TeppersList Review: Is Leon Tepper’s Subscription Service Worth Its Salt?

It is review time, folks and today we are going to move beyond the world of stocks and dive deeper into the ocean of subscription services today. In our past two reports, we had interviewed financial wizard, Leon Tepper and spoken about one of his key services. Today, as our first service review, we have decided to go ahead and review TeppersList itself and build a broad understanding about its offerings, their pros and cons, and whether it is actually worth it to subscribe or not.

The Necessity and Horrors of Subscription Services

Before we move forward with the review, it is actually important to throw some light on the concept, the necessity, and most importantly, the horrors of subscription services that exist in the market today. Subscription services have become a necessity for most working Americans today. After working for more than 10 hours a day, few have actually got the time to sit and scan the stock market and try to find the best stocks or other investment opportunities to grow their savings. However, with these services, all the person has to do is pay a nominal sum each month and he will be provided with a model portfolio, given specific instructions what to buy, when to buy, how much to buy, when to sell, and so on. The goal of these services is to make independent Americans achieve maximum returns on their savings through investing in equity and other markets.

But is this goal true for everyone? Clearly not. The market is full of such services and more often than not, subscription service providers care about the monthly cash flows more than anything else. Subscribers end up destroying their savings more than increasing them owing to the randomness of recommendations and the lack of analysis to support the same. If your luck is even worse, then it is possible that the service is a complete fraud and just shuts down within a few months of starting. There are very few who are genuine and have actually created value for subscribers and it is important to identify these services. In the end, most subscribers look for 1-3 services at the most and they would really want to maximize the value appreciation from these services.

Keeping this approach in mind, let us see if Mr. Leon Tepper’s offering has what it takes to fit into an investor’s top 3 list.

So Who Is This Leon Tepper After All?

A full-time trader since almost 2 decades, Leon Tepper has traded in every possible form of security on the market whether it is stocks, exchange traded funds (ETFs), or commodities. A follower of the contrarian approach, Tepper had always looked to integrate fundamental and technical analysis (using a technique he calls “fusion”) and worked on building algorithms to carry out complex chart analysis on fundamentally strong companies. The man is a financial wizard and an industry veteran with a good success rate.

Now if you go through his website, TeppersList.com, you will actually find a lot of details on the algorithms and the approaches that Tepper has built. You will come across really confusing terms like Genetic Adaptive Wide-ranging Reversion Algorithm (one of Tepper’s many creations) and Tepper Neutral Index, and so on which might make no sense to you at all. Hell, you can also find the whole life story of Tepper himself and how he went ahead and discovered some of his algorithms (quite an interesting story if you like reading finance success stories):

However, the good thing is that you don’t need to understand all the technical mumbo jumbo. All you need to do is see if the service works or not and whether it is able to provide good returns or not. In the end, Tepper’s years of research and algorithm building are all integrated into three relatively simplified subscription services which are described in the next section.

The TeppersList Offerings – Are They Any Different From Every Other Trader In The Market?

The Mega Hot-Stock Report, the Turnaround Report, and the Invest & Forget report are three basic subscription-based offerings of TeppersList. Each of them has a uniquely different approach and caters to different kinds of investors. They also have differentiated pricing but all of them fall within the premium range.

1. Mega Hot-Stock Report

This caters to the active investors who would love to play on a company which has an upcoming result, news, potential FDA clearances, or a generally high potential investor interest. These hot stocks are all about looking into the future technologies and are the ones most likely to jump on a forthcoming event. This is a service meant mostly for active investors, particularly the swing trader community, and is priced at $99 a month. Admittedly, Tepper has delivered some solid recommendations especially within the technology space and followers would have generated some strong returns.

2. Turnaround Report

Tepper has openly said that he is a follower of the contrarian approach and identifying turnaround stories is clearly his core competence. The market has thousands of stocks following a downward trajectory and most investors pick their turnaround bets purely on instinct. Why turnaround bets? Obviously because of the phenomenal returns that these have to offer. However, instinct is rarely the best way to go in the case of stock picking.

Well, Tepper has built a scientific algorithm taking into account cyclical factors associated with specific companies as well as the economy in general and his turnaround report helps identify those top 2% of stocks with best upside potential.  Priced at $99 per month, this service is for both active as well as passive investors as it attempts to find the optimal stocks with the aim of getting the maximum profit out of the market. The goal is to generate a return no less than 40% (which is probably the kind of return that investors would expect from a turnaround story). This is definitely a very interesting offering in Tepper’s portfolio of services.

3. Invest & Forget Report

We have actually done a detailed piece on this service earlier and it is probably Tepper’s most popular service because it caters to the ideal passive investor – the individual who wishes to invest in fundamentally strong stocks and sit tight while watching his investments grow. It mixes value and growth investing with a strong technical base to determine the right entry points after taking into account various economic cycles. The algorithms behind this service have generated true multi-baggers like Facebook in the past and it can be rated as one of the best subscription services for passive investors in the market today. It is priced at $149 and has discounts for quarterly / annual packages and seems to be a good value-for-money proposition.

 

The Pros

The single-largest positive in favor of TeppersList and all of its services can be summed up in two words – IT WORKS! Leon Tepper’s years of research and building different forms of algorithms have been quite productive and it is evident from the kind of recommendations that all 3 of its services have generated. Interestingly, along with passive investors (the Invest & Forget subscribers), the active ones including the trader community themselves are quite pleased with Tepper’s recommendations. Check out some of the testimonials below:

 

Over and above the success of generating good returns for its subscribers, TeppersList also has a relatively simplified report structure that is easy for the common man to understand. While its base may involve the use of complex algorithms, the final output provided to subscribers is very simple and user-friendly and it clearly explains the what, why, when, and how much with amazing lucidity. The reports are sent in a very timely manner and ensure that subscribers have enough time to act before investing in any given stock. The different approaches, different target groups, and the varied outputs of the different algorithms are truly remarkable and I would certainly say hats off to Mr. Tepper for all his years of hard work because his service does look like a real winner.

The Cons

My perception of a good investment service is one that is more inclusive and is reasonable enough to have subscribers of all income groups. This is one aspect where TeppersList does not live up to my expectations. Have no doubt in your minds that this service is premium. It caters to the people who can afford to pay around $149 a month (this is for the Invest & Forget service; the Turnaround and the Hot Stock services are at $99 which again seems on the higher side). If you compare this number to most of the other subscription services in the market, including the Seeking Alpha Marketplace, you would figure that it easily falls in the upper price bracket.

Now if you ask me – is it worth the $149? I would certainly say yes. The depth of analysis done by Mr. Tepper and team coupled with his algorithm outputs seem quite impressive and I really doubt if any of his clients have lost money. Yet, if you ask me – is this service for everybody in the market? I would probably say, “Hell no! It is definitely a premium service catering to a rich niche.”

 

The Verdict

At the end of the day, the single most important metric to determine the success of failure of any subscription service is the result. Results don’t lie and TeppersList actually clears this test with flying colors.

There are some of the biggest success stories of the service and these returns seem to have come in a relatively medium time frame i.e. less than five years. While pricing might be a deterring factor, the wide variety of services offered by Leon Tepper for all categories of investors, whether it is active, semi-active, or passive ones, is something creditable. I am going to go with 4.5 out of 5 stars, cutting the half star rating for the pricing. Overall, TeppersList does appear to be a promising subscription service for the future.