Is Alexander Green (The Oxford Club) a fraud? – Complaints Galore!

Overview

• Name: Alexander Green
• Type: Investment Advisor and Writer
• Website: oxfordclub.com
• Services: Personal Finance Advice

Alexander Green is Chief Investment strategist at The Oxford Club, a financial letters service that was established in 1989. It functions as basically a private investment club, where tips and strategies are shared between members in the pursuit of profits. It shares its investment advice through various newsletters, alerts, and reports. They offer a number of different membership subscription prices depending on whether you want purely digital access or some print copies of their work.

A lot of the services and products that Alexander Green teases through the Oxford Club are massively over-marketed and crudely teased in the most clickbait fashion possible. He is, in this regard, no better than a lot of the investment grifters out there who try to bombard and bamboozle people with “the next big thing”. We have covered his over-the-top teasing of stock in the past in fact, with our article on his single-stock retirement plan.

Now, if he was just a no-name internet investment figure, then it wouldn’t be too difficult to point to his misleading stock pitches and simply say that he should be avoided entirely if you are looking for sound advice.

However, it is slightly more complicated than that as he does have real Wall Street experience, over a decade of it in fact, as an investment advisor, research analyst, and portfolio manager. He is also a national best-selling author, four times over with his pop-investment/self-help style books, such as The Gone Fishin’ Portfolio.

Green became the investment director at the Oxford Club in 2001, after apparently becoming “disgusted with Wall Street”. He then took over the Club’s general investment policy and philosophies over the next few years. In 2007 he took over as Chairman of Investment and continued developing a number of services for the club, whilst overseeing the various publications that it sends to its subscribers every month.

The Oxford Club now boasts over 150,000 members, so, is the man behind it all actually giving sound advice? I’m going to break down some of what is offered by Alex and the Oxford Club and then help you come to a conclusion about whether or not he is the real deal.

Products, services, and costs

Alexander Green has a number of products and services for you to sink your hard-earned cash into in the name of investment advice. Let’s take a the subscription levels that are advertised on the site:

Basic Subscription - $49/yr for the first year and $79/yr for each year after the first:

Yes you are reading that correctly, the $49 price quoted on the website as the basic Oxford Club subscription is only for the first year of service. After that it increases to $79 per year as the “lowest amount” that they can charge as a recurring payment… for some reason.. that they don’t specify. Basically, this is their way of making some extra profit out of you by banking on the fact that you will either forget your subscription entirely or that you’ll not notice the price hike. Sure, $30 extra may not seem like much, but when we’re talking about over 150,000 members it starts to add up. Sneaky.

What does this basic subscription get you? Only the digital version of the Oxford Communique, the flagship monthly newsletter. There are, obviously, countless investment newsletter advisory publications out there now, especially digital ones that all compete for your attention and money so the selling factor behind this one is the supposed pedigree that Alexander Green himself brings to the table.

Standard Subscription - $129/yr:

The “Standard” subscription gets you the same digital Communique, but it will also get you it delivered in print form. Y’know, in case you have an urge to collect physical copies of investment advice that will quickly be out of date and you’re happy spending an extra $50 a year for the privilege. For some who prefer to bookkeep on paper and who like the satisfaction of receiving physical copies will enjoy this option, but it seems like an especially large price-hike simply for a physical copy of a newsletter you are already receiving digitally.

Premium Subscription - $249/yr:

This most expensive of these membership options nets you both print and digital versions of the Communique, as well as access to some of the other reports that the Oxford Club publishes, such as the Oxford Income Letter. Not all of these are produced by Alexander Green specifically though so I won’t go into further detail about each one.

All of these subscriptions come with a number of added in freebies that are presented in the typical over-the-top way of showcasing their supposed value with a big line through it in order to make you think that they’re being incredibly generous in giving it away for free. Standard marketing schtick that you should not fall for.

VIP Trading services - Prices Vary:

There are a total of 13 other “VIP trading services” available from the Oxford Club, some of which are championed by Alexander Green himself. The prices of these can vary wildly and some of them soar into the multiple thousands. One example of which we have previously covered; the Insider Report which Green flogged with Bill O’Reilly for $4,000 per year. You can see our breakdown of that particular service here.

So, quite the suite of services available to purchase and peruse for those looking for investment advice. If Alexander Green is to be believed, his keen eye for stock tips that comes from his many years on Wall Street and subsequent research will be all you need to get rich over time.

Let’s dig a little deeper into those claims and investigate exactly how effective his reports may be.

How good is the advice?

First of all, let me say that nothing I am about to write here should be considered investment advice. Those of you who are looking for that should always do your own research even if you do subscribe to the advice of particular experts though online magazines or newsletters. Many investment services run pretty shady services looking to simply take your money and offer ineffective advice in the long-run. That should come as no surprise for those of you who have paid attention to the many articles we have published here over the years.

