What we have right here is a pretty expensive trading research service. On sale at $1,495 from $5,000 annual fee, it is still quite an investment. So, is Shah Gilani's Hyperdrive Portfolio worth it?
According to the publisher's press release, Stuart Varney named Gilani "the man who calls it all." Apparently, he is among the best in the world in making predictions.
He’s called everything from the death of retail and the rise of e-commerce, to the biggest stock run-up in history. You name it, Shah’s predicted it.
The editor himself acknowledges that he is a genius of sorts. For him, the results speak for themselves.
Because of his trading strategies, he says he now has a "not-so-humble lifestyle" with "digs in the Hamptons," a "home on the Florida coast," an art collection," and a "collection of exotic sports cars."
The trader calls it the "Waterfall Trade." His goal with the service is to show subscribers how they can take advantage of the market turmoil.
If you want to make the best gains, just pay the hefty annual fee and listen to his advice. His pitch says you can make "potential gains of 625% in 17 trading days, 812% in 25 trading days – even 906% in just 22 trading days."
But wait, there's more, as the annoying infomercials would say. Gilani says you can make such gains "over and over again – two... three... four... even five times a week."
Does this sound too good to be true? Can he back up his claims with a solid track record and verifiable proof of concept? Is the service worth it?
Continue reading our review to get an inside look at Shah Gilani's Hyperdrive Portfolio as we subscribed to the service to provide more details.
Overview
- Name: Hyperdrive Portfolio
- Editor: Shah Gilani
- Publisher: Money Map Press
- Website: www.moneymappress.com and www.totalwealthresearch.com
- Service: Investment research service
- Cost: $1,495 annual fee (from $5,000 original price)
Editor Shah Gilani claims he can help you learn the art of trading even when the market is in disarray. In fact, he says that his secrets work even better during such times.
Essentially, it is a growth-oriented model portfolio subscription.
The editor says all you need to do is follow his recommendations to make impressive gains. With a price tag of a whopping $5,000, you will learn how to implement Gilani's Waterfall Trade system.
Of course, since he wants special readers to avail Hyperdrive Portfolio, you may get it for the promo price of $1,495. What a generous offer, right?
Despite the reduced price, it still is a hefty amount compared with other similar services. However, publisher Money Map Press offers a 30-day money-back guarantee so you can check out the service first.
Should you subscribe? We will help you answer this question in the next sections.
Subscription Process
Compared with other long-winded narratives from newsletters, the pitch we saw was not as long. One could see a crystal clear flow from a legitimate need to what subscribers can expect from the service.
Aside from this, we also appreciate the honesty of the warning.
With that in mind, you should only invest what you're comfortable with – and comfortable losing.
This is extremely helpful for readers. Most editors shy away from saying this or bury it in tiny, tiny fine print.
However, many more should temper subscribers' expectations so they can make wise financial investment decisions. This is especially true for Hyperdrive Portfolio because it does promise the moon and the stars.
Let Me Show You How to Play It for Staggering Potential of 625%, 812%, 906%, and More!
These are astronomical gains. If potential subscribers see these without context, they may be in for a disappointment. This is because investing does carry significant risks.
For those dissatisfied with the service, Gilani offers a money-back guarantee. When we saw this, it further pushed us to try it out as there was a safety net.
If you plan to take a peek at what the service offers before actually subscribing, take note of the photo below.
You may be tempted to subscribe to the significantly cheaper quarterly option. However, the refund policy does not apply here.
Once you sign up for the service, you know what usually happens next. Of course, there is another special offer for a limited time. In this case, gasp, you only have three minutes to decide!
So on top of the $1,495 fee for the supposed one-year fee, you can upgrade to a lifetime membership.
All you need to do is pay a one-time fee of $995. In addition, you would need to shell out a $249 maintenance fee annually. Take note that this yearly maintenance fee alone is the price of other newsletters.
But if it does deliver on its promises, it is a small price to pay. So should you risk it? Continue reading as we extensively review the service and its features.
In our particular case, we opted to pass on this generous offer for now. The team wanted to see what it could offer first before committing long-term to Hyperdrive Portfolio.
To our surprise, we were already brought to the welcome message right after. The upsell route was so unbelievably short we wondered if there was a system glitch.
As you know, publishers usually will not let you enjoy your subscription right away. Since you just purchased, they will bombard you with one mega special opportunity after another.
You will often get an upgrade offer, a bundle promotion, or an add-on feature. Editors are typically relentless when it comes to these. That's why this is a welcome surprise for us.
So after the welcome, we now get to see what's inside the pricy service. In the next sections, you will learn more about what's inside Gilani's trading platform.
