If it looks and sounds like a scammy outfit, it's probably a scammy outfit...
Just a warning here but Empire Financial are not going to be worth the money for the majority of investors because they are a) deliberately misleading and b) not very talented. The easiest way to demonstrate how misleading they are is to look at their marketing. Enrique describes himself as having grown the value of his hedge fund several thousand percent but if you look into that figure that is mostly the assets he brought in, not performance. For example if I launch a fund at $1m, my investments return 0% but the next year someone invests in another $1m I've gone up 100%, it doesn't take any skill but they are trying to mislead you that way! With Witney Tilson much of the marketing blurb is also hilarious, and he is described as "the Man who bought Netflix at $7.78", implying, with a price today of $300, that he would have made you lots of money, ignoring that he sold it way to early and would have made you almost no money at all. In terms of being not very talented the best way to get a feel for this is to look at some of their public calls, Voyager Financial went bankrupt months after they advised it, Meta has been a disaster, Enrique's podcast also highlighted names like GROW, and SEEL that have been absolute dogs, not to mention launching a SPAC newsletter within weeks of peak SPAC-mania. By throwing out dozens of recommendations each year it's inevitable they'll be able to look back in a year, pick the best, and use them in marketing that says "you could have made a 200% return buying X", but the fact that they don't publish an audited track record of the performance of their stock-picking calls should tell any intelligent investor everything they need to know.
Oh and a final point, but read the small-print on any of their "money back guarantees", make sure this is not in the form of credit for other worthless research services.
12 January 2023
Unprompted review