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IBD Leaderboard Review – The Results Are In

IBD Leaderboard Review

In this Leaderboard review I examine IBD’s stock picking subscription service. A subscription service where IBD does the time consuming research for you, then presents you with a list of stocks near their buy points.

While subscribing to proven services such as Leaderboard is the fastest way for anyone to make gains in the market when they first start, in this IBD Leaderboard review I’ll go over the four things you need to look for when evaluating any trading service such as Leaderboard.

When I first started investing, I subscribed to the IBD Newspaper and read many of William O’Neil’s books. Great education. However, this is not about those products but about their Leaderboard subscription service.

To me, these are the 4 most important things to look for. What else even matters? Do you do this to have fun or to build a big retirement account? If you want a big retirement account, then read on.

To make a more efficient use of your time, I’m not only going to review Leaderboard, but I will also compare Leaderboard to a similar trading service, the Index Trading Strategy. While Leaderboard gives you buy and sell points for stocks, Index Trading Strategy gives you buy and sell points for Index ETF’s such as TNA, TZA, TQQQ, and SQQQ.

So let’s get started with this Leaderboard review and comparison by starting with my most important criteria, “expected returns”.

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What Are My Expected Returns?

While Leaderboard does not post the results of their individual trades, they do post a cumulative return. I have yet to figure out how they come up with this number. Here are the results I have found posted on their website as of June 5, 2024.

As you can see, the returns start back in January of 2020. Leaderboard managed to achieve a 36% return. That gain is about 50% better than the S&P. Not bad. Now if we compare the return of Leaderboard to my own Index Trading Strategy, we see something quite different: Leaderboard’s 36% return does not look as good. We all have only a certain amount of time before we retire (or pass away). The bigger the gains, the faster our money grows and the better chance we have of hitting our financial goals.

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What Are My Costs?

Leaderboard costs $69 month. For Leaderboard’s 36% gain over 24 months you would have had to pay $1,656 ($69 x 24 months). If you have only $10,000 to invest, you just lost 17% to subscription fee. Your 36% gain is now about the same as just buying and holding SPY. No need to subscribe to Leaderboard unless you have a lot more funds to invest to overcome the high expense.

Compare this with my Index Trading Strategy subscription fee of $19.95 per month. Twenty four at $19.95 equals $480 for a gain that was 2x more profitable than Leaderboard. BIGGER gains at a much lower cost means more money in your pocket and a faster retirement.

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Can I Do This?

With Leaderboard, you get trade alerts for 10-15 stocks each month. Leaderboard will alert you with buy and sell points. It’s up to you to decide which ones you want to trade. If you do all of them, you could be in dozens of stocks at a time and spending lots of time at the computer trading and monitoring.

With the Index Trading Strategy have only one ETF to trade (ETF’s trade the same as stocks) and will do about 10 trades per year. Compare that to 120 to 180 with Leaderboard. Index Trading Strategy has less work for a much bigger return.

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Is There A Money Back Guarantee?

Leaderboard has no money-back guarantee but they do give you a 3 week trial for $9.95. Not sure if that is enough time to see if it works, but should be enough time to verify returns and to see if it’s something you can follow.

My Index Trading Strategy offers a 30-Day Money-back Guarantee which means you pay up front, but have 30 days to verify returns and see if it’s something you can do. Cancel within 30 days and get full refund of your subscription fee (and you don’t have to ask – comes automatically).

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Conclusion

We have already seen that Leaderboard and the Index Trading Strategy both give you buy and sell alerts. The big difference seems to be that Index Trading Strategy costs much less, has you doing less work, and in the end you wind up with a bigger gain. I’ve put together a chart comparing Leaderboard against Index Trading Strategy. Hopefully it will help you make a decision, or subscribe to both for a few months and see which is better for you.

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Now that you have the facts, I’m sure you can now make a more informed decision as to which service is a better fit for you. There is no guarantee that my trading service, or Leaderboard will do similar gains in the future.

To your success.