Intelligent Investor

Great information and analysis on stocks. Often done with good humour and honesty. If you value neutrality or a fair go at both sides of politics, I'd avoid the Weekend Briefing. The left leaning and love for our worst ever PM is quite incredible. Alan Kohler does, after all, work for the ABC.

Happy II customer for many years – I have Intelligent Investor subscription for many years. Excellent source of information, however I always tried to see whether recommendations are suitable for me, didn't try to act blindly on Buys/Sell advice. Just don't expect them to be 100% right, but they are very honest with analyzing their mistakes. They do a lot of legwork of interpreting… Read more ·  1

financial report that I don't have myself time to do. Their portfolio tool is actually pretty good, very useful for dividends and reconciliation at tax time.

Beware of this broker – They closed my trades without even taking time to inform me and went ahead to announce that it was technical problems, but i received no compensation and lost so much, trustpilot stop trying to silent me by deleting my reviews. ( Fla )_ ( shrec )_ ( l a i m ) at gm_-ail DOT C O M or ( Fla )_ ( shrec )_ ( la im ) at (out) ~ (look) DOT c0m … Read more

made sure I got back every penny they failed to pay me, all I had to do was file a report to them and they acted really fast and made sure I was refunded in less than a week

Not a trading advice service! – A past user and decided to comment after seeing negative reviews by traders! I found the advice to be pretty good, like one reviewer I was also mainly using it to trade and in doing so you need to be careful as the advice isn't really geared towards trading. Shares that I bought off their recommendations usually went well, some I lost on due to… Read more

my "investment" horizon, but in general over a 5 yr time frame they were all pretty much in the money.

Making comments like the advisers aren't making enough on their own investments otherwise they'd not be doing this is kinda childish. Using that argument there'd be no financial advice available anywhere.

50% strike rate – I subscribed about 6 months ago and have bought and sold about 250k worth of stock using their recommendations. At the moment I am $2,500 down which I think is about even. At first the reasoning behind their recommendations made sense to me so I was blindly going with what they said but I think they must be missing something because some of the… Read more

stocks have gone down over 20% after they recommend it. This has really got me to start questioning their recommendations.

Sometimes they get it right but from my experience you are best to make your own decision on when to sell and take some profit. A lot of their recommended sell prices seem to be very high.

One good thing is there is a lot of really good educational information which teaches you how to balance your portfolio. Subscription is not cheap so time will tell if I pay again next year.

I highly recommend Intelligent Investor. I've tried them all – I’ve been a subscriber for almost the entire life of Intelligent Investor. Must be getting onto 20 years now. Without doubt, I believe they offer the very best value investing stock recommendation and analysis service in Australia. I have tried almost every newsletter out there. Intelligent Investor is the only one I have stayed with year after… Read more

year. In an industry full of cowboys, this team are professional and high quality.

They have taught me how to invest with thoughtful understanding and purpose, and they have guided me through some very scary market highs and lows. Each and every time navigating me along a profitable path. I have become a good investor, largely due to them. They do much more than report what the business papers already write. They go deeper and really add value to my understanding of each business they recommend. And they explain things very simply.

It really doesn't matter whether the share market goes up, down or sideways, because I now know what to do and why.

Of course, not every stock buy has been profitable, no one has ever done that, but if you follow their advice to be patient and to buy good, well managed businesses when their stock prices become undervalued, then over time you will do very well. If however you just pick up the odd recommendation and buy without diversification or care, then you may loose money. I don’t follow every recommendation of Intelligent Investor but I do follow most of their non-spec buys and my own returns match very closely their own audited performance.

You should never approach share market investing with a get rich quick gambling mindset. Many people do and they get hurt. Invest slowly, over time, into good businesses when their stock prices are low, then you should do very well. I highly recommend Intelligent Investor. ( I don’t use their InvestSMART services, only The Intelligent Investor side of the business).

I do not understand why they get good reviews – I had taken the Intelligent Investor subscription for a number of years. At one time 3 of the stocks they recommended and I bought kept going down, Namely Trade me, IOOF and Santos. I could accept Santos going down as I feel no one expected the oil price to fall so sharply as it did. When I wrote on the internal website about my concerns, and… Read more

how as the price fell they recommended the buy at a lower price and used this as their base price. I got a very pompous letter from [Name Removed] saying I should learn how to invest. When I queried [Name Removed] on why I got such a reply. I was ignored. If these guys were so smart they would have invested their own money and not have had to make money on advise.

Long term user . . . II is one of the best – I have subscribed to Intelligent Investor for several years, and they give me lots of good ideas, only some of which I invest in. Over the years I have tried all the big investing services, and found only three who are worth the money (in order) - Lincoln Stock Doctor (LSD) (the best qualitative research), Intelligent Investor (II) (the best for… Read more ·  1

generating longer term well researched investment ideas), and Marcus Today (MT) (best analysis of day to day stockmarket information). I would not invest in anything without consulting all three, but I certainly do not blindly follow their recommendations. Best investment I make every year is my membership of the Australian Shareholders Association for some serious investor self education, then pay for some good data through LSD, II and MT. Always do my own research before investing, but I would be lost without the ideas, data and analysis I get from these three great information providers.

They Exaggerate their returns – I have used II for a number of years but I have chosen not to continue for the below reasons. When looking at the past returns achieved for their portfolios, I have seen their numbers been overly exaggerated in some cases and sometimes it will totally change. For example once their marketing documents said their portfolios achieved 13%pa and… Read more

then another time It said 8%pa that was for the same portfolio and the same year so how could it be different.

Also in a lot of cases they have told users to buy certain stock like Amaysim and then after the stock price has dropped 80% from the buy price they only say they are ceasing coverage or they don’t even put a sell update.

Their whole strategy is to buy low and hold for a couple of years but if the stock pick was a total mistake they need to communicate that mistake to users.

Also their managed funds have not performed well the Small Cap fund is down 20% for the year when the index is up 10% and their listed fund has just been dropping in price.

All in all not impressed they are like another Motley fool.

Why does INV keep changing its name?? Dodgy! – I invested 20k in Fat Prophets(FAT) when it started. The idea was to invest in a diversified portfolio. After about 12 or so years and 5 or 6 company name changes that $20k is now $2k. That company is Investsmart(INV). Why would investors subscribe to the financial advice services if a company whose market value has steadily decreased to 10%?

Best advice, big profits! – In depth stock analysis and quality advice has helped me make significant over the last 2 years. I also tried recommendations from other top companies within similar market but made a big loss