Stock Gumshoe

Today I’m looking at a teaser ad from Andrew Gordon of Investors Daily Edge — I’ve looked at a couple of Gordon’s teaser picks over the past year or so, one good (SunPower) and one very bad (Microvision). Apparently now his focus has moved a bit, he’s not talking about breakout high tech companies these days, but about stable dividend payers — so he at least knows how to change his spots when the leaf he’s sitting on withers and dies.

With the current panics in the market, I expect we’ll continue to see more of this kind of focus from the teasermeisters — stability, safety, and dividends. Of course, they’ll probably largely still stay away from the best dividend payers, the big banks, but I imagine I’ll be seeing many more income oriented ads in the months to come. Greed works better than fear as an advertising ploy most of the time, but sometimes investors are so afraid already that they can’t quite bring themselves to reach for the real, over-the-top greed impulse that is demanded for a stock that’s promised to provide 1,000% gains.

So we have here a company that has been raising its dividend consistently for 37 years, and that is likely to be issuing a big special dividend of some kind this fall, according to Gordon. That might start some little bells of recognition a-tingling in your cranium, but we do get a bit more. Read the rest of this entry »

[regular readers: this originally appeared last week and I'm just correcting some bad coding, sorry for any confusion]

Can you really buy McDonald’s or Coca Cola for “pennies a share?”

Leaving aside the fact that “pennies a share” means nothing, of course (with enough pennies, you could easily pick up some of Steve Sjuggerud’s favorite St. Gaudens Double Eagles — though 100,000 pennies would put some stress on your pants pockets).

I’ve heard from many of you about the new teaser circulating for the Dividend Grabber service from Stansberry and Associates for so-called “500-B shares” so let’s take a look at it. You may have seen this as 500b or 500-B, or seen them called stocks or shares, but it doesn’t really matter (they just made the term up, as far as I can tell).

The teaser is from Sean Goldsmith, who I guess is the editor of the S&A Dividend Grabber these days. Those of you who’ve been around Gumshoedom for a while know that I’m not all that crazy about these dividend grabbing strategies as the basis for a portfolio, though they can occasionally work over the long run as long as you’re not just “buying the dividend.”

In the past I’ve heard from several readers who were frustrated Read the rest of this entry »