The first red flag is the fact that the Oxford Club itself, while run by Alexander Green, is actually owned by Agora Financial. Agora Financial, for those who are unaware, owns more than 40 investment publications and in fact accounts for the vast majority of the digital investment newsletters that are advertised all over the internet. The Oxford Club and its communique fall into this group.

So what’s the big deal? Well there is one massive unifying theme that underlies the strategies behind many of these publications and it doesn’t have much to do with the nature or efficacy of the advice offered. The thing they all have in common is the much maligned and often misleading advertising style that they employ - exemplified by some of the techniques seen in our review of some of Alexander Green’s specific offerings.

Exactly how misleading is the marketing that Agora Financial and its affiliated publications have championed in the past? Well for one, they have been subject to a number of lawsuits. For example, in 1995 there was the Ginsburg vs Agora Financial lawsuit for Factual Misstatements. That in itself is pretty damning, but it doesn’t end there. There have been countless more, including a lawsuit brought by the SEC itself in 2003 for Profiting from False Financial Information. As recently as February 2021, Agora Financial was ordered to pay a $2,000,000 fine to settle charges brought by the FTC for misleading people in one of its publications about a cure for type-2 diabetes.

It’s not a good look for Alexander Green that the parent company responsible for publishing his newsletters has been sued multiple times and fined by regulatory bodies for deliberately misleading people to make a profit. That is exactly the kind of damning information that would indicate that those involved are indeed fraudulent and would in no-way be worth your time or money. The owner of Agora, Bill Bonner, has a net-worth that is rapidly approaching $1billion, so the money involved in the marketing of financial advice itself seems to be rapidly overtaking the money that you are purported to even make by following the advice itself. A curious situation indeed.

To be slightly more fair to Alexander Green for a second here though; sure it doesn’t look good that the Oxford Club and its publications forms one of many affiliated companies that are owned by a publisher that is proven to be fraudulent, however, that doesn’t necessarily prove that Green himself is a fraud, even if it does tip the scales against him. To make a definitive judgement, we should look more closely at the specific product that he offers and the complaints that it may or may not have had to face.

The stocks recommended by Alexander Green and the Oxford Club are largely microcap stocks, which are stocks that are very cheap per share. This makes them seem like a great buy-in opportunity, but in fact simply leaves them open to all kinds of market manipulation by larger players. It leaves them open to the classic pump-and-dump schemes, where a company promotes the mass buying of a cheap stock in order to inflate its price and allow them to sell their shares for a profit before the price returns to the original figure. This is exactly the thing that Agora Financial, for example, was sued for in 2003.

Is Alexander Green going to make you rich or set you up for retirement as his website and over-the-top advertising likes to claim? Probably not. He only gives the occasional tip that is going to pay off and it’s not going to pay off in a massive way if/when it does just down to the nature of the stocks he is focussing on. Alexander Green puts most of his time into market timing advice, and whilst this is something that can also be overhyped in terms of its primary importance, it is certainly a major factor in stock performance.

Let’s look closer at that flagship stock tip he has been touting. As I mentioned, we have already exposed it as being Foxconn/Hon Hai in the past. The fact is, Alexander Green has been promoting this stock for years now with almost the exact same sales pitch. It was a $3 stock in 2015 and it was a $3 in 2020. There has been no growth at all until the beginning of 2021 when the sell price finally rose to around $8. According to Green, however, it was set to skyrocket almost 5 years ago - so what happened? Why has he been pushing this tip for so long despite the fact that an easy search will reveal that the stock is average at best?

The simple fact is, it is the perfect stock to market because of the fact that it is a tech company with links to some big brand names. When you take these facts out of context, you can make the stock look like a sure-fire hit waiting to happen, unfortunately, the stock is not a secret sleeper hit, Foxconn are already well known as simply the “manufacturers of the iPhone” and not much else. Either Green knows this and is deliberately misleading you, or he is not giving very good investment advice out of ignorance. Neither option paints him in a particularly good light.

Some more damning evidence against Green is the fact that despite the fact that he likes to market the Oxford Club as an “elite investment club” and his newsletters as expert investment advice from a real industry professional, the Oxford Club are being reported online frequently on Stockgumshoe and the Better Business Bureau for failing to deliver on their promises and taking money from people without them knowing. 

The Better Business Bureau has this to say about the Oxford Club in general:

“this business has a pattern of complaints concerning advertising issues, refund & exchange issues, customer service issues, and billing issues.” which essentially backs up all of the individual complaints that are out there.

For and against

Here’s a quick for and against summary that weighs up everything we’ve covered here today.

For:

• Alexander Green does have over a decade of experience on Wall Street
• He is a best-selling author of multiple books
• His investment advice can sometimes lead to money being made

Against:

• The amount you’re likely to make is far less than advertised
• The cost of his services are massively overpriced in my opinion
• His advice is often misleading or simply ill-informed
• His company is owned by a publisher that has been sued for fraud multiple times
• His company has been subject to numerous complaints about their own practices regarding secret subscription costs and difficulty getting a refund

Conclusion