[User’s Review] Adam Khoo Piranha Profits Review: Is It Really Worth It?

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So, we tried out two products from Adam Khoo’s Piranha Profits.

One of them is the Ultimate Investors Playbook by Adam Khoo and the other one is the Options Tactics Playbook by his partner Bang Pham Van.

How is our experience?

Is it really worth the money?

Let me share with you everything about our experience, so you can make an informed decision.

Ultimate Investors Playbook By Adam Khoo’s Piranha Profits

So, what is the Ultimate Investors Playbook?

It’s a subscription-based product where you can see one of Adam Khoo’s investment portfolios and the stocks that he invested in.

It usually costs about $1,900 a year.

Every month, he releases a video to share with you what is happening in the market as well as his views on the market.

He always does technical analysis and tries to predict where the market might go in the near term.

I should have seen this as a red flag.

Why?

He considers himself a value investor who studies and reads about Warren Buffet’s investment strategies.

But, did he not read the comments that Warren Buffet made on technical analysis and predicting short-term market movement?

No one can predict the market in the short term and Warren Buffet does not look at price charts to make his investment decisions.

Also, according to Warren Buffet, no one can determine the fair value of a company with 100% certainty.

Yet, Mr. Adam Khoo gives its subscribers fair values of all the recommended stocks and recommends them to buy as long as it’s above the fair value.

Adam Khoo’s Stock Picks Performance

Let’s go through Adam Khoo’s stock recommendations in his Ultimate Investors Playbook by Piranha Profits.

Two of his recommended stocks are Alibaba and Ping An.

At the time that we joined, they were labeled as about 20% undervalued.

Did you know what was the share price of Alibaba at that time?

Alibaba’s share price was about $200!!!!! (As of my writing today, Alibaba’s share price is about $80.)

Then, as Alibaba continued to drop, it was labeled as a “FIRE SALE” and about 30% undervalued.

At that time, Alibaba’s share price was about $160.

In the group chat, people were worried about their Alibaba stock position, but they were reassured by Adam Khoo and his bullish view of this stock.

I vividly remember that there was this subscriber.

He complained in the group that he sold his Tesla stocks and bought Adam Khoo’s recommended stocks, only to get stuck with losing stock positions and missed out on the huge rally in Tesla because Adam Khoo didn’t think Tesla was a good investment.

In the end, this subscriber decided to cut his losses on Alibaba at around $150, despite Adam Khoo telling his members that he is still bullish on Alibaba in the long term.

It turns out that this subscriber was right to follow his own investment decisions and NOT put blind trust in Adam Khoo.

Why?

Later on, Alibaba’s share price continued to drop another 50% from $160 to a low of about $80, and subsequently to around $60.

Most subscribers continued to believe in Adam Khoo and held on to Alibaba stock.

The funny thing is that Adam Khoo continues to lower his fair value estimation on Alibaba from about $250 to around $160 and then to about $120.

He should have warned his subscribers that it’s risky to buy based on his fair value estimation because it could be adjusted much lower later on.

The same thing happened with Ping An stock, another one of Adam Khoo’s Fire Sale stocks that he claimed was about 30% undervalued.

Below is the share price chart for Ping An.

Now, fast forward to early 2024, he mentioned that he was going to slowly get out of all his Chinese stocks because he no longer thinks it is a good market to invest in.

If you are one of his subscribers who had positions in these Chinese stocks, are you going to follow him and close your positions at a loss or continue to hold it hoping that it would eventually go up?

The problem with following so-called investment experts’ stock recommendations is that you have no idea what to do when the stock crashes.

You have to completely rely on other people’s opinion/analysis to make investment decisions.

If anything unexpected happens to the stocks, you are left clueless and helpless as to how to deal with it.

So, those Hong Kong Stocks that Adam Khoo recommended performed very badly from 2021 to April 2024 (as of my writing)

Also, many of his US stock recommendations performed very badly during the stock market crash in 2022.

One of his recommended stocks is Amazon.

When Amazon was around $150 in 2021, he said that it was a very good price to get in because it’s still below Adam Khoo’s fair value for Amazon.

Was he looking at the same share price chart of Amazon as I am?

All I want to say is that he is a really really optimistic person, probably one of the most optimistic among all the people who are selling investment and trading courses online.

Then, I suddenly realized that if people who are selling investment courses don’t keep saying that the stock market is going up, no one is going to buy from them.

Now, let’s go back to Adam Khoo’s stock recommendations inside his Ultimate Investors Playbook.

Most of Adam Khoo’s other stock recommendations suffered a huge loss in 2022.

Examples are Mercado Libre, Veeva Systems, XBI, Palantir, Meta, Adobe, and many more.

The thing is that many of these stocks have very high P/E ratios and the Fed is expected to continue to raise interest rates.

So, the future does not look very rosy.

