Stewie is a good guy. He puts in the work and he wants his traders to be successful. There are a few core setups that he focuses on, and you can learn those setups by joining his service.
Stewie is a decent trader. He can be unfocused, and trades a little scared from time to time, but he has the attribute that is most important: he limits his losses to prevent blowing up.
So as a totally new trader you can learn something from joining his service.
But if you are considering joining his service based on the posted performance, you should consider the following.
I was a member of his service for over a year. I used a computer program to take his alerts in as timely and accurate a manner as possible. I took 297 of Stewie's alerts, all with a position size of $7500 per trade (on a $30K) account. My realized win rate was 55%, and total profit net of fees was $1213.37. On a $30K account that is a 4% return net of fees. And what is important to understand is that I was paying $50/month, not the current rate of $100/month. If I had been paying the current fees, I would have netted less than $500 dollars. That's a return not worth the risk to my account, and if you look at an equity curve of those 297 trades, including the $100/month fee it is decidedly range bound. That's when I decided to drop the service.
Now don't get me wrong. I didn't lose money as an Art of Trading member, and that is probably a lot better than most services. But if you are considering signing up for his service, and you have a relatively small account to trade, you shouldn't really expect to make much money just taking his alerts.
It's also important to understand that my experienced performance significantly lags Stewie's posted performance. This is not because he is dishonest, but because you are unlikely to get executions at the alert prices. Limit orders will not solve the problem, because the issue isn't the entries, it is the exits, particularly on losses. The variance between my actual results and Stewie's posted results were always greater on losses than on wins.
There is one more number you should consider. I took all of Stewie's alerts and calculated the result I *would* have achieved if I got executions at his alert prices, given my position size. The profit from the posted performance results was $7354.94 (a healthy 25% return on a 30K account). But the actual result that I experienced in my account was $2763.37. That is *NOT* net of fees. Commissions and slippage ate up over 60% of the posted performance! And then fees ate up another 20%, leaving me with a realized return that was 16.5% of the posted return.
Obviously the bigger the account you have to trade, the more you can dilute the drag of fees, but I doubt you can improve much on the slippage I experienced.
So my balanced assessment is this: if you are looking for a chat room to join to learn to trade stocks, and you come to like Stewie's trading style, then the trades will probably pay for your membership, and you may get plenty of value from that. But if you are trading a relatively small account and are salivating at the posted performance results, understand that your actual returns on a risk-adjusted basis are going to leave something to be desired.
This review is the subjective opinion of an Investimonials member and not of Investimonials LLC
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