focuses on technical investing: one of the most potentially rewarding types you can practice. Granted, this does mean you need to have a little experience in the stock market and with technical investing, so beginners should move on to one of the other newsletters above.
This newsletter includes a weekly market report, which itself provides short and medium-term investing ideas for appropriate industries like biotech, energy, and banking. The main publisher of the newsletter, Joe Cotton, offers specific pick recommendations. Most of these are long equity, focusing on purchasing common, but specific, stock shares for long-term growth.
This also means that Cotton’s Technically Investing focuses on stable growth rather than aggressive earnings. Indeed, if you follow the charts and strategies as outlined in the newsletter, you’ll hold most of the stocks you purchase for at least several months.
To this end, consider Cotton’s Technically Investing if you’re fine with waiting around a year for your investments to pay off, like if you’re toward the end of your career and are trying to boost your nest egg.
A one-year subscription is $199, and there’s a 30-day moneyback guarantee. Fortunately, you can check out Cotton’s Technically Investing with a few sample issues on the main website.
GCOR (Global Changes and Opportunities Report)
Excuse the acronym, but GCOR is one of the best investing newsletters you can get your hands on. It’s quite similar to another investing newsletter (the Early Warning Report), but it’s better for investing in general since the main writer, Jim Powell, focuses on ETFs, large-cap stocks, and plenty of nontraditional investments. In other words, it’s a great newsletter for those looking to maximize portfolio diversification.
The GCOR usually focuses on macroeconomics and industrywide trends instead of looking at specific industries or niche markets. This makes them valuable for virtually all investors instead of just a small handful.
But Powell also occasionally leaves specific stock recommendations that you can take or leave depending on your own instincts/analysis. These are normally related to the analytical topic at hand, so there’s a satisfying level of thematic consistency across newsletter issues that we really appreciate.
Not sure whether you want to give GCOR a try? There’s a sample issue you can download and examine for yourself right on the website. The sample issue changes every once in a while, but remember that the advice there may be a bit dated if you check it out today.
Ultimately, GCOR offers a solid bird’s-eye view of the market at large and provides good long-term advice if you want/have a diverse portfolio. Prices are a bit high at $139 per year to start, then up to $229 per year after the first annual subscription. More experienced investors will probably get more value from this newsletter than beginners.
Dividend.com
Dividend.com offers a newsletter with premium reports that emphasize, as you might guess, dividend growth investing. As a result, it’s a more specialized newsletter instead of a general advice magazine like many of the others above. Dividend investing may become even more popular as the 2020s progress and investors look for greater direct yields to their investments.
To access the newsletter, you have to choose either the Lite or Premium plans. The Lite plan costs $99 per year and includes research performed by the Dividend.com investment company, a selection of ideal stocks to invest in or watch, and a daily dividend newsletter, which comes with additional advice, opinion pieces, and analytics reports.
The Premium plan costs $149 per year. It comes with a few extra goodies, including dividend payout changes, another special stock watchlist, spreadsheet exports straight from Dividend.com, and more dividend-focused articles. That price isn’t as high as many of the other excellent investing newsletters on this list, but you get a ton of value for your subscription.
The research tools available on the site, which you can access by subscribing to one of the newsletters below, are excellent in and of themselves, as well. Since the company posts over 40 years of dividend investing history, you can rest assured that the report and analytics writers know exactly what they’re talking about.
Even better, Dividend.com offers a neat little widget that allows you to track your dividend earnings from multiple online brokers or platforms. All in all, we think Dividend.com offers a deceptively large amount of value for relatively reasonable prices.
Stansberry Research
Stansberry Research is the last top investing newsletter to check out, and it’s based on a solid research firm that also produces a fantastic podcast (the aptly-named Stansberry Investor Hour).
Stansberry Research’s newsletters – specifically the Stansberry Investment Advisory – are some of the priciest on the market, which means you should do a lot of soul-searching before deciding whether the tips they can offer are worthwhile. We’re talking $199 for a yearly newsletter package. You can occasionally find lower subscriptions that take the price down to around $99 per year, but they’re few and far between.
But the content within is certainly worthwhile for some stock market investors. The Stansberry Research produces detailed and structured recommendations for the most discerning investors, as well as specific stock recommendations and analyses for those recommendations. This way, you actually know why the writers of the newsletter decided to pick that stock or ETF.
Even better, Stansberry Research newsletters use stop losses and add these to their detailed recommendations.
They don’t offer any free sample issues, but we do like that there’s a 30-day moneyback guarantee in case you find the research to be wanting. Most, we feel, will want more than a taste after their first try.
Should You Always Follow the Advice of Investing Newsletters?
The short answer is “no”, even though most investing newsletters worth your time and money are written and well-vetted by industry professionals.
There’s a simple reason for this – the market, for all of its apparent transparency, is ultimately never fully predictable. If someone tells you with 100% certainty that buying such and such stock at such and such price at a certain date will result in big gains, they’re lying.
They may be quite confident in that stock pick, or in an overall strategy. But no one knows with full certainty that their strategy is the winning one.
To this end, it’s best to look at investing newsletters as strategy guides or helpful advice. They’re not foolproof manuals you can follow to the letter to make tons of money off the stock market. Smart investing newsletter readers will use the advice contained within, sure, but also exercise good judgment when determining whether to follow the outlined strategies or pass.
Investing newsletters will be most useful for those with a little market investment experience. But they can also be very useful if you are just starting out and want to immerse yourself in the investing world.
How to Choose an Investing Newsletter
There are tons of investing newsletters to choose from above, let alone on the wider internet! So figuring out the right investing newsletter to potentially spend your money on is important.
Samples
The first thing you should check out, before anything else, is whether a newsletter comes with a few samples or a free trial. Samples give you a sense of a newsletter’s writing style, available information, stock recommendations, and so on. It also shows you what areas of the market they focus on.
If an investing newsletter doesn’t have at least one sample for new readers, only sign up with extreme caution and under heavy recommendation from trusted advisors in the real world.
Investing Focus
You should also consider the investing focus for every newsletter you subscribe to. For instance, Dividend.com’s investing newsletters necessarily focus on dividend investments. Tim Sykes emphasizes penny stock trading, and so on. It doesn’t do you any good to pick up a newsletter focusing on a type of trading you aren’t interested in or aren’t very good at.
Reviews
If you still aren’t convinced about a particular newsletter, check out the reviews from across the web. Investors don’t hesitate to inform the general public whether a newsletter is useful or if it’s a bunch of mumbo jumbo not worth the digital ink it was written with.
Price
Lastly, be sure to consider the price for a newsletter before committing yourself to a yearly or multiyear subscription. Most investment newsletters have lower than average prices for new readers – these can be as big as $100 off a yearly subscription. Don’t be fooled by these lower prices, as you’ll have to pay the overall regular price as soon as your yearly subscription is up and you renew.
Some investing newsletters are totally free, like Trade Ideas TOW. But most top-tier investing newsletters with real or valuable information will cost you at least $75-$100 or so.
Conclusion
All in all, the best investing newsletters are likely the ten described above, plus maybe a few other edge cases for specific investing strategies or stock types. We think the ideal investing newsletter should fit your budget and investing focus more than anything else – take the time to check out each of the above options and see the samples they offer before committing to a subscription.
You’ll be a lot happier reading a single, regular newsletter you appreciate and enjoy than trying to sift through a bunch of newsletters you can’t use.
