Mon, Dec 18, 2017|Porter Stansberry

Clearing up Some Confusion About Our New Stansberry Terminal

No good deed goes unpunished... A Friday Digest firestorm... An important letter to Alliance members... Clearing up some confusion about our new Stansberry Terminal...

No good deed goes unpunished...

We've made our Alliance members the center of our business efforts for 15 years. They get early access to new products. And they get everything new we create, for free.

Over the last few years alone, we've launched half a dozen new services around highly successful strategies: True Wealth China Opportunities (a home run), Stansberry's Credit Opportunities (a home run), the Bear Market Survival Guide (a home run), Income Intelligence (a home run), Stansberry Gold & Silver Investor (great results, comparatively), the Stansberry NewsWire, and all three of our Stansberry Portfolio Solutions portfolios, which have performed as promised.

You can argue that all we've really done is deliver what we promised to our Alliance members.

Yes, but look at how we've delivered.

Look at the huge amount of new content we're producing. Look at the quality of it. An entirely new, real-time news service... staffed by former Wall Street traders with about 100 years of experience among them?

We've added millions and millions of dollars' worth of overhead to our business and created products that would cost more than $25,000 in subscription fees on a yearly basis.

And that's just in the last few years.

Surely our Alliance members would have come to appreciate our efforts and trust us...

Nope.

On Friday, I announced a major new effort at Stansberry Research. I explained that our mission to give individual investors all of the advantages of institutional investors – great research, real-time information, data and analytics, and model portfolios – was hampered by our roots as direct-mail publishers. Going back 20 years, when we started our efforts, we primarily used "snail" mail. And when the Internet emerged, we mostly grafted that model on top of the Internet using e-mail.

But that doesn't make any sense today.

We offer lots of products and services that simply don't fit into e-mail – real-time news, model portfolios, data models, and charting services. And then, of course, consider the volume of what we're publishing now. It's not just a once-a-month newsletter. We send out daily e-mails, too.

Keeping up with this content and making it all easily searchable... Well, you can't really do that with e-mail.

This year, I asked my staff to completely rethink our business...

If we were starting from scratch today, would we build out a bunch of separate e-mail lists? Or would we build something like Bloomberg – a fully integrated terminal, which can distribute our research in real time, along with all of the tools needed to use the research easily and quickly?

The answer was clear. So we went out and hired the most experienced executive in the terminal space we could find. His name is Michael Lang. He's a veteran software executive who helped design and build the first investment terminal, Bridge Information Systems, back in the 1980s. So far, we've spent a few million dollars on this development effort. We just began beta testing with a handful of subscribers who have a background in programming.

Our goal is ambitious: We want to build a terminal that can compete with Bloomberg, but is designed to serve individual investors and small investment firms. We plan to make our research and the research of our competitors available on this Stansberry Terminal, along with a complete set of data and analytical tools – including the proprietary models that we use to build our research products. If we're successful, this new piece of software will make finding great investment ideas and managing your portfolio easier and faster than ever before.

If our roles were reversed, how would you handle this new service in regard to your Alliance members?

An investment terminal was never part of anything we promised. And we've spent a fortune building it. Would you really give it away for free?

Well, I decided that was the right thing to do for our Alliance members.

I have no idea exactly how much we're going to charge everyone else to use the Stansberry Terminal. Probably something like $100 per month. But we can offer a "basic access" version for free to all Alliance members.

I thought this was an incredibly generous gesture. It's exactly the way I'd want to be treated if our roles were reversed. Surely our Alliance members will be thrilled... right?

Nope. I got that completely wrong...

The angry e-mails rained in over the weekend.

In fact, angry doesn't really cut it. Most were apoplectic.

Here's a sample of a real letter, from Alliance member Martin K:

"While the Stansberry Terminal looks interesting, I am extremely upset to read that you are offering Alliance Members free access to only the 'basic' level. This level doesn't even provide a fraction of what we currently get. To be fair, you should provide Alliance Members access to all but Stansberry Venture. That is what we paid for. Cutting service after a making a lifetime commitment is unconscionable."

Others were furious, convinced that the lifetime subscriptions they had paid for would now be completely null and void.

