Stansberry Research Retirement Trader – Dr. David Eifrig, MD, MBAWhat is your opinion of Dr. Eifrig and his newsletter? Many thanks!
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He has had long “unbeaten” records in his core strategy, which sounds like it is essentially just selling covered calls. That probably leads to stable returns, though I don’t know what the results are relative to a more vanilla investment, covered calls typically provide a steady return but also typically mean that you miss out on some of the upside… which can have a big impact over time. The 2023 scorecard from Stansberry had Retirement Trader earning a 9.8% annualized return — way under the 24.8% return of the benchmark (S&P 500), but still with a very high win percentage (90%). Over five years, Retirement Trader has an annualized return of 2.9%, also far below the 12.1% of the benchmark. So according to their own reporting, Eifrig has mostly successful trades and a very high win rate — but probably because of the win rate, which means he isn’t taking much risk, they aren’t nearly successful enough to keep up with just owning the S&P 500.