Yet, if you listen to him on YouTube, he has been calling a market bottom quite a number of times since May or Jun 2022 with his charts and data.

Yes, he finally got it right on the last one.

Did I mention that he pulled out data to say that the market would generally be up during years with mid-term elections?

For a person who claims to be a value investor, Adam Khoo has a habit of predicting the market in the short term with technical analysis.

He must have a very different definition of value investing from Warren Buffet.

By the way, in 2021, a lot of economists and billionaire investors came on TV and warned about high inflation and the stock market bubble.

The Fed even announced that it would start increasing interest rates in 2022.

What is common sense in investing during rising interest rates?

Overvalued technology stocks would probably fall in price because their valuation would be lower when their expected future cash flows are discounted by a higher interest rate.

So, what did Mr. Adam Khoo say about the Fed raising interest rates?

He released a YouTube video and pulled out charts and data to show that stocks could still go up even if the Fed increased interest rates.

Oh, did I mention that he said this in the last quarter of 2021 just before the market crashed in the first half of 2022?

Most technology stocks crashed close to 50% following his optimistic predictions of the market.

But, the market finally bottomed toward the last quarter of 2022, and then it staged a strong rally in 2023 and continued to make new highs in 2024.

So, the irony here is that people who bought Adam Khoo’s courses in 2021 and at the beginning of 2022 would have bought the technology stocks near the high and subsequently had to face huge losses in their portfolio.

If they had the stomach to hold on to their losing positions, they would eventually see some of their stocks come back to their breakeven prices in 2024.

For example, those who bought Amazon and Adobe back near their 2021 high could finally break even after two years of waiting.

But, there are two stocks that Adam Khoo recommended that made new highs in 2024.

They are Meta and Microsoft.

By the way, people who bought Adam Khoo’s courses in late 2022 or early 2023, would be profitable since the stock market bottomed and started to rally for most of the growth stocks he recommended.

But, if you bought S&P 500 index ETFs or Nasdaq index ETFs at the end of 2022 or in 2023, you would also be making decent money.

So, what is my point here?

It’s very important to get the timing right if you decide to join his courses.

As the market is making all-time highs, it’s tempting to jump into the market so that you don’t miss out on the “long-term bull run” suggested by Adam Khoo.

It’s true that the stock market does go up in the long term.

But, if you enter at the wrong time or overpay for good stocks,  you could still lose your hard-earned money.

Is Adam Khoo’s Ultimate Investor Playbook Right For You?

If you are thinking about investing in the stock market, my recommendation is that you should either invest in stock market index ETFs or start learning how to invest and make your own investment decisions.

Why?

No one cares about your financial well-being more than you do.

After trying out Adam Khoo’s Piranha Profits Courses – Ultimate Investor Playbook, I don’t recommend his courses for the following reasons.

First of all, his stock performance for 2021 and 2022 is very poor.

If he were really a good value investor, he would not have recommended his subscribers to buy overvalued technology stocks when there was high inflation and the Fed was going to raise interest rates.

He not only recommended them, but he also continued to predict that the market would go up.

What did Warren Buffet buy in 2021?

Oil companies.

So, subscribers who joined him in 2021 and early 2022 mostly lost money following his advice.

The funny thing is that he started investing in the stocks many years earlier at a much lower price, so he would be looking at a smaller profit while his subscribers (who most likely not making as much money as him) lost their hard-earned money.

But subscribers who joined him in mid-2022 and 2023 would be profitable because the stock market finally bottomed towards the end of 2022.

Investing comes with risks.

Trusting someone to make investment decisions for you is dangerous.

Because they make millions of dollars selling courses to you every year regardless of whether you make money or not following their advice.

So, the best thing you can do for yourself is to take control of your investments and make your own decisions.

Secondly, after watching his video analysis of companies, I find that he is mostly pulling information and data out of the company’s annual reports and making simple comments on them.

That’s his so-called “deep-dive” into the recommended companies.

I remember that he was analyzing “Ping An” in one of his videos and his analysis was nothing unique or insightful.

One of his reasons for buying Ping An was that one of his friends knows the chairman of Ping An and confirms it should be a solid company.

Huh?

Is that how you analyze and value a company?

Lastly, I don’t see great investors selling investment and trading courses.

I don’t see them giving free investment advice or trading advice on YouTube (or even spending big money on advertising) to get more people to buy their courses.

Great investors are mostly managing multi-million or even billion-dollar funds and getting interviewed on CNBC or Bloomberg.

All in all, I recommend that you learn the fundamentals of investing yourself and do your own independent stock research.

Personally, I use the following stock research and analysis platforms to find stock ideas as well as do my stock research and analysis:

• Seeking Alpha (Best Quantitative Stock Rating)
• Morningstar (Best If You Want To Find Undervalued Companies)
• Stock Rover (Best Fundamental Stock Screener)
• TradingView (Best Stock Charting Software)