The Best Investment Newsletter of All-Time?

Originally posted September 7, 2016.

In October 1993, at the peak of the investment newsletter industry, Money magazine authored a Money Newsline feature headlined Big Investment Newsletters Worth The Money.

Richard C. Young was pictured on the cover of this special issue of Money and featured inside in a multi-page article, Your Smartest Moves Now.

Money analyzed the five biggest circulation investment newsletters and rated each A to C-. That was 23 years ago. Money’s #1 rating and the only letter to receive an “A” was Richard C. Young’s Intelligence Report.

All these years later Dick Young is still editing. The other big four editors have died, retired or simply, as Julia Child used to say “slipped off the raft.”

We conducted a lengthy interview with Dick recently and asked him, as the #1 rated editor of the biggest circulation letters in the investment newsletter heyday, who he thought was #1 among all letters during this phenomenal era. Below is his response.

Over the decades, this question is probably the one I am asked the most. Here is a perhaps shocking answer. And no, I am not including Richard C. Young’s Intelligence Report in my review. That’s because Intelligence Report is only the second best strategy report I have personally edited. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, when I was in the institutional research and trading business, I published at Young Research and Publishing & Co., Inc. and was the editor of Young’s World Money Forecast. YWMF was on a whole different level, covering the international economic and monetary system, currencies, gold and stock market momentum (using my highly regarded and accurate Market Tension Index (MTI) as a primary trend tool.

My rating of the best investment newsletters has not changed at any point over my many decades in the investment industry. Through the years, I have subscribed to and read religiously only three investment strategy reports. And it is these three that make the final cut for me.

I truly hate to single out just one of these superb reports, but I have gotten asked the question so often through the decades, I decided it would be helpful to have an answer ready.

Due to it’s vast scope of coverage, Tony Boeckh’s Bank Credit Analyst could have been my clear #1 pick. But BCA did not offer specific investment advice, so I could really not put BCA in the #1 slot when asked about the best investment advisory services. I slotted BCA #2, just ahead of Richard Russell’s Dow Theory Letters.

Russell passed away in November 2015. Tony Boeckh’s last year as editor-in-chief of The Bank Credit Analyst was 2002.

#1 for me for decades has been HSL. from Chevalier Harry D. Schultz, KHC, until he retired in 2010. Much more on HSL in part II.

So there you have it. Each of my three long-time favorites are now off the scene.

Until I bring Young’s World Money Forecast back from vacation, I have no reservations advising Richard C. Young’s Intelligence Report as the best overall internationally focused financial and personal security strategy report.