Is it worth paying for stock advise newsletters?

The newsletters typically duplicate what is already avaliable elsewhere.

You are far better off digging into a respected source. Bill O'Neill started Investors Business Daily and it is a respected source of financial information, AND an excellent resource for you to learn a highly effective method of investing. They prescreen categories of high quality stocks in an easy to understand format that will immediately enhance your stock picking. They do not pick stocks for you. This has lent them a tremendous amount of credibility. Starting out picking stocks on your own is an invitation to reckless disaster. Working with IBD as your primary resource will reward you, and eliminate a lot of unnecessary risk from your field of choices, by minimizing your downside. Their IBD 100 list has annihilated the S&P 500 returns for many years. The only thing I would change with IBD is that I would have gotten involved with them earlier in my personal investing. Their advice is outstanding.

As for Cramer, he does make some good calls, and he makes a lot of awful calls that are disasters. His focus is more on "what's hot now", and he takes very little accountability for crazy calls. Example: He recommded CFC as outstanding in May of 2007. If people would have poured serious money into that stock with a "fire and forget" mentality, they would have lost virtually everything. I watch Mad Money, but I do it for a different reason - to see what the naive investor is likely to "bandwagon" on to as a result of his advice. There are a lot of them, and they usually lose money as a result of making decisions on his advice alone. Jim advises against jumping on his picks immediately, but people do it anyway. That's just a dumb way to lose money. The thing he deserves credit for, and doesn't get near enough, is how he holds the bureaucrats accountable - whether in private industry or the federal government agencies or congress. If the Fed would have responded earlier as Cramer called for last year when the credit crunch was emerging, we would be in better shape now. Jim also teaches great overall market awareness. Learn from him and ignore the egotistical hype.

The Fast Money Traders are valuable for this market because Buy and Hold is not the way to go in a volatile market - Buy and Profit is. Jeff Macke has a good read on retail and the market overall, Adami has a good percentage on particular stock entry/exit points and trading strategy, Pete Nijerian and his brother are valuable in pointing out where buying/selling pressure is heating up within given derivatives (puts, calls options) within a given company or sector, and Karen is very valuable as a longer term view. Of all their regular guests, I find the counsel of Dennis Gartmen to be very valuable - he has an excellent, consistent pulse on the market. Happy Hour on Fox will occassionally have a valuable guest as well - but their format hasn't really caught up with their resources yet, and I find them less valuable. They have good personnel, they just don't seem to format them in a way that provides much more than noise.

Late at night/early morning I also find Bloomberg valuable on cable for the international market pulse pre-open here.

Always check the Yahoo earnings calendar to stay abreast of Earnings - who's reporting, the impact that might have on the market - and what major Economic News elements are going to occur that day. Oil inventories report every Wednesday at 10:35 AM, and Natural Gas every Thursday at the same time. These are examples of market moving information that can impact your entry/exit points.

Best wishes with your personal investing. Any book you can find by Bill O'Neill will provide you more information in less pages than any other financial author I have found. Stick with his advice - it's simple and it works. You have enough to work on in personal investing without making it overly complex.