What is Hyperdrive Portfolio?
According to the editor, it is a "research initiative" focused on giving you trade alerts so you could make "big, fast triple-digit gains."
Once you subscribe, you will also get analyses that explain how you can make more money as a trader. Gilani says he guarantees that you will see great returns even during economic turmoil.
His secret weapon here is a process he calls "The Waterfall Trade." According to the editor, he named it such because he uses it "to make money over and over and over again."
We will go over them in detail in the next sections , but we can say that the editor does make an effort to explain these concepts in the dashboard.
This technique constitutes four elements, explained in his own words:
1. Financial X-Ray Score
a proprietary rating system I've developed over the last 40 years
it gives me a comprehensive snapshot of what's happening deep inside a company
2. Real Profits Indicator
designed to give me a real picture of their profitability – or more accurately, just how much money they're losing
3. Debt-Suffocation Grade
combines a number of debt-related statistics including total debt, interest coverage, earnings per share, cash flow, leverage ratios, and debt-to-equity ratios
4. Drop Zone
a sophisticated price-tracking system that tells us when to hit these bad companies
the stock has rolled over to the downside and is poised to tumble like a barrel going over Niagara Falls
Based on his descriptions, we may all be asking the same question. But Gilani has anticipated what we all might be thinking, and he has a ready answer:
... this is not shorting stocks. It's a simple, easy-to-use option trade that goes up when the underlying stock goes down.
No matter what you think of his system, whether you think it's effective or not, we do commend his attempt to explain his process.
There are a lot of subscribers who do not really care to look at what's under the hood, and we respect that. But we also know that there are many readers who want to understand what how a service will accomplish its promises.
In our recent reviews, we have often commented that many editors do not bother to explain anymore. They mistakenly believe that name recognition and marketing will do the trick.
So in this case, we appreciate what the editor's team has done. Considering that this is not an affordable research service, potential subscribers would be curious to know how they can make more money.
Based on the discussion so far, are you inclined to subscribe to Hyperdrive Portfolio? We would appreciate your comments below.
Before we give you a rundown of the Hyperdrive Portfolio dashboard, let's find out if Gilani and Money Map Press have what it takes to actually give you the returns they are promising.
Who is Shah Gilani?
If you want to get an extensive look at the editor, we suggest reading our past article, Who Is Shah Gilani? Are His Services Legit or Scams?.
In that write-up, we looked at his background, services, and even general feedback about him and his services.
In a nutshell, Gilani is an experienced trader for 40 years.
His profile states that he launched his first hedge fund in 1982 and his second in 1999. Aside from these, he also founded a bundled fixed-income trading desk in a British bank, Lloyd's TSB.
We also saw some claims from his team that he is a "trader's trader." Gilani's PR team also says that people also call him "one of the world's best experts on the credit crisis."
He graduated from the University of California Los Angeles with a degree in psychology and economics.
You can read more about the editor through our past articles. We believe these will give you more information and help you decide if you will subscribe to his service or not:
What You Get, Track Record
So what are we poised to receive once we subscribe to the service?
According to the pitch:
- Kickstart Briefing with trade recommendations
- Portfolio
- Trade Alerts
- New trade alerts that could show you "big, fast triple-digit gains." Gilani says his team "will monitor each and every trade."
- Access to the live trading room
- Waterfall Profits Master Trading Program
- Includes "five distinct videos chock-full of tips, tactics, and techniques" the editor used in his 40-year career.
Indeed, you will find all these in the easy-to-navigate Hyperdrive Portfolio dashboard.
Briefing
His Kickstart Briefing is under Special Reports. If this short note is an indication of how Gilani will navigate through his recommendations, we can say that it is indeed promising.
Right off the bat, he will tell you what you can do immediately. The editor provides the name, ticker, price, and exit strategy. It's a no-nonsense, straightforward approach.
Then he gives a brief economic and financial situationer, then proceeds to explain his thinking for each of his recommendations.
Here is a typical format:
Action to take: Buy-to-open a Compay Name (Ticker) (Date) $(Price)/$(Price) (Call/Put) Spread for $(Price) or less. Plan on exiting the trade at $(Price) (or more) or if shares drop (Percent)% below your entry price.
Among the four recommendations, two are of the same ticker but with different entry dates and call spreads. This is in his portfolio but the two others are not.
In terms of the information he provides, subscribers will indeed get a clear picture of the rationale behind his actions.
For his first recommendation, Gilani gives a one-sentence background plus critical numbers.
He tells readers the company's profit margin, year over year quarterly revenue growth, the trailing twelve-month net income, diluted earnings, trailing twelve-month operating cash flow, and levered free cash flow.
