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Is Adam O’Dell’s Green Zone Fortune any good?
Who is Adam O’Dell, the man writing the Green Zone Fortune newsletter?
Is he legit?
What is Adam O’Dell’s stock-picking strategy?
How have Green Zone Fortune’s stock recommendations performed so far?
Are there any better alternatives?
Who is Adam O’Dell, Expert Behind Green Zone Fortune?
Adam O’Dell graduated from Elon University with a Bachelor of Science.
Then, he started working as an enrollment manager at the University of Phoenix where he trained and managed sales representatives.
While he was working there, he also studied part-time to get his MBA in finance and economics.
After that, he worked as a financial advisor at Ameriprise Financial Services for about a year, before deciding to become a forex trader at Integra FX in 2009.
A few months later, he quit being a forex trader and started working as an account executive at TradeStation Securities in 2009 where he helped get more people to open trading accounts.
After working for 3 years as an account executive at TradeStation, Adam O’Dell went on to work as an investment analyst at Charles Street Research from 2011 until now.
During this time, he got his Chartered Market Technician (CMT) certification (i.e. how to analyze stock price charts and do technical analysis which Warren Buffet says it’s useless).
It appears that Charles Street Research was a financial publishing company that sells investment research newsletters.
When I googled “Charles Street Research”, its company website has changed to some educational blog on how to write a research paper.
In 2020, Adam O’Dell started to work as the chief investment strategist at Money & Markets, which is also a financial publishing company that sells various investment/trading newsletters.
Money & Markets is just one of the financial publishing companies under Banyan Hill Publishing which sells many different types of investment newsletters under different investment experts.
Under Money & Markets, Adam O’Dell offers the following high-end investment research products:
- Green Zone Fortune: $47
- Wednesday Windfall (selling a strategy based on back-tests only): $2495
- 10X Stocks: $10,000
- Max Profit Alert (option trading service): $1495
Green Zone Fortune is the lowest-price product of all and is used to get as many subscribers as possible into the sales funnel.
On its website, it claims that “he’s beaten the returns of George Soros, Carl Icahn, and even Warren Buffett”.
Wow, that’s quite a claim.
Later on, we will look at his past stock picks and their performance and you can decide for yourself.
Green Zone Fortune: Adam O’Dell’s Stock-Picking Strategy
Now, let’s look at Adam O’Dell’s strategy.
Here’s a checklist that he uses for picking stocks:
- Powerful Mega Trend
- Strong Green Zone Ratings (aka Stock Power Ratings)
- Overlooked “X-Factor”
First of all, megatrends do not necessarily make you money.
When cars were first invented, it was revolutionary.
At its peak, there were hundreds of car manufacturing companies.
In the end, only 3 car companies survived.
It’s very difficult to pick winners, especially if the so-called megatrend is just emerging.
Personally, I think it’s more important to analyze the underlying business economics and its competitive advantage and long-term growth potential.
When you find good businesses, you buy them when it’s selling below their fair value.
Next, let’s look at Adam O’Dell’s “Stock Power Ratings” system which rates stocks on three fundamental factors and three technical factors.
Below are the three technical factors:
- Momentum: strongly up-trending stocks get higher ratings
- Size: smaller companies get higher ratings
- Volatility: less volatile stocks get higher ratings
Below are the three fundamental factors:
- Value: less expensive get higher ratings
- Quality: high-quality companies (based on profit margins, cash flow, debt ratio, etc) get higher ratings
- Growth: high growth companies get higher ratings
His Stock Power Ratings system assigns stocks 0-100 ratings based on the above-mentioned six factors, where 0 is “worst,” and 100 is “best.”
A stock rating of 61 and higher is considered “Bullish,” which means that Adam O’Dell expects it to double the market’s return over the next 12 months.
Any stock rating over 80 is considered “Strong Bullish,” which means he expects it to beat the market by 300% over the next 12 months.
First of all, I am very skeptical about the ridiculously high one-year returns claimed by Adam O’Dell.
No one can predict the market with 100% certainty.
