Another day, another interminable sales “presentation” … my kingdom for a transcript! This ad is from Jeff Brown for his higher-end tech stock picking service, Exponential Tech Investor (“on sale” for $2,000 for two years), published by Bonner & Partners, and he says he’ll be offering “tiny 5G bonus picks to buy now” as well […]
Author Bio
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Travis Johnson is an individual investor who founded Stock Gumshoe in 2007 as a way to air his dissections of overhyped marketing pitches... and to share the "secret" stocks that stock newsletters hype to get your attention and your subscription dollars. His thinking? If you already know what the "secret" stock is, you can make a much more reasonable and thoughtful decision about whether or not to commit to an expensive newsletter subscription. (And if you don't pay for the info, you'll be more free to think for yourself about whether or not the investment is worth your money.)In his charmed life he has been, among other things, a university faculty member, a fundraiser, a writer, and a world-champion ice-cream scooper. Now he runs Stock Gumshoe for you, allowing us all to discuss and dissect the latest overheated stock ideas... as well as review and talk about investment newsletters and enjoy the commentary and opinions of Stock Gumshoe's other special contributors and the discussion with our unusually attractive, erudite and polite readers. He lives with Mrs. Gumshoe and all their little Gumshoes in the wilds of Western Massachusetts.
Author Archives
April 3, 2020
Friday File: How about Hedging?
What will probably serve investors best right now is patience. Don’t sell all at once, don’t buy all at once, and don’t feel like you have to do something every day. If you’re someone whose heartrate climbs as you open your brokerage account website and feel the urge to buy or sell every few minutes, […]
I’ve gotten a few questions about the latest Technology Profits Confidential (currently $79/yr) tease from Ray Blanco, so although it’s a few weeks old now, and started circulating right in the heat of the first coronavirus downturn in mid-March, I thought I’d take a look today. It is still a current ad, I got it […]
Jason Stutman is peddling his Technology & Opportunity letter ($99/yr) with a new tease about blockchain, so I thought it would be good to take a look at that after we sniffed around in Paul Mampilly’s (older) blockchain tease yesterday. The spiel is all about an “arms race” in bitcoin mining that will be spurred […]
You’ve almost certainly seen these ads from Paul Mampilly, the ones that start with the headline “These Warehouses Hold the Key to a $3.1 Trillion Dollar Revolution…” The ad has been running since at least the Summer of 2018, and has not really been updated at all in the interim as far as I can […]
March 27, 2020
Friday File: Gambling on Sports, Micro-Dosing on Stocks
I knew to buy like crazy last Friday morning, because people say that I am the SMARTEST INVESTOR IN THE WORLD. Woohoo! Oops, sorry, I forgot that I wasn’t selling myself with hype-filled puffery. That’s obviously not true, I did some buying last week and opened a few new positions that have done well so […]
March 27, 2020
What’s Motley Fool’s “Netflix Killer” Stock?
I’ve had a bunch of new questions about this almost evergreen Motley Fool ad for their Stock Advisor service, so I thought I’d share some answers with you here — partly because this is a stock that I write about a lot for our paying members, since it’s a substantial part of my portfolio, but […]
A version of this story first appeared on January 22, when we first saw Christian DeHaemer’s ad. The ad has been very lightly updated in recent months and is being heavily promoted now, so I’ve gone through and updated this article and my thinking to reflect the coronavirus collapse and any updates the companies have […]
A version of this article was published on January 13, 2020, when Mampilly’s ads first called this his “#1 Stock for 2020”, and though the ad is unchanged we’re seeing it a lot again now — most recently, the ads from Banyan Hill now say that this “$10 Stock Gets ‘All In’ Buy Alert on […]
Today we’re taking a little side path into the gold markets, since gold has recently shown a little spike of enthusiasm following talk of bailouts, and we’ve gotten a bunch of questions about Gerardo Del Real’s “Tier 2 Gold” teaser pitch for Junior Mining Monthly ($99/yr). So what is he talking about? Well, like most […]
During these crazy market moves, a lot of us are keeping in the back of our mind a notion along the lines of, “hey, this might be the chance to buy something cheap… but it better be really, really good!” And for many of us, that means our minds drift to “blue chip” type stocks […]
Thank you for coming back and reading my musings week after week, we here at Stock Gumshoe would not exist if not for the attention and generosity of readers like you. I don’t say it enough, I’m sure, but I really appreciate you being with us… and having the patience to slog through these sometimes […]
March 19, 2020
Cabot’s “Apple of Cannabis”
Where might we find opportunities these days? Perhaps in the beaten-down marijuana sector? It’s awfully hard to say, since every sector is really “beaten down” this month, but let’s look at the latest pitch from Cabot Marijuana Investor ($497/yr), since they’ve been touting a hot idea that editor Timothy Lutts is calling the “Apple of […]
March 19, 2020
Cabot Marijuana Investor
Monthly newsletter focused on the marijuana industry and on finding top growth stocks within that industry.
I’ve been knocked out by a non-coronavirus illness for the past couple days, and I have to tell you, that’s probably the best thing that could have happened for my sanity — watching the stock tickers fly by and freaking out at the constant stream of COVID-19 news is not the best way to keep […]
March 16, 2020
Wyatt’s picks for “Coronavirus Biotech Boom?”
