Review of Marc Chaikin’s Power Gauge Report: Any Mojo in The Gauge?

We will introduce Mark Chaikin, Chaikin Analytics, and his potent, reasonably priced research platform in this Review of Marc Chaikin's Power Gauge Report.

As I write this review (early 2023), we've seen considerable losses in the bond and stock markets; private investors are uneasy. Regarding the current bear market, we are not yet out of the woods, and inflation in 2023 could still worsen.

Almost all investments, with very few exceptions, have seen a significant portion of their value decrease during the horror show of 2022.

Given this, an advisory service that says it can help you invest in stocks or ETFs that are best positioned to overcome this disadvantage and find opportunities for a model portfolio that grows, seems like the heavenly miracle that many of us still hope will happen.

Like most other platforms, you receive a monthly newsletter and a portfolio. The main difference is that the Power Gauge Report also has a complete tool for rating stocks.

Overview

• Name: Marc Chaikin's Power Gauge Report.
• Publishers: Chaikin Analytics.
• Editor:  Marc Chaikin.
• Website: www.chaikinanalytics.com.
• Service: Entry-level investment advisory.
• Focus: Medium-term trades (average six to twelve months).
• Cost: Initial annual subscription fee: $49. Renewals $199.
• Refund policy: 30 days money back guarantee.

Who is Marc Chaikin?  

Marc Chaikin's CV presents an inspiring story about a man who has achieved great success in the investment world with a career that spans more than five decades. Doing the math, Marc is a very venerable and wise man who will be 80 this year (remember, I'm reviewing this in early 2023).

His academic background is a bachelor's in economics and business administration. He holds an MBA in Finance and Investment Management from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.

Marc got his broker's license in 1966 and started working at Shearson and Hammill that same year. From 1966 to 1969, he was able to enjoy the first of many bull markets. It was followed by his first bear market, which lasted nearly two years, and so on, with (shorter or longer) bulls and bears. He was head of the options department at Tucker Anthony & R. L. Day in the 1970s.

Chaikin later got a seat on the New York Stock Exchange and traded futures contracts there. In 1980, Chaikin started making his stock market indicators, and in 1982, he began working for Drexel Burnham Lambert. In 1983, he was awarded the Chartered Financial Analyst designation.

Thereafter, Marc established Bomar Securities LP, which Instinet acquired in 1992. After the sale, he was promoted to senior vice president of Instinet's brokerage firm. He started Chaikin Stock Research in the late 2000s so that small investors could use professional stock tools.

The business was first known as Chaikin Power Tools. On April 30, 2018, Marc and the Chaikin Analytics team rang the NASDAQ opening bell to commemorate the first year since their hugely successful launch.

On October 21, 2021, Chaikin Analytics published the first monthly issue of The Chaikin Power Gauge Report.

This service includes the Money Flow Indicator, the Power Pulse and the Power Feed.

You can quickly get confused by his different products, upgrades, and plug-ins. I confess that I am.

Marc realized early on that fundamental analysis, the household and nearly sole tool of people in the market in his early days, was insufficient. Something else was needed: technical analysis, charts, and more profound quantitative tools. Marc spent his whole career building and fine-tuning such instruments. The Power Gauge Report, in his own words, is the culmination of his life's work.

How independent is Marc?

Chaikin Analytics, the service publisher, is not a stand-alone business; it is owned by a much bigger publicly traded company called Marketwise, that also owns the Oxford Club, Stansberry Research, Rogue Economics, Palm Beach Research, Brownstone Research, and other well-known publishers.

The Agora and Bill Bonner, about whom we have previously written extensively in this service, here and here, have "fathered" this maze of interconnected businesses. No surprise here.

You will have to deal with a lot of manipulation, both from Chaikin and from many other services that go under the Marketwise banner. I do not mind Marc too much; I have grown rhino skin. Besides, I like him and find his "marketing" intentions consistently well-written, informative, and worth reading or looking at (like his many webinars and presentations). Click here for another reason why I follow Marc's baits.