Next, Adam O’Dell sets a stop-loss target of about 30% to 50% for every buy recommendation.
To me, what Adam O’Dell is doing is trading and speculating instead of investing.
The hard truth about trading is that the majority of traders lose money.
To grow your wealth, the proven and more reliable way is investing in undervalued good businesses.
If you are investing in a good business that is currently undervalued, that would have given you a decent margin of safety.
Better yet, if your analysis is right, it would be a great opportunity to load up on the stock when its price drops further.
After Warren Buffet bought the Washington Post stock ( which is about 80% undervalued based on his calculation), the stock price dropped further before it eventually shot up about 9,000% over 40 years.
Lastly, a close look at Adam O’Dell’s monthly newsletter does NOT leave me impressed at all.
You should NOT expect to see an in-depth analysis of the stock that he is recommending.
Inside the issue, there are basically three main sections:
- A short write-up on the so-called megatrend (e.g. renewable energy, carbon neutral, etc)
- Go through the Green Zone Ratings of the recommended stock (which I find quite useless and lacks substance)
- Overlooked X-factor (which is quite disappointing because what he is saying is pretty obvious if anyone just looks at the company’s fundamentals)
Here are a few screenshots of a typical monthly issue that you can expect from Adam O’Dell if you sign up for Green Zone Fortune:
Green Zone Fortune: Stock Picks & Performance
So, how have Adam O’Dell’s Green Zone Fortune stock recommendations performed so far?
Most of Adam O’Dell’s stock picks in 2021 and 2022 didn’t do well.
I think that’s the reason why he closed most of his losing positions to make the portfolio look better.
As you can see from below, his open positions do not look so bad now.
Regarding the closed positions, Adam O’Dell is not very transparent about its closed positions.
That means you cannot find the performance in the member’s area.
This is one of the red flags I noticed.
So, there is no easy way to really know how his stock picks have performed in the past two years.
But, as I go through all his past Trade Alerts to tell his members to sell his past recommended stocks at market price because their stop-loss targets had been reached.
I must say, there are A LOT of losing positions that he asked his members to close.
Here are just a few of them from the past 6 months.
As you can see, his stock picks Gritstone Bio and Blueprint Medicines based on the “AI” megatrends did very badly.
Of course, there are definitely winning positions, especially the stock picks he recommended after the market bottoming in March 2020.
For example, there are a total of 11 Top Trades.
Out of these 11 trades, 9 were recommended after March 2020.
As you know, everyone can make money in a strong bull market.
What really sets a good investor is his performance in a bear market.
Green Zone Fortune: Pricing
So, how much does Green Zone Fortune cost?
As a subscriber, what do you get?
There are three different types of pricing:
- 1-Year: $47
- 5-Year: $199
- Lifetime access: $299
Here’s what is included in your Green Zone Fortune subscription:
- Monthly report with a deep-dive into their monthly stock recommendation
- Weekly updates on the market and their portfolio positions
- Buy/ Sell Trade Alerts
- Model Portfolio that includes all the stocks on the “Buy Now” list
The subscription comes with a 1-year 100% satisfaction guarantee.
So, is it worth subscribing to “Green Zone Fortune”?
Pricing-wise, it’s not expensive.
It’s comparable to all the other investment newsletters out there for the 1st year subscription.
However, the pricing for its 5-year and lifetime access plans is considered cheaper.
So, the question becomes, is Green Zone Fortune really useful in helping you make good investment decisions and get better returns?
Personally, I don’t really recommend it because it does not have a proven track record of delivering market-beating performance over a long period of time. (Adam O’Dell’s Stock Power System was only launched in 2020)
Second of all, I am not convinced by his strategy.
When it comes to investing, I prefer an investment thesis based on an in-depth analysis of the business, an intelligent estimation of its fair value as well as a good risk assessment.
Stock ratings are useful as a research tool, but it’s NEVER wise to purely rely on stock ratings alone to make your investment decisions.
The stock ratings that I do use in my stock research are Seeking Alpha’s Quant Ratings.
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