Want the skinny from investment newsletters without the $30,000 price tag?
Posted on January 16th, 2009 – 8:05 AMBy Kara McGuire
Like another print medium I’m intimately familiar with, investor newsletter subscriptions have been on the decline for years because of the web. I’m not terribly familiar with these publications because many of them don’t offer free subscriptions for journalists and I don’t have hundreds of dollars lying around to invest in them.
I figure that if someone said something of interest in one of these newsletters, it will hit the web some way, some how, for free. Or someone will write about it and I can learn about it through their lens. Not ideal, but hey, times are tough!
But a new site launched last week called Zepinvest aims to provide investment insight to the masses.
Their CEO walked me through the site, which currently offers more than 80 investor newsletters for $600 per year with new ones signing up regularly. Zepinvest claims that individual subscriptions for these investment web sites would cost $30,000 annually.
There is a 7-day trial period that you can use to peruse offerings.
As for how they choose them? CEO Michael Radov says Zepinvest execs look for paid content with a loyal following that’s been around for at least two years. He was somewhat vague about whether the newsletter authors need a track record of providing good advice, but said performance is a consideration and ZepInvest looks to ratings from places such as longtime investment newsletter tracker Hulbert Interactive for guidance.
You can search the site by most viewed, most recent, and by topic. You are also supposed to be able to search by stock ticker, but the search function wasn’t working during my tour; the site is still in beta mode.
It’s an interesting concept but I’ve got to say that $600 is still a lot of money for this buy and hold investor to pay for investment content. And like newspapers, I think it’s a tough sell for consumers used to getting their info online fast and free.
