Why I don't trust stock picking services

Have you ever read a long stock report that marks a stock a "STRONG BUY" only to see this at the bottom:

These drive me nuts.

How can someone write a report about how good a stock is and why you should buy it but not own the stock themselves?

Unfortunately, this is the world we live in.

Stock picking services sell. Really well.

Everybody wants to get rich, which means anyone with some knowledge of the stock market and a loose set of morals can throw up an ad and claim their stock picks outperform the market.

But the truth is impossible to escape -- anyone claiming their stock picks outperform but doesn't own the stocks they recommend either hates making money or is not as confident in their picks as they say.

Here's the reality: These people realized it's a lot easier to sell stock picks than using those picks to get rich on their own.

Which is why we decided to do the opposite.

The Barbell Investor is a premium investment research service with 100% transparency into our exact portfolios. 2x per month, you'll receive a newsletter containing our positions, an update on one of our holdings or a report on a new stock we're considering buying, and some education and market commentary.

We aren't telling you to buy anything. We're simply showing you what's in our portfolios and why. The rest is up to you.

If you're still working on building your portfolio, we launched a free version of the newsletter (Basic) which includes shortened versions of the educational and market commentary portions of the Premium issue.