HedgeyeReviews of hedgeye.com

Brian McGough is killing it. I keep a spreadsheet of different stock tip analysts and services and as you know, the market has been getting crushed across the board. I started tracking HedgeEye at the beginning of 2021 when I got a free email about the The Pitch series. I see that McGough is on fire. Everything he recommends this year is doing great. DBI, RH, PLBY, and DUFRY (not yet, but will once airports re-open). So now I'm tracking some of their other analysts and things are going great. I don't know why HedgeEye has such bad reviews here, maybe they weren't doing great pre-2021? But if you want to make money in 2021 on re-opening trades then McGough's retail picks are must buys. He is a rain maker this year.

Watch out for these guys. They are unscrupulous. I requested that my subscription be cancelled and refunded in December 2020 (it was ending in March). They said that they could not offer refunds, but that they would turn off the auto renew (I have email evidence from their Sales Director Matt Moran stating this). Sure enough March comes along and they charge my card (which they kept on file). I have now emailed them 4 times over the last couple of weeks requesting that my money be refunded, with no reply. This is how they operate, be careful. What ever you might think of them, just make sure that you take your credit card information off their system or you might be sorry.

Real time alert is not a useful tool for portfolio management since: 1) It does not really give you the real-time price, per se, as the executed price it shows would lag by a few minutes and the difference between the shown executed price and true real time quote can sometimes be sizable (i.e. 2 to 3% if the stock is a small cap company or the market is volatile). 2) The calculated so-called hit rate it shows on the website provides little use in real portfolio management since oftentimes the gains are quite small (i.e. less than 2% or even smaller if it is a day trade) but some losses are astronomical (i.e. more than 30% after signalling twice which means over 60% losses on the original position), wiping out the accumulated gains from a lot of closed signals. If you calculate the RTA's overall performance by assuming an equal weight for each issued signal, the aggregate return is deeply in red year-to-date. If you intend to use the RTA to broaden your selection base of stocks/ETFs or to haunt for some small or medium cap names to trade, it does provide some values and I hope you can have a better experience than I did. The RTA product provided by Hedgeye is far more inferior than the other two products I have been using from other institutions and I will not renew my membership after the current subscription expires. Another tip is to try to avoid from paying the yearly membership as I did from the get-go even though the website claims some hefty discounts for annual subscription option; instead, try it on a monthly subscription first to see how well it fits into your investment or trading style. If you like it after using it for some time, then convert to annual subscription or otherwise cancel it as soon as you realize it has little value for you - it took me a month or so to conclude that RTA is not worthwhile keeping but I am now stuck with a paid annual subscription.

A friend introduced me to Hedgeye many years ago. I’m extremely happy he did. Excellent, non-consensus research/insights particularly Macro. The CEO is unafraid to ruffle feathers/p*ss people off (and is often successful) which may explain the critical trolls on the site!

This is very similar to a cult.

Starting with the positives, I learned a lot from their view on the markets and macro investing in general. It's a higher level of discussion than mainstream financial network offers and they frequently have some high level guests with a lot of experience and a different perspective in some aspect of finance. Most of that content can be had for free by following them on YouTube (as long as you're careful not to be tricked into their paid content) But what matters in the service they offer is being right and in a way that leads to successful investments. In this regard they usually fail miserably. For example... I first encountered what they offered (after occasionally noticing Keith on twitter for some time) in Dec'15, just after Yellen's ill fated rate hike. At that time Keith correctly called that the economy was slowing and the hike would exacerbate that slowdown. For about the next two months they were right, BUT then they proceeded to remain bearish not only early in the bounce, but the entire ride up. Being boldly short and wrong, costing their mostly novice subscribers immense sums of capital. Not until late Nov'16 did they turn bullish. Keith eventually on his Macro Show figured most people forgot or they churned through a new generation of subscribers and he started bragging that they nailed the ride up. Their lying about past performance to me is worse than being incorrect about market direction. Then looking at the past year, Hedgeye turned bearish in early 2019 after teasing it for some time. For that whole duration every dip Keith would pound his chest and declare how right they were on his show and on twitter, even though the indexes just kept climbing back every time. By the end of the year Hedgeye still insisted they were right because they bought fixed income, which had a good run, ignoring that they missed a 30.4% year in the S&P (hopefully none of their subs were short...) 'But hey, they were totally right. Stocks eventually crashed' one might say, which Hedgeye did, loudly. They circulated articles and marketing materials all over twitter that they were "The Firm That Called, The Crash of 2020". Problem is they didn't. Right into the crash they were still buying Oil, Energy and SPLV. They didn't call the crash because they didn't have a single timestamp showing that they were positioned for it, actually the opposite. They were bearish for long enough that a Black Swan that they didn't even recognize crashed the economy. Nothing to do with their macro predictions. And then as many reviews have pointed out, they stayed bearish at the bottom. Now actually short the bounce, all the way until June when they've start to turn bullish again. I expect in a year once their subscriber based has churned again Keith will be telling them how great their timing was. Lastly I'll just direct anyone reading to just search Hedgeye + Scam in their browser, it's still pretty easy to find the story from 2014 of them suing a trader and blogger who bothered to crunch the numbers of their Real Time Alerts. Which is something Hedgeye doesn't seem to want you to know. They'll post their win/loss record for those trades on the website, but anyone who's spent any time following those signals, knows it's a plethora of minuscule gains if you're even lucky enough to break even

Keith McCullough was bearish on the S&P 500 from March 23rd to June 5th, a 43% rally. Then, he went bullish. Keith McCullough was saying "Fine! Go ahead. Buy the highs!" sarcastically the whole way up, and "What could POSSIBLY go wrong?" as if the S&P 500 would crash every day of the week. Keith McCullough just went bullish on the S&P 500 Friday June 5th, AFTER the 43% rally!! Keith McCullough said the range for WTI was $10-$18. He said short it. It went to $35, a total disaster if you did what he said. Keith McCullough's style of power selling sounds like he's recruiting direct marketers for Amway. He sounds like he's selling Herbalife products in a hotel conference room. Keith McCullough is very arrogant. He makes it sound like he's right about everything, and anyone with a different opinion is wrong, incompetent, stupid, or lying to you. That is BS. The truth is that Keith McCullough gets it wrong most of the time. His presentation is entertaining, convincing, and manipulative.

Keith is loud and rude (but sometimes funny). That's his entertainment brand. Please remember he makes all of his money from subscription revenue and not from trading/investing. He has an imaginary portfolio at all-time highs every month. Of course, his net worth is not transparent to subs. His sidekick, Jonesy, acts like a moron (it might not be an act) to add entertainment to the Macro Show. His rival is a massive African American ex-college football player from Yale. Darius often drinks too much wine on the weekend and tweets contradicting and condescending tweets about Keith mixed in with random pictures of murders or other violence on his twitter feed. How bizarre. In summary, the guys at Hedgeye remind me of the characters from Tiger King. Keith is Joe Exotic, and Darius and Jonesy are Keith's husbands. If you want a laugh, tune in for free on youtube, if you're a real investor or protecting your money is critical, run and don't look back. Only a fool would trust Keith (Joe Exotic) with their financial future. If Keith is locked up and put in jail, he'll be telling his cellmate how his portfolio is at new all-time highs and how he called the latest rally or crash.