Stock Gumshoe

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 my life fun and meaningful is this — writing about stocks and newsletters for you. And I thought today would be an opportune time to revisit some stinkers … and to choose the Turkey of the Year, and perhaps even carve it up a bit for you.

This honor is not bestowed lightly — to be named Turkey of the Year in Gumshoedom, you must have been a truly awful stock idea, chosen within the last twelve months, and, preferably, you should stand for all that is entertaining (and misleading) in stock newsletter teaser ads.

And within the last twelve months there have been a half dozen or so picks that are down at least 90%, so there was no shortage of candidates. If you went back to look at the whole history of Gumshoe Mania on the spreadsheets, adding another nine months or so of picks to that last year covered herein, you’d have even more options — roughly 10% of the stocks I’ve written about in this space are down by 90% or more, and a few rare delights have fallen even more drastically still: Centerline Holdings (which even looked promising to me way back when, before the mortgage meltdown) and Atherogenix are both down fully 99% from the price when they were touted, and there are several well-known stocks that were popular with the Gumshoe faithful that got immolated — Crocs and Neuro-Hitech both got a lot of attention in this space, and both are down by about 98% as I type.

Neither of those was picked within the last twelve months though, at least not for the first time, so the winner of the Turkey of the Year is … Read the rest of this entry »

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 sneak in all the cliched jokes and puns we can find. I’ll get you started, and you can throw in as many others as you like:

These newsletter ads are usually full of hot air, and they “blow.”

I can already hear my wife working up a snide comment about my own personal wind capacity, so I’ll leave it there. Your turn!

On to the point, you say? This ad is from Street Authority, yet another of the investment newsletter publishers that’s “just down the road” from Gumshoe Headquarters here in Washington, DC. The particular newsletter they’re selling today is StreetAuthority Market Advisor from Paul Tracy — their special deal today is three months for $40, but I think we can all do the math and determine that the annual subscription price is $160. Not outrageous compared to many, but more than you’re likely to find under the couch cushions.

Hulbert doesn’t track Paul Tracy’s newsletter, and I think I’ve only written about it once before, so I can’t tell you anything about his performance, even anecdotally (if there are any of his subscribers among the great Gumshoe faithful, feel free to pipe up and share your experience). His last pick that I wrote about was when he was riding Warren Buffett’s coattails to tout CarMax (which has done poorly since April … but then, what hasn’t?)

Here’s how the ad begins:

“The Government Made Millionaires of Thousands of Dell, Oracle and Amgen Investors — Guess Who’s Next?

“(This investment was a good bet even before Obama was elected … now it’s a slam dunk!)”

The argument, in not so many words, is that the government can push companies into massive spasms of profit — Dell and Oracle because the government spent a lot of money upgrading its own systems in the early 1990s (and, of course, funding the continuing development of the internet), and Amgen because of the big government research funding push in biotech in the 1980s.
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Does this ring a little bell for you? It might, if you’re a careful reader of every Gumshoe article (and why wouldn’t you be, really?). This ad is almost exacly the same as one that I wrote about back in October — an investment that is super safe, on the bargain rack, and, perhaps most exciting for folks, is not a stock.

Neither is it a “savings account,” of course. These “Safe Harbor Savings Accounts” are exactly the same thing as “Safe Harbor Investment Covenants.” I don’t know why they changed the fake name — perhaps “covenant” was too fancy a word to draw in the great investing unwashed, or maybe the connotation was too creepy when a newsletter edited by a guy named Christ was selling false “covenants.”

So, for your convenience, I’m republishing that note from last month below — and I think I changed all the “investment covenants” to “savings accounts” below, but I haven’t changed the article otherwise. If you’d rather read the original, you can click here to see it, along with the dozen or so insightful comments from fellow Gumshoe readers.

Today’s ad that will receive the Gumshoe treatment is for Steve Christ (no relation, I assume) and his Wealth Advisory newsletter … and yes, like so many others these days, it is focused on words like “safety” and “guaranteed.” Exactly the tonic that the panicked investor demands.

Now, this particular newsletter will only run you $79 a year, so you can go ahead and subscribe if you feel like it — as with so many of these “introductory” newsletters I assume they also use it as the target of constant upgrade offers for their more expensive services, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t any good.

But if you just want to figure out what a “safe harbor savings account” is, well, you’re in the right place — just read on, it won’t cost you anything.
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