Ian Wyatt has been out over the past couple weeks with some “webinars” in which he talks up the coronavirus outbreak (for an hour!) and then ends his show with a tease about several “special reports” on the stocks he thinks will make you a lot of money as we fight COVID-19… and, of course, […]
March 13, 2020
Friday File: Buying and Selling (at a Social Distance)
It’s been a wild week. The mood was still pretty upbeat on Monday and Tuesday, a little anxiety but a lot of complacency (including mine)… I was in Toronto early this week, with plenty of hand washing and hand sanitizer but no real signs of panic or changes in lifestyle for most folks — the […]
This is the latest teaser pitch that a lot of folks have been asking about — and rightly so, I expect, because it’s designed to be extremely topical and get you revved up immediately. Here’s the intro to the ad that I’ve seen in some Angel Publishing newsletters: “We’re now in crisis mode over coronavirus […]
March 6, 2020
Friday File: Panic in the time of Purell
It’s been an unusually active month in the Real Money Portfolio — a couple big sells, several brand new positions, and quite a bit more churn than I usually have. Those transactions have mostly been fairly small, the largest position that I opened or closed was the sale of my sub-2% Facebook position, but that’s […]
I’m updating this quickie teaser solution for you today because we’re getting a LOT of questions about it over the past few days. The ad originally ran in mid-January and we published the first version of this article on January 20, but it is still circulating widely. The ad seems identical to the one we […]
Recent Author Comments
Posted on September 5, 2024
Posted on September 4, 2024
Del Real is out pitching this story again, though with a preamble that one of the three stocks has been acquired for about $3 billion -- so that confirms that the copper stock that I did not unearth above was indeed Filo Corp (FIL.TO, FLMMF), which is bein[...]
Posted on September 4, 2024
Welcome aboard, Chet -- the pitchmen love to get us revved up about quick gains and juice those gambling urges... but sadly, one telltale sign of a great long-term investment is that you don't have to decide whether or not to invest within five minutes. S[...]
Posted on September 4, 2024
Those are the super-levered ETFs that are designed to either generate large options income or one-day levered gains to a single stock. The YieldMax ones are pretty prominent, but there are a lot of others that can let people bet on short-term moves or tak[...]
Posted on September 3, 2024
He's run similar ads all year, though I think he swapped out some of the "secret" partners in more recent ads. First time around it Was TSM, ARM and (maybe) SMCI... in later versions it looks like it was ANSS, ARM and maybe VRT, though they could have sha[...]
Posted on September 3, 2024
Interesting, new one to me -- thanks![...]
Posted on September 3, 2024
Not really, I handle situations on a case by case basis... there are some companies that I primarily own because I see a shorter-term opportunity to make a profit, and I might own that stock for just a few years (or even just a few months, in rare situatio[...]
Posted on September 1, 2024
Don't know anything about it -- are they planning to build a mine (PEA or feasibility study?), or is it just a discovery?[...]
Posted on September 1, 2024
$377 is still my preferred buy level, but it hasn't hit my preferred level very often over the years. My "max buy" is currently $463, which is my latest estimate of intrinsic value per share.[...]
Posted on September 1, 2024
The DNOPY ADR represents half of a share on the Warsaw exchange.[...]
Posted on September 1, 2024
Succession planning (make the portfolio easier for next CEO), likelihood of higher taxes, high concentration, or just a richly valued market Sparking him to remember his regret that he didn't sell some KO shares when it was trading at 50x earnings a couple[...]
Posted on August 31, 2024
For which stock?[...]
Posted on August 30, 2024
Depends on how T-Bills change over the next few months, mostly. The big reason to buy REIs or any dividend paying stocks is that the dividend can rise, which won't happen with a bond... but most REITs are under pressure and not raising their dividend much[...]
Posted on August 30, 2024
Thanks Shaun. A lot of investing is about accepting that a lot of your decisions are going to be "wrong" in the fullness of time... so when possible, especially when your level of certainty is low, make the decisions smaller.[...]
Posted on August 29, 2024
Haven't seen that ad, but if it's about investing it's probably one of Amazon's landlords -- a warehouse REIT like PLD on the e-commerce side, or a data center REIT like DLR on the AWS side.[...]
Posted on August 29, 2024
For now, at least, looks like ALAB bottomed out around when most newly public companies do... in the week or two surrounding the end of the six-month lockup period, when insiders began to do some post-IPO selling. We'll see how things settle down in the[...]
Posted on August 29, 2024
If greed didn't often overrule judgement, there wouldn't be many retail investment newsletters.[...]
Posted on August 28, 2024
I give up on trying to predict recessions, the economy is so different than it has been in the past... but I agree, the risks of a really bad stock market are more acute than they've been in a while. If only because valuations remain extended.Doesn't [...]
Posted on August 28, 2024
Well, they're also all a little desperate after subscriber numbers have plummeted over the past couple years -- everyone's hunting for a pitch that works to bring in new subscribers.[...]
Posted on August 27, 2024
Not very "AI," but a high end travel services firm. Seems tough to scale, In my opinion, but I've never looked deeply at Lindblad.[...]
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Haven't suffered through the latest Altucher pitch yet, but Credo was the stock he was similarly touting back in June. (https://www.stockgumshoe.com/reviews/luke-langos-innovation-investor/answers-apples-silent-ai-suppliers-who-are-luke-langos-three-tin[...]