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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.

Alternatives To Green Zone Fortune

Motley Fool Stock Advisor is focused on giving stock recommendations that are high-quality companies with long-term growth potential, which suits my investment philosophy.

The reason why I subscribe to Stock Advisor is to get stock ideas as Motley Fool has a proven record of finding stocks with massive upside potential.

Personally, I don’t buy every single stock recommendation.

What I do is that if I find any interesting stock pick, I will do my own research again.

First of all, let’s take a look at their track record as of 9th March 2023.

Below is the performance comparison between Motley Fool Stock Advisor and S&P 500 between 2002 and 9th March 2023.

 

As of 9th March 2023, average Motley Fool Stock Advisor recommendations have returned over 386% since inception while S&P 500 has returned 115%.

In short, the Motley Fool Stock Advisor has outperformed the market 3 to 1.

That’s a HUGE difference in returns.

But, what about its individual stock picks?

This metric is important because you might not be buying every single stock recommendation made by Stock Advisor.

Below is a table that shows you the performance of individual stock picks over the years.

As of 7th Dec 2022, Motley Fool Stock Advisor has had 164 stock recommendations with 100%+returns.

Here are just some of their best-performing stock picks:

• Amazon: it’s up 19,806%*
• Netflix: it’s up 23,901%*
• Walt Disney: it’s up 632%*
• NVIDIA: it’s up 16,423%*
• Shopify: it is up 4,107%*
• United Health Group: it is up 2,338 %*

[*Returns as of 31st Dec 2021. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Individual investment results may vary. All investing involves risk of loss.]

Will the Motley Fool Stock Advisor always be right about their stock recommendations?

No, because no one can be right about their stock picks 100% of the time.

Let me sidetrack a bit here.

If any stock picking service tells you that they have a close to 100% success rate on their stock picks and can guarantee you high investment returns, you should definitely stay away.

Even Warren Buffet has loss-making stocks in his portfolio, but he still achieves above-average returns because a few big gainers in the portfolio can make up for the under-performers.

What I like about the Motley Fool Stock Advisor is that they are very open and transparent about their bad investments.

As a member, I can see the performance of ALL its past and current stock recommendations (even for closed positions).

For some other stock-picking services that I’ve tried, they don’t publish the performance of all their past and current stock recommendations, so it’s not easy for you to find out their true track record.

For example, the year 2022 has not been good for high-growth stocks because of rising interest rates and high inflation.

So, you can see a lot of Motley Fool Stock Advisor’s stock recommendations are not doing very well.

The truth is that other stock-picking services are not doing well either because of the stock market crash.

Do I still think it’s worth subscribing to the Motley Fool Stock Advisor?

My answer is yes.

The stock market goes up and down all the time.

Every few years, there is a bear market.

According to Peter Lynch who is a legendary fund manager, far more money has been lost by investors trying to anticipate correction than lost in corrections themselves.

In fact, I think the bear market is the BEST time to start investing in the stock market.

Why?

During a bear market, it’s more likely to find great businesses selling at very cheap prices because people are just selling out of fear when the business is still fundamentally sound.

A market crash is a time when huge wealth transfers from irrational and emotional investors to patient and rational investors.

So, if you are thinking of getting into stock investing, I highly recommend the Motley Fool Stock Advisor because I think there are a lot of well-researched stock recommendations.

In terms of pricing, Motley Fool Stock Advisor is also much more affordable.

Usually, its annual subscription is $199.

Right now, there’s a special limited-time $89 offer* for new members for the first year when you click the link here to try it out for 30 days with a Membership-Fee-Back Guarantee. (*Billed annually. Introductory price for the first year for new members only. First-year bills at $89 and renews at $199)

So, for $89 a year- that’s just $1.70 a week – you can gain unlimited access to their library of expert stock recommendations which are carefully selected to help you grow your wealth.

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