Liberty Through Wealth Review – Sinister Marketing

Overview

• Name: Liberty Through Wealth
• Type: Newsletter
• Website: libertythroughwealth.com/libertythroughwealthdaily.com
• Service: Financial Analysis

As mentioned, Liberty Through Wealth is a product of the Oxford Club and their Chief Investment Strategist, Alexander Green. The listed address is therefore the same as the Oxford Club itself:

105 W Monument St, Baltimore, MD 21201

There’s nothing inherently fishy about this and it would seem to make sense due to the fact that it is a product of Alexander Green. Interestingly, there seems to be two concurrent websites operating the Liberty Through Wealth Brand as of the time of publishing this article in March 2020. First is libertythroughwealth.com, which describes the publication as being published 5 times a week, and in fact has a different address too:

PO Box 932, Baltimore, MD 21203

In addition to this, there is libertythroughwealthdaily.com, featuring the original Oxford Club address which is listed above. This website claims that Liberty Through Wealth is a newsletter that is sent out six times a week. It’s odd for this duplication to take place, they are clearly referring to the same product and have a lot of the same copy text on both sites.

Based on the general layout and overall design elements involved between the two, I would hazard a guess at libertythroughwealth.com being the newer of the two sites.

Perhaps the PO Box address is an attempt to distance themselves from the Oxford Club so explicitly? Although that doesn’t seem to be consistent with the other marketing present on the site, which does advertise them as a subscription service. Either way, I find it very odd that they have decided to keep both domains up and running simultaneously as there doesn’t seem to be any direct explanation or obvious reason for it that is presented.

Something very important to keep in mind about Liberty Through Wealth and Alexander Green, is the ties with Oxford Club and their parenting company, Agora Financial. Alexander Green may be the man behind Liberty Through Wealth and the Oxford Club in general, but they are owned by the publishing company Agora Financial, who actually own and run a vast number of financial newsletter companies and are infamous for their less than stellar practices.

More on this later, but first, let’s take a closer look at the experts directly contributing to the daily output of Liberty Through Wealth itself.

The people behind it

Alexander Green: Alexander Green is a former Wall Street investment expert who plied his trade for around 16 years or so at various firms before leaving because, according to his own bio, he was “disgusted” at the culture that had developed there. He has since moved to the Oxford Club in the early 2000s and was promoted to Chief Investment Strategist in 2003. Since then he has been involved in the creation and marketing of a number of products that the Oxford Club puts out, including the editor of this newsletter. 

He certainly has the experience and therefore one would assume the knowledge that comes with it, however, as we mentioned in our more detailed personal overview of Green, he is much more concerned with getting your subscription money than with helping to actually make you rich.

Nicholas Vardy: Nicholas Vardy is the “Quantitative Expert” at Liberty Through Wealth, meaning that he is basically basing his advice on quantitative trading systems and exchange-traded funds. Vardy is based out of London and provides a number of articles for Liberty Through Wealth daily based on his own approach to investment strategies. He also seems to have real investment experience, just like Green, with an impressive CV and three degrees to his name.

He writes at least one article per week for Liberty Through Wealth, runs his own newsletter, the Oxford Swing Trader, and contributes to The Oxford Communique, which is the Oxford Club’s flagship publication.

Mark M. Ford: Ford is one of the founding members of the Oxford Club and a highly successful businessman in his own right. He is also, according to the Liberty Through Wealth bio page, a keen practitioner of martial arts, teaching, philanthropy, and has directed four films. To call him a “character” would be an understatement. Ford is the son of two college professors, has an M.A. to his name, and has been involved in business since the 1960s.

He has been Chief Growth Strategist at Agora Inc. since 1993 and is active in real estate. He was once also prosecuted by the United States Postal Inspection Service and had $6.6million seized before being forced to set up a compensation fund for the victims he allegedly defrauded - oops!

What do you get with Liberty Through Wealth?

Liberty Through Wealth is a daily newsletter offering financial assessment of current investment trends in order to guide your own investment strategies and help you make money. It should be noted, however, that they explicitly say on their website that they do not offer personal investment advice or brokerage services.

This is likely a mere disclaimer to stop you from suing them should you follow their analysis and somehow end up penniless. It shouldn’t take away from the fact that they do very much offer general financial advice in various forms, nor should it deflect from the fact that the way Liberty Through Wealth is marketed is very much geared to making you believe that you will get rich if you follow what they have to say. With that being said, let's take a closer look at the various levels of analysis that they offer.

