It’s been close to two years now since I started writing about the teasers that investment newsletter publishers send out to entice us to subscribe, and the results aren’t so pretty.
I track the picks that I sniff out, and make those tracking spreadsheets publicly available so that everyone can draw their own conclusions — but as you can imagine, the last six months have turned even the best-sounding stock ideas into ashes.
“Some smart Americans have begun collecting checks from a little-known government-guaranteed gas rebate program. And they’ll continue receiving payments until 2011. Now you can join them…. Simply put your name on the list below to claim your ‘Gas Rebate’ checks ($400-plus every month!) starting with the next payout … New York Times reports that Americans ‘are making significant amounts of money’ from this gas rebate program”
Peter Schiff is given credit for foreseeing the credit debacle we now find ourselves in, and for a long time he’s been focused on choosing high-yield international stocks for his investors — he teases one such investment in his newsletter this month, want to know what it is?
Louis Navellier started marketing his services late on Tuesday with an email that has the subject line: “Today’s Cut Takes us to the Brink!” In his words, “I have been telling my customers for several weeks now that this is the greatest buying opportunity of our lifetimes. But let me clarify: It’s not as simple as buying any old stock that’s cheap now, it’s about owning a mix of the highest quality stocks. That’s why I have spent the last few weeks creating what I call Action Plan For The Wipeout. Act today and you can put this plan to work for you, beat the market by over 3-to-1 AND be able to look at the morning news without flinching.”
What is his “Action Plan?” Read on for details!
“It doesn’t involve Stocks… Government Bonds… Currencies… or even Options.” Steve McDonald wants to sell us a service that will help select safe investments. The ad says that “back testing the strategy to 1920 proved that it was 99.77% risk-free.” Is that kind of return really possible … or, more importantly, is it likely? And what is he talking about?
Last week we looked at Porter Stansberry’s Put Strategy and his assertion that General Growth Properties would go belly-up last Friday. Well, that mortgage debt of $900 million that came due on Friday for a couple of their Las Vegas malls still hasn’t been extended, renegotiated, or repaid, but the company hasn’t gone bankrupt yet. [...]
Tim Fields is telling us that the next big wave will be personalized medicine, and using genetic testing to customize treatments. We’ve heard that before from several newsletter editors, and it has been an investment theme for years. Will this little stock really revolutionize medicine and lead to untold riches for investors? First, I’ve got to figure out who it is for you.
Porter Stansberry, whose newsletters I write about from time to time, is revamping his new Porter Stansberry’s Put Strategy newsletter to focus not on his original plan — which was selling puts to buy bargains at even lower cost — but on betting on the demise of companies, and particularly (at the moment, at least) companies in commercial real estate.
And here’s the “tease” for the recent letter he sent out about this Put Strategy newsletter:
“America’s Next Major Bankruptcy (it’s not GM or CitiGroup)… Happens this FRIDAY at Midnight” –
What is this one?
A big part of the advertising that comes out for Carla Pasternak’s High Income Investing is by way of their writeups on the “income security of the month” — and, as she has done this month, she often recycles these ideas … it looks like today’s “Income Security of the Month” was also the income security of the Month for October.
Times are tough, everyone’s cutting back — so no need to hire another copywriter if you’ve got a perfectly good sales letter sitting around!
Some of the comments below first appeared in this space back then, which now seems a lifetime ago, but I’ve added some more info and done some updating.
“These special hybrid securities not only provide strong returns during market turmoil thanks to the ‘AAA’-rated portfolio of their parent company — they also provide unlimited upside potential since the shares are convertible at any time into stock of the underlying company.”
The Motley Fool is sending out an ad that claims to have chosen “The Only Stock to Own 2009-2019.” Now there’s a promise, no? The assumption of almost all pundits and pontificators, myself included, is that this awful market might represent a remarkable buying opportunity — at least, an opportunity for those who make the [...]
Steve Christ, who I wrote about recently when he was flogging what he called “Safe Harbor Savings Accounts” (he also called them Safe Harbor Investment Covenants for a while), has a new teaser to offer as he tries to get you to subscribe to his Wealth Advisory newsletter. He’s calling this next great idea from [...]
The merry lads at the Oxford Club are at it again, promoting their subscription service with a nice long teaser ad that promises to turn you on to the next hot investing strategy. And as usual, there’s a little truth and a lot of obfuscation — so let’s give it a look. Here’s how they [...]
“While most folks earn tiny 2%-6% dividends on Blue Chips (like Pepsi, Johnson & Johnson, and AT&T) savvy Americans are secretly “boosting” those small yields to dizzying heights – earning incredible 30%-50% on the exact same shares. Originally available only to executives at America’s richest Blue Chip firms, this income secret is now available to [...]
If anyone was in danger of forgetting the “Chaffee Royalties” teaser ad for Chris Mayer’s Special Situations newsletter, the marketers have saved you from that precarious perch — I’ve seen this ad more in the past week than in the last several months combined, so it must be taking hold once more. Why? Well, the [...]
I’ve seen this particular ad a few times in the last week or so, and I know that there are many folks out there in Gumshoe Land with a yen for silver, so I thought it deserved a few minutes of consideration. The ad is for a special report from the Oxford Club — sounds [...]
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Or at least, Happy Thanksgiving to the Americans among you — I know I missed the Canadian Thanksgiving by a month or so, and I hope everyone else around the world has had a chance to give thanks for whatever it is that makes your life meaningful. Personally, part of what makes [...]
The ad we’re looking at today is from Street Authority, and I’ve already had one reader send it in with some suggested solutions (she was largely right, of course — one of the many benefits of having the wisest readers in cyberspace!) Today’s selling story is all about wind — which means we have to [...]
Closing the Hedge