Stock Market Mentor (SMM) is a decent stock trading advice subscription and at a reasonable cost (about eighty-bucks per month), if you’d like to learn the basics, and a few arcane aspects of price-volume chart reading, identifying support and resistance areas. There is, however, little in-depth instruction offered on price-volume indicators, except for Bollinger Bands for which the website chieftain (Dan Fitzpatrick) has an extreme fondness. Otherwise, his primary chart watchdog indicators are the 200 and 50 period moving averages. Unless a specific company is requested by a subscriber, he mostly sticks to analysis of stocks in what Mr. Fitzpatrick calls the “winners’ circle.” These are stocks that are trading in an upward trend in the top right corner of a stock chart, and that have a 50-period moving average with an upward slope.
Mr. Fitzpatrick gives few definite buy recommendations, but specific selling advice is quite rare, except for stocks that anyone can see are already in a death spiral downward. He’s careful regarding his chart price-volume interpretations, with a lot of, “the stock price should do this” advice that is then countered with hedging and “but it could also do this” counseling. The possible buy suggestions (and they are mostly “suggestions”) almost always include employing an almost mandatory stop-loss order – and he almost always advises precisely where to establish that stop-loss (at what price).
Listening to his daily and weekend analyses lately (perhaps over the last three or four months), Mr. Fitzpatrick is not at all bashful about telling his subscribers that this market is definitely going higher. But my sense has been that picking individual stocks for swing trading investing in today’s up-and-down, market-sector schizophrenic market has him often as perplexed as us who are more novices at trading.
The subscription also includes access to the SMM “forum.” The forum is a sort of blog that is available to all subscribers. Here, subscribers can banter back and forth and discuss individual trades and stocks or sectors. I suspect that Mr. Fitzpatrick may obtain a lot of the stocks he chooses to discuss from the forum comments. The forum is, at times, a good source of information and ideas for the SMM subscriber, and there is no requirement that you participate. You can simply “lurk” about, if you so choose.
One annoying aspect of the forum is Mr. Fitzpatrick’s sometimes hypocritical approach to discussions. He can "dis" people and companies all he wants, but if a subscriber makes any sort of critical or disparaging comments, that subscriber is reprimanded and criticized unmercifully by Mr. Fitzpatrick.
Another annoying aspect of Mr. Fitzpatrick’s nightly, weekend and occasional market opening commentaries is that he requires you to go along with him on his journey of self-discovery. For a guy in his early fifties, he should know who he is by now and to inflict on his subscribers his stories of introspection and self-analysis and his experiences at various EST-type (EST = Erhard Seminars Training) seminars is simply boring as heck and wastes the subscribers’ time. Helping Mr. Fitzpatrick find out who he is and what his purpose in life is supposed to be was not why I was paying a monthly fee to be a subscriber.
For instruction in the basis of chart reading, a few simple price-volume indicators, and discerning the chart’s support and resistance areas, SMM is okay for a short-term subscription (in about 3-months,m you should be well drilled and schooled in what SMM instruction has to offer). But for specific stock buy and sell recommendations with no equivocating or temporizing, you should probably look elsewhere – but you’ll also likely pay a lot more for that advice.
Freddy Bentine-Brown
This review is the subjective opinion of an Investimonials member and not of Investimonials LLC
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