Liberty Through Wealth remains largely market neutral in their approach, with their articles and analysis covering a wide range of investment strategies, including: momentum investing, tax-advantaged investing, emerging markets, and many more. It is clear then that they do not prescribe to one particular mode of operating, nor are they trying to sell you on a specific mode of operating through their continued output.

Their claim is that they are hoping to educate you through a journey from financial illiteracy to complete financial independence through the acquisition of wealth over time. Sounds like a pretty noble venture, all things considered. Let’s keep digging to explore how exactly they aim to do so.

They both publish articles daily to the site and send out the newsletter to the mailing list. You will be sent (bombarded) with their current up to date views on the market and investment, with encouragement to engage with and respond to the various issues of the day. This is, of course, a way for them to peddle their various services that are markedly not free, such as the $4000 subscription services that are associated with The Oxford Club itself. 

They have a number of quasi-moralistic tenets to which they supposedly adhere, as outlined in their sales pitch, so let’s go through them. Firstly, they claim that those who run Wall Street are not out to help the average person with their advice and therefore should not be trusted, however, they are independent of Wall St. and are committed to providing advice that will allow people to become self sufficient and rich. If such a claim is true, then it is a massively altruistic enterprise that they have embarked on - they claim that through the sense of a shared community that they are empowering people to strike back at the Wall Street agenda for no apparent benefit to themselves. This should be taken with a massive pinch of salt.

As they claim themselves “every broker on Wall Street has an ulterior motive”, but this somehow does not apply to them. One wonders why we do not hear more about the effectiveness of their anti-Wall Street agenda to actually promote wealth given that it is apparently their singular mission that is delivered to tens of thousands of people - where are all the millionaires they have created? It’s not just Wall Street investors with an agenda, and given the history of the people involved, you should be very careful in trusting Liberty Through Wealth implicitly.

Some other of the mentalities that they purport to subscribe to include: contrarian investing i.e. investing in the S&P 500 when equity fund flows are negative and in treasury bills when fund flows are positive. This is an odd one because it cites a 25 year-old study from the Journal of Financial Economics that demonstrated this to be the case, however, they make no link to the actual study, and I couldn’t find it even with significant digging. It would help their claims here, again, if

they could actually provide some evidence. The rest of their convictions are similarly vague suggestions such as simply “focus on the long term” and “know when to sell”. This is hardly revolutionary advice in and of itself; focussing on fundamentals is a long recognised strategy.

So, the sales pitch is hardly a knock-out in terms of describing what you get. However, in fairness to Liberty Through Wealth, you can view a huge number of articles on their website for free at any time. As I have said, they do provide actual investment analysis and their writers do have genuine experience, so there’s a real chance that you might learn something through osmosis that you weren’t aware of before.

Just don’t expect to suddenly have the secrets of Wall Street revealed to you. Apart from the articles and the daily email updates, you will also get, as part of the service, a number of follow-through links included as part of the newsletters. These are present on their site too. They are doing here the typical direct marketing strategy of teasing more and more information behind different services and paywalls.

Costs and refunds

One thing that Liberty Through Wealth has going for it is that it is, on the face of it, a completely free service. You will constantly be sent click-through links and advertisements to further services offered by the men involved, but otherwise the newsletter itself is completely free. For a closer look at some of the products that you are likely to be advertised, including our review of whether they are worth it, you can check out more of our Oxford Club reviews here. Otherwise, you can simply unsubscribe any time that you like without having to worry about a refund so long as you haven’t signed up to any of their paid services.

So, in this case it seems it is relatively easy to get out of the service one you are a member. Just remember to read up on their privacy policy before you give them any of your contact information to make sure that you are comfortable with what they are going to do with your email address and personal data with regard to selling it on or using it to track/advertise to you in the future.

Complaints

You won’t find Liberty Through Wealth on the Better Business Bureau or many other reviews sites out there at all. After a significant amount of digging, I could not find any complaints from people who had subscribed, nor could I find any substantial evidence that Liberty Through Wealth had exploited or ripped people off directly. The likely explanation for this is that they are simply not directly selling anything through the service, so there isn’t really much scope for people to be ripped off.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

- It’s free

- The writers have genuine experience

- Its delivered daily

- You can opt out at any time

Cons:

- The quality of the advice can vary greatly

- The founder has been arrested for fraud in the past

- They will try to sell you extra services

Conclusion