Do you trust shares tipsters or broker notes?

Paul Roberts, CEO 

Let me explain what led me to set up the UK’s only Stock Tips Aggregation and Comparison site

It starts with a question: Who do you trust with your money and why do you trust them?

Do you hand over a portion of your hard earned salary every month to a fund manager hoping they will work hard to protect and grow your investment?

Maybe you trust those cold calls saying, ‘Hi, have I got a great investment opportunity for you?’

Perhaps you do your own research based on hours looking for investment ideas in newspapers, magazines, websites etc. trusting yourself and the tipsters or maybe you just listen to your friends or your wise granddad?  Who knows?

But the reality is that someone somewhere is giving someone else advice about which shares to buy and why they should buy them.  Many investment decisions made by retail investors  start with a tip whether it be research, a chat over a glass of wine or an article in a national publication or website.

For me it is about drawing on the views of experts but doing a bit of research myself.  What follows is the story of what led me to that conclusion.

A few years ago I had a call from the local branch of a well known advisory stockbrokers.  ‘I have a great stock for you to invest in’ said the broker and then explained what it was and told me that the buy note had come from their highly rated research team.

The net result for me was a £40k loss and a very, very painful lesson in investing.

A short while after I bought the first £20k of the stock it rose by 25% so I bought a further £20k.

A week later the stock went in administration citing cash flow due to loss of a major contract. Bang all gone.

‘The net result for me was a £40k loss and a very, very painful lesson in investing’

While many investors no doubt receive very good advice, I am sure I not alone in this story; I was always told to invest, but invest wisely!

Well what does that mean when I haven’t even got time to go to the gym let alone sit at home researching how to invest what’s left of my hard earned salary?

I had a few choices: either invest myself and do my research thoroughly or give my hard earned cash to someone who knows what they are doing or do a bit of both.  So for me now it is about doing a bit of both.

Acknowledging the risk warning that past performance is not always an indicator of future success, I have made my personal investing more controlled and fun as I only invest in funds or equities that I know the tipsters or fund manager has a quantifiable track record they can show me and that this record is totally transparent including the dogs they have picked too.

I don’t invest on the basis of calls from brokers selling me the next big stock tip unless they can demonstrate to me the track record of the researcher.

Brokers rarely publish the FULL unedited track record of their in-house researchers. I believe that they should as the cream rises to the top!

Investing should be exciting and therefore fun, so how can investors level the odds of success?

Well what I do is invest with people with a track record of success.

In response to my first experience, I kept looking for the right people making recommendations, with the right track record to invest in.

‘Well what I do is invest with people with a track record of success’

They are meant to be the experts after all. I can’t make head nor tail of a corporate balance sheet but the experts can.

Great, so who to follow?  The information I was looking for was not available, so I built a platform that does have that information.

The result is www.stockomendation.com

A few years later and we are the UK’s only Stock Tips Aggregation and Comparison site that compares and performance monitors stock tips from over 160 financial journalists and tipsters, thus creating a ranking of success and failure.

We track over 9000 stock tips and members can see which tipsters’ perform badly and which offer a chance of success.

We are trying to change the industry by creating trust through accountability and transparency of experts’ tips and recommendations. The results are incredible and surprising.

It seems we are doing the right sort of things as we have just been shortlisted by FINTECH CITY in London as one of 60 of the most innovative financial disruptive technology platforms in Europe.

DIY Investor has been in touch and negotiated a discount for its readers to join the site to view the UK’s leading tipsters all in one place.

See how they perform and take a view on which advice you trust to invest in.

One last thing. Sometimes not getting what you want is a wonderful stroke of luck… If I hadn’t had such bad advice, Stockomendation would not have been born so maybe it all evens out in the end.