Adam Khoo is one of the most-watched investing educators on YouTube, and he sells courses — which means most of what is written about his method online is either a sales page or somebody's leaked lesson notes. This guide does neither. It compiles only what Khoo has published free and under his own name on piranhaprofits.com and wealthacademyglobal.com: the three "keys" of his Value Momentum Investing approach, the one moving-average rule he actually names with numbers, and the risk arithmetic he teaches. Then it separates the part you can put in a stock screener from the part that is judgement — and says plainly where the free material stops.
Who Adam Khoo is, and what Value Momentum Investing means
Khoo is a Singaporean investor, author and educator. He founded Adam Khoo Learning Technologies Group in 2002 and the online trading school Piranha Profits in 2017, and has written books including Winning the Game of Stocks! and Profit from the Panic! (Wikipedia). His own Piranha Profits profile describes over 30 years of market experience, more than a million YouTube subscribers, and portfolios "grown to a combined value of over USD 10 million."
A note on integrity before we go further: InvestingPaths is an independent research site and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Adam Khoo, Piranha Profits, or Adam Khoo Learning Technologies Group. Everything below is our summary of his publicly published material, attributed as such, with links you can check. Nothing here is financial advice or a promise of any result, and nothing here reproduces his paid course content. Investing and trading involve a substantial risk of loss.
"Value Momentum Investing" is his trademarked name for combining two things most people treat as opposites: buying a business on fundamentals (the value half) and only doing so while price is trending up (the momentum half). Note that "momentum" here means this stock's own price trend — it is not the cross-sectional, buy-the-strongest-decile momentum that academic literature and our own momentum ranking refer to. Same word, different thing, and conflating them is the most common mistake in write-ups of his method.
The three keys, in his own words
In his 2020 post "Best Way to Invest in Stocks" Khoo lays the approach out as three keys, verbatim:
| Key | What he publishes | Screenable? |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Identify very good businesses | "Consistently increasing sales, earnings and cash flow from operations"; a durable moat (brand monopoly, barriers to entry, switching costs, network effect); a conservative balance sheet — low debt, adequate cash | Partly — growth and debt yes, moat no |
| 2. Buy only when undervalued, at support or dips in an uptrend | Enter below fair value, at support levels or pullbacks; "splitting our position into tranches, entering bit by bit" | Valuation yes; "at support" is chart judgement |
| 3. Exit when fundamentals deteriorate, the stock is overvalued, and/or it is in a downtrend | Three separate exit triggers, any of which can fire | Trend yes; fundamentals partly |
The growth requirement gets a number in a 2023 interview on his own blog, where he says he only buys companies with "a history of consistently increasing sales revenue, net profit, and cash flow from operations for at least 5-10 years." On debt his line in the same interview is blunt: "If you've got no debt or low debt, you can't go bankrupt." On holding period: "Just hold on for the next 10, 15, 20 years," and "You sell when you need the money!"
What he does not publish free is a numeric screen. There is no stated minimum ROE, no debt-to-equity ceiling, no revenue-growth percentage. Screens circulating in his student community commonly use something like ROE above 15% and debt-to-equity below 1, but treat those as community convention rather than his stated rule — we could not find either figure published by him.
The one hard rule he publishes with numbers: 50MA and 150MA
The concrete, testable rule appears in his June 2022 post "We're In a Bear Market... Is It Time to Sell Our Stocks?". Walking through 2007, he writes that "when the 50 moving average (blue line) crossed below the 150 moving average (green line), that signaled a change in the long-term trend to a downtrend," and for re-entry: "You want to wait for the moving averages to be sloping up, for the 50MA to cross back above the 150MA to get back in the markets."
That is a complete mechanical rule — a 50/150 simple moving average crossover, long above, out below — and you can run it in about twenty seconds:
Run the 50/150 cross on the S&P 500, free →
Here is the part most summaries of Khoo leave out, and it is the most honest thing on the page. In that same article he immediately qualifies the rule: it protected you in the protracted crashes (dot-com, 2008), and it does not help in the majority of bear markets that reverse too quickly for the averages to turn. His actual advice in that post is to hold good companies through the drawdown — "If you don't sell, you don't lose, provided they are good companies" — and he quotes Peter Lynch on money lost preparing for corrections. So the crossover is presented as a crash filter with a known failure mode, not as his everyday exit.
That matches what we found testing crossovers ourselves: the 50/200 golden cross is a regime switch that pays in long trends and bleeds in chop, and across 225 backtests of popular mechanical rules only 16% beat simply holding. Shortening the slow leg from 200 to 150 makes the signal faster and the whipsaws more frequent — which is exactly the trade-off to see for yourself rather than take on trust. Our primer on moving averages covers why.
On trend definition more broadly, his Wealth Academy article "The Power of Stock Price Trends" keeps it structural — an uptrend is "price making higher highs and higher lows," a downtrend "lower highs, and lower lows" — and names the 50MA, 150MA and 200MA as confirmation rather than as the definition. No thresholds attached.
