The Holy Grail of investing is as obvious as it is elusive: A winning formula for managing investments that returns above-market returns year after year. It’s the kind of pursuit that seems perfectly feasible for new investors fresh out of Finance 101 classes armed with basic formulas and a half-read copy of Security Analysis, but looms ever larger and more insurmountable as they put their money where their mouths are.
It’s not that earning a good return on your investments is that difficult. Anyone can get lucky and place a big bet that delivers an even bigger payoff. The markets would be calm and predictable if not for the possibility of such lucky breaks. And of course it’s possible to develop a homebrewed investing strategy that manages to beat the market for at least a few years.
The trick is consistency.
A strategy that delivers above-market returns with any kind of long-term consistency is a rare thing indeed. Even the best investors, the most prestigious hedge funds, and the brightest financial advisors in the business have bad years sometimes. It seems like an impossible dream.
Zacks may have found the Holy Grail, and Zacks Home Run Investor may be just what you need to get those market-beating returns you want with the consistency you need.
What is Zacks?
Leonard Zacks founded Zacks Investment Research in 1978 armed with a PhD in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He’d spent much of the last decade working as quantitative researcher in a brokerage firm, during which he’d come upon a major discovery: that earnings revisions are the most powerful forces affecting stock prices.
Zacks used his considerable skill and experience to develop the Zacks Performance Rank, a quantitative model that’s formed the basis of a stock research and recommendations empire that’s spanned four and a half decades.
According to Zacks themselves, the stocks picked using the Zacks Rank system have returned more than twice as much as the S&P 500 over the same period. It’s hard to argue with an average gain of 24.52% per year between 1988 and 2023, and it’s no wonder Zacks is still such a powerhouse in the world of stock research.
Zacks Home Run Investor
The Zacks Home Run Investor service is a subscription-based program that identifies small and mid-cap companies with the potential for explosive growth. A stock only qualifies for the Home Run Investor portfolio if it’s already been evaluated using the Zacks Rank system and identified as having growth potential of 50%, 100%, 200%, or more. The list itself is kept to about 25 to 30 stocks that are held for a period of 1 to 2 years, with about 2 or 3 trades per month to cut losers and add new opportunities.
Zacks Home Run Investor has only been around since 2011, but in that time it’s already picked more than 100 stocks that delivered double and triple-digit gains in the period they were held.
Zacks is so confident that the Home Run Investor program will be worth the money that it even offers a money-back guarantee if the Zacks portfolio underperforms against the S&P 500 during the stock holding period. Actually claiming the refund has some big stipulations attached—minimum number of timely stock purchases, full brokerage documentation, comparisons against he S&P over the same period, etc—but it still speaks to their confidence in their service.
Neat. How Much is It?
If you click around on Zacks’ website you’ll eventually find yourself at the Home Run Investors Page. Once there you’ll notice two things: first, there are a couple buttons that promise a 30-day trial for $1. Second, the actual price of the service isn’t listed.
Now, 30 days for $1 is a pretty decent deal. It’s just a little weird that the actual subscription price is only listed in a small paragraph on the page where you actually sign up for the trial.
The price, as it turns out, is $59 per month, though you wouldn’t know that if you didn’t go digging through the expandable FAQ menu at the very bottom of the page or read everything on the subscription page. It’s kind of an odd move, and not something you’d expect from Zacks.
Pricing:
$1 for first 30 days
$59 per month after trial
What Do You Get?
A subscription to Zacks Home Run Investor—which is apparently an inseparable part of the Zacks Investor Collection package—gets you a few things:
Zacks Home Run Investor itself
Access to Zacks Investor Collection
Zacks’ 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days
Zacks Home Run Investor
Run by Zacks Aggressive Growth Strategist Brian Bolan, the Home Run Investor program targets low-profile stocks with exceptional growth potential. The actual modeling is complex, but it essentially looks for stocks with high earnings momentum that will hopefully lead to a bunch of quarterly earnings surprises and significant share price growth.
Here’s how it actually works in practice:
Once you sign up for the service you’ll get access to the Home Run Investor portfolio. This will give you a look at the current portfolio—usually between 25 and 30 stocks—how long they’ve been held, how much they’ve returned, and other pertinent information. You’ll also be able to access exclusive market commentary that will help keep you up to date on the latest developments with each company and how to trade accordingly.
The portfolio only sees 2 to 4 trades per month, but each one of those trades is both important and highly time-sensitive. As such, you can enter your email address and/or phone number and receive instant alerts as soon as stocks are added or removed from the portfolio.
One of the stipulations of receiving a refund on your subscription fees is that you follow the alerts and make your trades within 24 hours of receiving the email or text. Zacks wouldn’t put that on the list if the timeliness of the trades weren’t important, so the alerts feature is more important than it might seem at first blush.
Finally, the subscription to Home Run Investor comes with a quick start guide for helping you get set up as quickly and painlessly as possible.
Zacks Investor Collection
Home Run Investor is just one of the portfolios included in the Zacks Investor Collection. It also includes portfolios like:
ETF Investor
Income Investor
Stocks Under $10
Value Investor
Zacks Top 10
It also includes:
Exclusive market insights
Zacks Premium research and research tools
Zacks’ exclusive stock insights and strategies
Access to a member-only website with open positions and live performance
Daily briefings on key developments and portfolio changes
Real-time buy and sell alerts from all private long-term portfolios
This is where the majority of your $59/month is going to. Getting recommendations from Home Run Investor is great, but getting the full range of insights and analyses from Zacks is even better. If the claims of Zacks’ historical performance are true (and the math says they are), the subscription will more than pay for itself in no time at all.
Bonus Report
The last thing the subscription gets you is a copy of a nice little bonus report called Zacks’ 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. The site doesn’t go into too much more detail than that, but it really doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what the report includes.
Conclusion
Zacks Investment Research has made a name for itself as one of the better stock research and recommendations firms out there. It’s not hard to see why; their ranking model delivers impressive above-market returns with remarkable consistency and shows no signs of slowing down.
Zacks Home Run Investor is just one of the portfolios that Zacks actively manages according to their models. It doesn’t always find every low-profile stock with huge growth potential, but the extraordinary share price growth the winners enjoy is more than enough to justify the $59/month subscription price.
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