The editor varies it on his second recommendation. He talks about the Federal Reserve, geopolitics, and world economics. It is informative, and presents Gilani as a credible expert.
His explanation for the third one does not disappoint either. You would get a clear sense as to why it makes sense because he provides a short but sufficient analysis.
On its face, these all seem legit. Unfortunately, one has to look at the performance of the other two from other sources as they are not in his portfolio.
Portfolio and Track Record
So, what's in Gilani's portfolio?
As of this writing, there are nine items when you click on the Portfolio tab. As you can see, seven are from 2022 and two are from 2023. When you look at the Percentage Gain column, all are in the red.
To help his subscribers, the editor does give instructions on what to do with each.
Based on these, what do you think so far?
As we further explored dashboard, we saw another portfolio under the Live Trading tab. We noticed that there is a discrepancy between the two portfolios as this one has 12 entries.
In the three items not in the main portfolio tab, one has a negative percentage gain, one has 0.0%, and the other one has a positive 11.7% gain.
Since these can quickly change, especially during trade days, we suspect that one of the two portfolios just is not as updated.
When we refreshed it at another time, the main portfolio had 10 entries. The one in the Live Trade, meanwhile, had 11.
We also explored Hyperdrive Portfolio's Closed Trade.
By the time we publish this article, there are 42 entries. Among these, 12 have positive gains, from 30.4% to 128%. The negative gains, meanwhile, range from -2% to -100%.
We appreciate this as the disclosure shows that the service tries to be transparent. If accurate, the tab shows that Gilani is not intimidated by the numbers subscribers will see.
Trade Alerts
When we checked, there are twice-a-week alerts from the editor. These are meant to give traders more timely action points so they can quickly act on urgent market movements.
These range from 200-word updates to longer ones that almost reach 2,000 words. Below is an example of the former.
As you can see, it is short and sweet. Subscribers will see what they need to act on, plain and simple.
Meanwhile, an example of a longer one is his December 2022 portfolio review and strategy change. In it, Gilani discussed the new approach on zombie stocks so readers can make more profit.
After, he listed a number of companies with corresponding trading instructions.
What's interesting in this trade alert is that he acknowledged that at that time, there were indeed losses. In fairness to the editor, though he prefaced this with the statement that trading does incur losses, he apologized.
I know many of you are frustrated, and I’m sorry. We will carry on, make up for our current losses, and have a record-breaking, record profit-making 2023.
Although there is commendable content here, we wonder if the frequency is suitable for a trader. We could just imagine that for these types of investments, one needs to act swiftly, or the opportunity passes by quickly.
If you will only get updates twice a week, one could argue that by the time you move, it could already be too late.
We remember our previous review of the Monument Traders Alliance War Room. We mentioned then that although the service tends to overpromise, it has daily, real-time recommendations.
This way, traders can move quickly if there is an urgent opportunity they can grab. The service from Bryan Bottarelli and Karim Rahemtulla also has a chat room like Gilani's.
Another comparable service we have reviewed is StocksToTrade Advisory. Read our previous article if you want to know more about a similar trading research outfit.
Live Trading Room
Based on the pitch, here is what the feature is all about:
- has a "fully immersive experience"
- "intense" and "in REAL TIME"
- "front-row seat" access as he "unleashes 40 years of trading acumen on a slew of deadbeats, freeloaders, and leeches"
- "you will see what it looks like when a bad company takes a beating and serves up a massive potential win of 443%, 640% – even 908%"
Due to these words, Gilani sets the expectations high for his subscribers. But does he deliver on this feature?
Once you click on the tab, you will see a monitor that has an ad when the editor is not online. His stream is at 10AM ET every Thursday.
There are also spaces for the Portfolio, Chat, Schedule, and Feed. An important note here from the service is that the chat is unmonitored when the team is offline.
This is the reason why subscribers freely post their thoughts on Gilani and the service.
Although we cannot show you what commenters exactly say, we have seen strong words from the chat room.
For sure, there are occasional trade recommendations here. Some subscribers also ask each other about their thoughts on specific companies.
In addition, we have also seen comments who ask for refunds as they are not satisfied with the recommendations. Some people also narrate how they keep losing money with the trades.
We understand that since this seems like a free-for-all chat section, people can get hyped up. But these kinds of real-time comments and feedback also reflect on how these subscribers perceive the service they're getting.
Waterfall Profits Master Trading Program
When we checked what this is about, we saw four (the pitch said five) videos. However, there are other instructional videos in there, so maybe they are part of the program? We are not sure.
Each run from between 10 to 20 minutes long, and cover topics like put options, shorting vs. buying, directional trades, and volatility, among others.