The risk arithmetic he teaches for free
Khoo's 2018 post "The Casino Rig" is the clearest free statement of his risk framework, and it is pure expectancy maths rather than a secret. His stated core rule is that "we always risk $1 to make $2 or more" — a minimum 1:2 risk-to-reward — and he works it through: at a 60% win rate over 100 trades you win 60 × $2 and lose 40 × $1 for $80 net; even at a 50% win rate you finish $50 ahead. The point is that a positive expectancy, not a high hit rate, is what makes the outcome converge.
Two more published numbers sit alongside it. In the 2023 interview he says "the most I will risk is 1% of my capital on any one trade." And in the bear-market post he describes scaling in rather than committing at once: "I buy 1/4 of what I want to buy," with "a rough rule of thumb… to enter when it drops another 10%," adding another quarter each further 10% down until the position is full.
Reproduce those as documented figures, not recommendations — a quartered entry with 10% steps is a bet that your valuation is right and the drawdown is temporary, and it is the same behaviour that turns a bad thesis into a large loss.
What you can actually put in a screener
Here is the honest mapping. Roughly half of Key 1 is screenable; almost none of Key 2 is.
- Multi-year growth in revenue, net income and operating cash flow. This is the load-bearing filter and it is genuinely screenable. Most free screeners only expose 5-year EPS and sales growth rates rather than "increased every year," which is weaker than what he describes — Finviz will get you the growth-rate and debt columns free, but you will still open the statements to check consistency.
- Conservative balance sheet. Debt-to-equity, net cash, current ratio — all standard screener fields. Pick your own cutoff, because he does not publish one.
- Valuation. His school publishes a discounted-cash-flow framing (project operating cash flow forward, add net assets, divide by shares) in its intrinsic value article and a PEG rule of thumb — under 1 cheap, over 1 expensive — in its PEG explainer. Note that both of those posts are bylined to the Piranha Profits team rather than to Khoo personally. Our free intrinsic value calculator runs the same shape of DCF, and you can see how sensitive the answer is to the growth rate you assume.
- The moat. Not screenable, at all. Brand monopoly and switching costs are a reading exercise, and this is where his method stops being a filter and starts being research. Our guide to analysing a business before you buy it is the honest version of that step.
- "At support levels or dips on uptrends." Chart judgement. A screener can tell you a stock is above its 150-day average; it cannot tell you the pullback is orderly.
If you want a systematic value screen to compare against, ours ranks the US large-cap universe on filed accounts using Greenblatt and Piotroski rather than Khoo's criteria — a different method with the same intent. And if you have never built a screen before, start with how to use a stock screener.
What stays behind the paywall — and what to discount
Most of the specificity lives in his paid Value Momentum Investing and stock-trading courses, and we have not reproduced any of it. That means anyone promising you "Adam Khoo's exact screener settings" for free is either guessing or redistributing course material. The free corpus gives you a coherent philosophy and one testable crossover rule; it does not give you a complete entry-and-exit system.
Two claims deserve scepticism. His blog states that "many of my students are achieving results of 25−50% annual returns," and his profile page says the method "consistently outperforms the S&P 500 index over the long term." Neither is audited, independently verified, or accompanied by a published track record we could examine — and self-selected student results are the least reliable evidence in finance. That is not an accusation of anything; it is the same standard we would apply to any educator, including ourselves, which is why every backtest we publish is runnable by you on live prices.
Frequently asked questions
What is Adam Khoo's Value Momentum Investing? His trademarked approach of buying fundamentally strong businesses — consistent multi-year growth in sales, earnings and operating cash flow, a durable moat, low debt — only when the price is below fair value and in an uptrend, and exiting when fundamentals deteriorate, the stock is overvalued, or the trend turns down.
Which moving averages does Adam Khoo use? In his free bear-market article he uses the 50-day and 150-day moving averages: a 50 crossing below the 150 marks the change to a long-term downtrend, and a cross back above marks the re-entry. Elsewhere he names the 50, 150 and 200 as trend confirmation. He also says the crossover only helped in protracted crashes.
How much does he risk per trade? He has published two figures: a minimum 1:2 risk-to-reward on any trade, and a maximum of 1% of capital risked on any single trade. Those are his stated numbers, not our recommendation.
Does Adam Khoo publish an exact stock screener setup? Not in the free material. He publishes qualities — consistently increasing sales, earnings and cash flow over 5-10 years, low debt, a moat, a price below fair value — but no numeric thresholds. Any specific cutoff you see attributed to him should be treated as somebody's interpretation.
Is his method the same as Qullamaggie's momentum trading? No, and the contrast is instructive. Kristjan Kullamägi screens for the market's biggest recent gainers and holds for days or weeks; his documented scan settings are a short-term breakout system. Khoo's holding period is measured in years and starts with the financial statements.
Test the testable part
The useful thing about Khoo's free material is that the one rule he states numerically is also the one you can check. Take the 50/150 crossover, run it on whatever you actually own, and put the result next to buy-and-hold with fees on — that is a twenty-second answer to a question people argue about for years. Open the 50/150 cross in our free backtester → No signup, no platform.
The rest of the method — the moat, the fair value, the patience — cannot be backtested, and Khoo would probably agree that is the whole point. If the long-horizon half is what appeals to you, why time in the market beats timing the market and building a simple long-term portfolio are the cheaper places to start than any course.