Marketwise, on the other hand, will try to sell you all of their other products. There, you'll get stock presentations promising you the moon, some probably risky and speculative, and they'll scare you into thinking society is about to collapse. You end up feeling that the only way to stay safe is to upgrade. Irritating.

Some people take it all in stride, which we recommend you do, while others get stressed out and upset. If you belong to the second group, don't sign up for any of Marketwise's services (or, to be honest, for some other advisory services, either). If you fall into the first category, your mouse is your weapon: click away from what does not interest you and read or look at whatever takes your fancy.

It is a misconception to think that selling $49 or $199 subscriptions will generate the revenue that advisory services earn. You can bet that most of their money comes from converting customers to more expensive subscription services. 

What is The Power Gauge and how does it function?

The Power Gauge Report shows you what Chaikin thinks are the best sectors and/or businesses, companies, stocks, and ETFs based on his own algorithms. The Power Gauge, his No. 1 tool, answers the question, "What to buy?"

It is complemented in more depth by two timing measures (both (sub)factors of Technicals) representing specially important tools: Chaikin Money Flow and Relative Strength vs. Market (S&P), answering the question "When to buy (and sell)."

Thus, the Power Gauge looks at 20 factors and produces a simple rating from Very Bullish via Bullish to Neutral (just Neutral, or Neutral + or Neutral -) to Bearish and Very Bearish. There are four major categories of factors, each with five (sub)factors.

Below are some excerpts of Marc's own explanations about the system contained in his introduction on the member webpage under the title "The Power Gauge: How to Double Your Money on the Best Stocks."

Financials

Earnings

Technicals

Experts

Combined Power Gauge Rating

About 4,000 stocks and 1,700 ETFs, mostly from large and mid-cap companies, are in their database.

The Relative Strength vs. Market (S&P 500) tool is the Outperformance Key. You want to see sustained outperformance before putting your money to work.

The Chaikin Money Flow factor looks at the difference between the stock's closing price and its whole range for the day. The Money Flow indicator will be positive if a stock closes consistently above its daily midpoint. 

Marc uses an easy-to-understand green-to-red color scheme for everything. 

The exact weighting of the factors for the final Power Gauge Rating is proprietary. This represents Marc's "secret sauce." The output is the initial combined rating, which appears at the top of the PowerPulse page for each stock. Chaikin is only interested in buying companies with Bullish ratings from the Power Gauge. Plus: Certain stocks are Neutral+, representing The Power Gauge's saying "it looks like good things are in the works." 

Hence, we get a systematized way of making our investments. These tools have become industry standards and helped create the first real-time analytics workstations (Bloomberg and Reuters terminals) for portfolio managers and stock traders.

Cost

I paid, in December 2021, $ 49 for a one-year subscription. I just renewed it for another year for $ 199.

The first year has a 30 days money-back guarantee. 

The Member Webpage

In this screenshot you see the member webpage which is intuitive and easy to navigate with the following parts:

Monthly Issues & Updates

These can be long (as the above-mentioned "The Power Gauge: How to Double Your Money on the Best Stocks" which has 16 pages) or the one below. Others can be as short as one or two pages.

Model Portfolio and its updates

I show the last one I received in the screenshot below.

You can see:

There are few positions. Marc expects to hold 10 to 15 positions in the model portfolio eventually. That’s just a guideline, though: it could be higher or lower based on market conditions at any given time (like now).

The results are less than dazzling.

Marc recommends a portfolio size of at least $ 5.000.