Again, this is an actual letter, from Alliance member Thomas M:

"I have been an Alliance member for many years. I am quite concerned by what I read in this Digest about a new 'terminal' format for your subscribers... from what I understand of your new venture, you are going to force me to use a data terminal that I have no interest in trying to learn...

"This is NOT the reason that I paid for a lifetime subscription! After reading your Digest of Dec. 15, I am very concerned that the many years of interesting reading and investment ideas is going to be set aside and I will either have to learn some new, complicated, expensive systems or lose the benefit of my subscription. This is not what I paid for, for life."

Holy cow...

It's like they don't even know us.

I spent most of last Friday's letter explaining how much Alliance members have meant to our business.

Going forward, we're going to completely change the way my company offers access to our work, by gradually limiting access to our investment research to only lifetime subscribers and Alliance members.

Meanwhile, we've built a great piece of software that will convert your computer, tablet, or smartphone into an investment-research terminal, making it much easier for you to access and organize our work. It will also allow you to access many of our competitors' products, too, as I know most of our subscribers get investment ideas from a wide range of providers.

If you're an Alliance member in good standing, you'll be able to use this software for free and you'll be able to access all of the content you do now.

The Stansberry Terminal will carry a lot of third-party data that I cannot grant you access to for free – like the Dow Jones news service, and real-time quotes, for example. I can't give you information that we don't produce, for free. But anything you're receiving now will be included, along with a huge amount of data, analytics, charting, and the ability to communicate easily with other Stansberry Terminal users.

But what if you don't want to use it?

No problem! We will continue to serve you in the way we always have – faithfully and generously.

I sincerely regret that any Alliance members were upset by this announcement. It simply didn't occur to me that anyone would be upset by the idea that we were making a great new tool available to you... for free. Nor could I imagine that any of you would think we would ever do anything to curtail your ongoing lifetime access to our products.

So please... don't worry.

I think you're going to love our new tool. But if you don't, I won't take it personally. You'll continue to get our products via e-mail, just as you always have.

Great Minds Wanted, Wicked Pens Adored

Stansberry Research is hiring an analyst to lead our Innovative and Disruptive Technologies research efforts. We're looking for people with a genuine passion for finance and the investment industry.

The ideal candidate is curious, competitive, humble, and has experience identifying and evaluating innovative, disruptive technologies and trends. Your goal is to conduct meaningful, insightful research and to write for our publications. Formal experience is preferred but may not be necessary, depending on the candidate.

If you've ever wanted to make a living reading, writing, and thinking, please send us the following:

A basic resume. Tell us what you've done before. We admire people who aren't afraid of hard work or odd jobs.

A writing sample. Tell us about an investment opportunity related to innovation or disruptive technology. We're interested in the fundamentals of your best idea, not something based solely on charts.

For more information on this position, click here.

If interested, send your resume, cover letter, and writing sample via e-mail with the subject line "Innovative and Disruptive Technologies Analyst," to AnalystCareers@stansberryresearch.com.

New 52-week highs (as of 12/15/17): AbbVie (ABBV), Altius Minerals (ALS.TO), Boeing (BA), First Trust Nasdaq Cybersecurity Fund (CIBR), Cisco (CSCO), iShares Select Dividend Fund (DVY), WisdomTree Japan Hedged SmallCap Equity Fund (DXJS), Grubhub (GRUB), Invitation Homes (INVH), iShares U.S. Aerospace and Defense Fund (ITA), Lockheed Martin (LMT), iShares Investment Grade Corporate Bond Fund (LQD), McDonald's (MCD), Microsoft (MSFT), AllianzGI Equity & Convertible Income Fund (NIE), Overstock (OSTK), iShares MSCI India Small-Cap Fund (SMIN), ProShares Ultra S&P 500 Fund (SSO), and VF Corporation (VFC).

If you are excited about the Stansberry Terminal... please let me know. It was a long weekend reading from what seemed like all of our best customers that they hate the idea and don't trust me at all. E-mail us at feedback@stansberryresearch.com and tell us what you think.

Regards,

Porter Stansberry
Baltimore, Maryland
December 18, 2017