Do we think these are informative? Yes. Do we think these contain paradigm-shifting, earth-shattering insights. Not really. A major problem here is how the pitch described these videos.
After watching them, you're supposed to be this master trader. The ideas here are supposedly the secrets to making big wins so you can be a millionaire, too.
If the marketing team did not hype this so much, it might have been a different experience watching them. But truth be told, we all know how copywriters for these newsletters operate. Hyperbole is the name of the game.
This rundown here is our initial impression of the service. As you can see, we did try to be fair and balanced. But what do others think of the service? Are other subscribers impressed or disappointed?
Reviews
Shah Gilani's Hyperdrive Portfolio got 2.4 stars out of 5 from Stock Gumshoe as of this writing. This rating is from 36 votes by the time we write this review.
When we accessed the review site, there were two commenters who shared their experiences.
The first one is highly critical of the service, and says it lacks deep analysis. The comment should sting as Gilani prides himself as trader who knows more about the markets than others.
This seems to be the unique selling proposition of Hyperdrive Portfolio as it claims you will get well-researched insights when you subscribe.
So it's not looking attractive at all when the service merely provides "rah-rah-rah," as the commenter said.
Another issue here, according to the reader, is regarding the so-called huge returns. Apparently, these are mostly on option positions, and you cannot gain so much from them:
... you are not going to dedicate a large amount of your portfolio to those positions.
The subscriber believes the gains are not exactly how Gilani projects them to be. Again, this is an issue that's exacerbated by the kind of promises the pitch makes.
The second commenter, however, had a positive experience. When you look at the statement though, "chiro85" does say that the profits he made are small. Still, he seems to be satisfied with the service.
We were not able to see too many legit reviews of the service from other trusted sites. When we checked Money Map Press on Pissed Consumer, though, we saw a few mentions of Shah Gilani.
Although these are not pertaining to Hyperdrive Portfolio, we think it also reflects on the editor. Here are some statements:
I spent $1950 18 weeks ago feeling good about the "hype" the Shah was putting out, i.e. 93% accuracy.
Unfortunately hype was all that it was. The fact is the Shah was wrong, or decided not to play, 16 of the 18 weeks. Ironically a losing 89% record!!
Shah’s communication is terrible. Whatever he picks, take the opposite position. He clearly front-runs every recommendation.
Every single option play that they recommended, I lost money 100% , eight plays and eight losses. I lost 2K before I could turn my computer off.
Since the site is on Pissed Consumer, we do expect the comments to be from pissed people. Overall, Money Map Press got a 1.6/5 stars from 143 readers when we accessed the site.
As we always say, all these reviews only represent the experiences of the people who commented. You may take them into consideration, but different subscribers may have varied responses to the service.
Cost and Refund Policy
Cost
The original price for the service is $5,000, but we saw a pitch with a reduced price of $1,495.
Refund Policy
Money Map Press and Gilani assure subscribers of a money-back guarantee within 30 days. They say readers just need to call or send an email, and a "prompt" refund is underway.
Pros v Cons
Pros
- Gilani boasts of a 40-year experience as a trader, with a "Waterfall Trade" strategy.
- Hyperdrive Portfolio has a live trading room where readers may talk to the service team and with other subscribers.
- The claim is you can make gains even in hard times.
Cons
- Though typical and unsurprising, the pitch tends to overpromise.
- It is not a cheap service as you need to shell out $1,495 for the annual fee.
- We are not too keen on the frequency of the trade alerts.
Conclusion - Is it Worth the Price Tag?
Shah Gilani's Hyperdrive Portfolio markets itself as a premium product. Available for a "limited time" for $1,495 from an original price of $5,000, it is definitely an investment in itself.
According to the editor, it is worth it because you will get huge gains over and over again. Gilani says his "Waterfall Trade" is almost foolproof.
Money Map Press tries to ease the subscription process with a 30-day money-back guarantee, and this can calm the nerves of some potential subscribers.
In fairness to Gilani, he does explain in detail what his process is. Unlike most editors, we think this is a sign that he respects subscribers who want to know how exactly they can make money.
Aside from his vast experience as a trader, Money Map Press tries to project Gilani as a patient mentor. In the service, the editor makes himself available weekly for a live trading session.
Aside from this, he gives trade alerts, masterclass types of videos, and a model portfolio.
The reviews have been mixed, and it appears that the service is for specific types of investors who will dig Gilani's style. We have shown you what some of the comments are so you can also judge for yourself.
So, should you risk that kind of amount for the service?
At this point, only you can answer that if you're willing to pay the fee. But we hope we have equipped you make a sensible decision through our review of Shah Gilani's Hyperdrive Portfolio.