Power Pulse

By just entering the name or ticker symbol of a stock or ETF, this very sophisticated tool gives you:

• Present stock price and increase/decrease in dollars and percent over the last day.
• The industry sector the company/stock pertains to.
• Its Power Gauge rating,
• Its performance over the last month, three months, one year and five years (expressed as a percentage, positive or negative - and in brackets, the same information for the prior year).
• A historical price chart corresponding to the above-mentioned four alternative periods (you choose the one you want to see).
• The Money Flow and Relative Strength, again corresponding to each of the alternative four periods.
• Each one of the four factors (and corresponding five (sub) factors) we have treated above, with detailed explanations.
• And finally, a short company profile.

A wealth of pertinent information is shown on just one sheet, and you can conveniently print it out. Some cutouts of the long output here:

Power Feed and its team

You have to sign up separately to this newsletter that is free for Power Gauge Report subscribers and is highly recommended. It is published Monday thru Friday, and in these screenshots, you get an introduction and get acquainted with the Power Feed team.

Performance. How does Marc deliver?

The results could not be farther away from "Double your Money."

There is an unfortunate lack of transparency because we only see open positions, not the closed ones with their gains and -probably, in 2022- losses. That information is missing in too many advisory services that outrageously claim a "multiplication of your wealth." I object to such failure to adequately inform. 

So much so, that I will qualify any results not backed with published active and closed positions, as unsubstantiated. Following this self-imposed rule, I declare that Marc's claim about "double your money" is unsubstantiated.

Thankfully, tracking positions in a service that has existed for only a little over a year, is not too difficult. A respected colleague of ours in the "Advisory Reviews and De-teasing of Stocks" space, AffiliateUnguru, already did that work for us. As theirs is a free service, here is what I find the most important part of their review of December 26, 2022 : Awesome Stock Picks or Hype:

"To find out how the service has performed since its inception, you need to see how the closed positions have faired. And this is only possible by digging through the newsletter archives, which, for an older service, would take forever since there can be 100s of newsletters. But finding that information was pretty easy in this case since the Power Gauge Report only launched in October 2021.

So, how have the recommendations worked out?

The closed positions, thus far, have been a bloodbath. I can’t reveal the tickers because it’s a paid service, but based on my sleuthing through the newsletter archives, nine out of ten closed positions have seen double-digit losses, while one has seen a double-digit win.

To Marc Chaikin’s credit, he recommends a trailing stop loss of 30% on all of his recommendations, which not every stock picker does. And even though the site doesn’t exactly “advertise” what I just showed you, he does openly disclose the closed positions at the end of each newsletter. Also, let’s be real… aside from energy, most stocks have been smashed this year, so Chaikin couldn’t have started this service at a worse time. No stock-rating system is perfect. Even 50-plus-year Wall Street veterans like Chaikin get things wrong. Hopefully, the picks improve over time. But it’s off to a rough start."

I fully agree. You could now say, "well, Marc should have recommended energy stocks above everything else." He did. And probably the unsatisfying result comes from wanting to diversify the portfolio. This did not work out well in a year when it would probably have been best to put all your eggs in the same (energy) basket.

However, that is not very reasonable from a risk management point of view. 

To give you a better feel about Marc's suggestions, I have gone through the weekly updates for the just-ended year 2022. Besides Energy, you can see other sectors and stocks promoted that look spot-on to me:

• Jan. 16: Do not dump Amazon yet.
• Jan. 21: Pros and Cons of Micro Cap, Mid Cap and Large Cap stocks. Marc suggests choosing the last two.
• Feb. 2: Billionaires (e.g Elon Musk with TSLA) dumping stocks and what it might mean (switch to energy?).
• March 8: Warren Buffet's #1 tool: Quality of the stocks/companies above everything else (energy?).
• March 9: War in Ukraine. Energy stocks, Aerospace and Defense. 
• March 11: Key recession indicator on the brink: Inverted Yield Curve.
• March 25: Historical Stock Market Shake-up. Techs down. Energy up. 
• May 1: FAANG+Microsoft stocks lost 1,4 trillion dollars since April. The message: Get out! The following day: do not fall for all-or-nothing. Example: GOOGL and NVDA, out. But: do not dump AAPL; rather monitor the stock closely.
• May 26: Energy is big.
• July 21: Biopharma is big.
• Aug. 5: Small-cap and large-cap stocks are somewhat bullish.
• Aug. 8: Biotech is big. Do not buy small-cap Biotech stocks. The "heavies" are better prepared to survive and thrive if one of the products in their research and clinical tests pipeline does not fly. 
• Aug. 10: Tech stocks just flashed unexpectedly. One of the three ETFs is bullish (while the other two are still neutral).
• Sept. 13: Keep out of Real Estate.
• Sept. 21: Biotech is very bullish, especially ETFs.
• Sept. 23: Healthcare, bullish.
• Dec. 5: Warning signs on bond markets.
• Two free recommendations on a webinar where he pitched his latest product, in Dec. 2022 : Avoid TSLA (oh, how he hates that stock). buy NTFX.

Notes:

More often than not, Marc's tips are well-reasoned and explained. It is thanks to him that I am (reasonably) invested in Oil & Gas, natural gas and LNG. and to a lesser extent in clean energy.

Aerospace & Defense has not evolved so positively, yet. It might, soon. Capital Market sub-sector and Bonds have behaved so-so. 

I perceive that Marc spots new trends earlier than most because his system is very sensitive to identifying changes.

However, his portfolio is not of the buy-hold-forget type. He trades quite actively, though not short-term.  So you have to monitor regularly what he writes and says. The average holding time is anything between six and twelve months.

Now to Marc's "Voldemort" side:

I did, in two instances, catch Marc trying to "trick" his own system when, according to his methodology, a stock did not earn a bullish rating; he assigned it anyway, turning somersaults while explaining why, and I wasn't convinced. 

The second blemish came from a service I respect named Stock Gumshoe with one of its readers: 

"January 14, 2022 6:00 pm

I listened to Marc Chaikin's promotion of his Power Gauge Report. I tuned him out when he told us his wife lost half of her 401K in 2008. He was a significant stock analyst back then and had already invented his algorithm. But he was unable to keep his own wife’s portfolio above water? doncatrow."

This refers to "poor" Marc's often repeated anecdote that he "had to" come back from retirement because his wife's investment adviser managed to lose a lot of money in one of the bear markets, in order to recuperate that loss. This, he says, he did with a vengeance. Still, I think "doncatrow" is right. 

Summing up

The Power Gauge Report at $ 49 was worth my money, and I just renewed my subscription for an additional year for $199.

When it comes to the different expensive upgrades,  I do not need them. They strike me as a rewrapping of a well-known and proven product with additional goodies and fireworks. 

However, Mark's frequent free webinars, presentations and temptations, provide me with more insight and ideas, over and above what I get with the original product. Click here for a recent example. Of the ten items no less than seven are energy or energy-related stocks. 

If only one would have known. Anyway, most helpful information for 2023. See now why I like reading Chaikin's upsells?

Note: This "Power Gauge Investor" pitch of Dec. 27, 2022, was supposed to be a service costing $2.500 for two years and adding the following "goodies" to the existing pie:

1) Two years of Power Gauge Analytics (which I already have).

2) Screener Tool (seems new - to filter out the stocks you want to concentrate on).

3) The Discovery Engine (new - is an algorithm that shows you similar stocks to the ones you have looked for before- the Netflix of investment).

4) One year of Monthly Market Insights (nothing new).

5) Marc's Portfolio Boost (includes market top ten and bottom ten). Interesting. But I can find that elsewhere for free.

I do not know why this is not longer available, but it is not. 

So:

Yes, there is mojo in the Gauge. I am well served with what I already paid for. No need to spend more of my money which I better invest in stocks and ETFs. 

Hopefully the right ones in this freshly baked 2023.

And this ends with The Review of Marc Chaikin's Power Gauge Report: Any Mojo in The Gauge?