We have traded WSG for just over 3 months and are happy to continue for the indefinite future. We feel we have discovered a high-quality service.
The service provided stock and option picks by Mr Walter Holder, and (excellent) support and administrative back-up is provided by his assistant Cathy. There are generally a 'handful' of picks, both options and stocks open at any one time. I would say an average of 2 or 3 each although obviously this is quite variable. It is recommended that you use 10% of your portfolio for each stock pick and 3~5% for each option pick. There is generally a stop loss of about 5% for picks, with profits being taken at 10% and similarly a stop of about 40% or 50% for options and a profit being taken at 100% or a little less. So you only need 1 successful trade in 3 to break even, any better than that and you should be ahead!
In addition to the stock picks Walter occasionally provides a detailed review of companies constituting possible long-term buys. This might be a useful addition for those who wish to hold an intermediate term portfolio in addition to the swing trading WSG portfolio.
Results given to us for July 2010 to June 2011 show average returns per month of: stocks 35% and options: 247% (and no losing months for either stocks or options). So for example if you had allocated $1000 per stock trade and 5% per option trade then this would represent $350 return per month for stocks and $432 per month for options (excluding commissions). For such small allocations a $10,000 portfolio would suffice, which represents an overall portfolio return of 7.8% per month. With compounding this would result in your $10,000 portfolio growing to over $24,000 in just one year!
But how does the system work in real life? It appears we joined at a more challenging time for WSG as we encountered a (rare) losing month for both the stock and options portfolio during the Aug/Oct market reversals. Over the long term I don't doubt that the system will return to normal profitability (for example we won just under 400% in September 2011 for options). What is more important is to discover the exact level of that profitability - which although very good is probably going to be somewhat less than that apparent from the results shown above for 2010-2011. This is because although the system can provide a list of buy/picks, it cannot be assumed that the trades are going to be 100% reproducible in your account.
We have the service traded automatically for us at Global Auto Trading, who do an excellent job for us (and at $1 per stock trade and $0.70 per contract the low commissions are a help as there is a reasonably high trade frequency).
But although auto-trade generally works well (far better than I could trade manually), occasionally there is a trade where the initial buy limits even if set generously - can sometimes be not wide enough and we don't get a fill. Further there is sometimes a little slippage on the options, although not as great as you might expect.
This is not to say that the service does not try hard to get fills. On occasions Cathy has sent special alerts to Global for us to ensure fills and overall WSG and Global work very hard together, communicating and adjusting limit amounts as necessary. Nevertheless, we have not got every winning trade and I would estimate that you would probably need to discount the above profit figures by as much as 10% to 20% or so to get a feel for 'real life' performance of the system. This would bring 'real life' performance down to about 6% a month - still enough with compounding to double capital each year, so I would not be complaining!
As regards the options: A further factor to at least be aware of is the question of your own trading stamina and discipline. For some it would be difficult to take the occasional but inevitable string of losing trades. But then if you 'turn off' options, you might just miss a string of positive trades... The answer may be to reserve a smaller allocation for options. You are limited here however as single contracts can (occasionally) cost as much as $250 or more, which means you can only reduce exposure so much. And since options are the more profitable side of the system, any reduction of exposure will lessen system performance. Just something to keep in mind!
A real highlight of the service are the people involved. It is stated on the web page that Walter comes from a family of brokers, and indeed there is a sense of professionalism and experience that I don't often sense with trade services. I feel as though I am dealing with my Dad's stock broker, except that the performance is about 5 times as good! And Cathy Lee's support has just been fantastic. Where the system lacks is in the web site, which is somewhat creaky in comparison to other services, and it would be wonderful if live performance figures could be shown, e.g. an average of live fills supplied by the auto-traders for example.
Nevertheless, the bottom line is that this is a consistently profitable service, if you can get it well traded for you (there are manual traders but I don't envy them). There are a lot of systems out there that cost a lot (LOT) more, and deliver much less. We are very pleased with Wall Street Giant - 5 stars.
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This review is the subjective opinion of an Investimonials member and not of Investimonials LLC
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