Have you noticed how desperate investment ads have become recently?

To be sure, I don’t have any quantitative measure of advertiser desperation. But, the distinct impression I get from reading the various ads I receive is that advisors are finding it harder and harder to attract new subscribers and, as a result, are resorting to increasingly outrageous claims.

This is saying something because I started the Hulbert Financial Digest 26 years ago in response to outrageous advertising claims I saw at that time. And, I’ve seen lots of advertising hype over the years. Because the Hulbert Financial Digest tracks hundreds of advisory newsletters, I bet I am on every direct mail and junk email list out there.

The latest ad that caught my eye came late last week in the form of an email message from Doug Fabian. Fabian, of course, is perhaps best known as editor of Doug Fabian’s Successful Investing, a distinguished mutual fund advisory newsletter that (under various names) has been published since the late 1970s -- though only since the early 1990s by Fabian himself. (Before that, Doug’s father, Richard, edited the newsletter.)

But, the ad in question was not for this several-decades-old newsletter. Instead, it was for something called Fabian’s ETF Trader, a newer service that (under several different names) has pursued a more aggressive approach to mutual fund trading.

The subject line of the email message -- “Make 10% in 30 Days” -- was hard for me to believe for several reasons.

For starters, a 10 percent gain in 30 days is wildly unrealistic. Compounded, that kind of return is equal to annual gains in excess of 200 percent. No investment advisor I know has ever come close to achieving that high of a return on a consistent basis. Even Warren Buffet, widely considered to be the most successful investor today, has produced an annualized return of “just” 23 percent since taking over Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRKB) in the 1960s.

This isn’t to say that advisors don’t, now and then, produce monthly returns of 10 percent or more. Many, on occasion, do. But, those double-digit months are more than compensated for by losing months, as well as other months of more modest returns. And, it’s impossible to know in advance which months will be the ones in which an advisor will be producing double-digit gains instead of double-digit losses.

But, I had more than just a theoretical basis for questioning Fabian’s claim. His ETF Trader itself has come nowhere close to producing average returns of 10 percent per month. In fact, since the beginning of 1999, when the Hulbert Financial Digest’s track record for this newsletter begins, it has produced a 49.4 percent loss, equivalent on an annualized basis to a loss of 8.5 percent.

In contrast, the Dow Jones Wilshire 5000 index over this period has gained 29.1 percent (3.4 percent annualized).

For the record, I should note that this newsletter hasn’t always been called ETF Trader. Up until the summer of 2003, it was called Fabian’s Sector Investing, and, from then until earlier this year, it was called Doug Fabian’s VIP Investor. And, its track record since February is better than what it was during the newsletter’s earlier incarnations, sporting a 5.8 percent gain from February through the end of August versus 3.5 percent for the Dow Jones Wilshire 5000.

Note carefully, however, that even over this more recent period of relatively better performance, the newsletter has come nowhere close to matching what is being advertised.

Also, for the record, I should note that within the body of his email message, Fabian uses a slightly different turn of phrase to describe the performance he is claiming for his newsletter. He urges investors to subscribe if they “want to make up to 10% in the next 30 days.”

I’m not sure what this phrase means, though I’m pretty sure it doesn’t mean a 49.4 percent loss over a nearly eight-year period.

While I’m at it, another claim in this ad for Fabian’s newsletter caught my eye. It is: “so far this year,” this newsletter has produced “consistent, rapid-fire profits.”

Oh, yeah? Of the seven calendar months for which the Hulbert Financial Digest has data for this newsletter under its current name, four have been losers, and just three have shown gains.

What makes Fabian’s ad so audacious is that it contains claims that so easily can be disproved. All I can figure is that the advertiser who wrote the email message took a gamble that I wouldn’t bother to challenge those claims.

And, I must confess that the advertiser could very well have won his bet. I see so many outrageous ads that I sometimes don’t even bother to get outraged. Furthermore, I had devoted a column on August 25 to another example of outrageous advertising; might the advertiser have wondered if I wouldn’t choose to so soon return to the topic?

Regardless of the answers to these questions, about which I can only speculate, the investment lesson remains utterly clear: Don’t believe what advertisers tell you.

That isn’t to say that all advertising is false. But, so much of it is that the only surefire way of protecting yourself is to assume that all of it is misleading.

You already know all of this, of course. But, I find, people who have well-honed instincts that protect them from outrageous advertising in other walks of life often lose those instincts when it comes to investing. And, we know that ads such as Fabian’s must be working because advertisers carefully track the response rate to their ads and quickly pull those that don’t work.

So, forgive me when I say, for the umpteenth time: Buyer beware.