Author/Editor
John Doody
Publisher
Stansberry Research
Description
Monthly newsletter that has been around for more than 25 years, focused on small gold miners and royalty stocks to produce a “top ten” portfolio. Listed as “Moderate” on Stansberry’s own risk scale.
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Rating: 3.5/5. From 27 votes.
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3.6
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Rating: 3.6/5. From 39 votes.
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John Doody’s main thesis , adopted wholesale by ‘Doc’ Effrig at Stansberry, is that gold is supported by negative real interest rates. Intuitively, this is highly plausible, as many people run to real assets when the inflation adjusted return on Treasuries is negative.
This hypothesis regarding levels is, however, unable to explain the current weakness in gold and its miners, as the fundamental, that the level of inflation can be expected to exceed the level of nominal returns on T-bills, has not changed. For that, I suppose, one should look to the changes: in what direction can real interest rates be expected to move?
Personally, I have no idea: but I have heard it said that real rates might be expected to rise in the absence of a QE3, the absence of which might cause inflationary expectations to fall.
All this is not necessarily sufficient to fault Dr. Doody for not having a crystal ball something he has never said he had.
All told, Doody’s Top Ten are a excellent bet on condition that one believes that real interest rates are not going to become positive any time soon.
I subscribed several years ago. The deal was that Doody was supposed to pick us gold stocks that would outperform gold. As I recall, Doody had us divide up our investment $ into 10 lots. 10 lots for 10 picks. Imagine my consternation when at one point Doody had us devote 3 of our 10 lots to GLD! For crying out loud, it was obvious gold was in a bull market. Any fool (this one included) could therefore pick GLD. The whole point of paying him the big bucks was to find stocks that would appreciate better than GLD or bullion. I was furious and had a fruitless email exchange with him over the issue. I felt ripped off. He was unrelenting with lame excuses. The icing on the cake was him getting out of the position at, as I recall, a loss. The thought of taking a loss on gold was preposterous to me and so I held for about a year or so and got out at a small profit.
In sum, I find this guy to be way overrated. He seems part of a mutual admiration society comprised of various newsletter publishers. I got some good recos from him. But I have also gotten recos that were as good for free elsewhere. After all, gold is in a bull market. TGLDX has been great for example. I got into that back in 2003 just on the basis of a WSJ article. Sometimes I wish I had just plunked all my $ into that and “set it and forget it”.
I am still trying to learn how to pick good stocks to invest in and the mining companies that you mentioned have been reviewed many times before by another investing outfit.
Your information seem to track what I was reading and narrowing down the picks a bit.
Thanks.
I almost got involved with Stansberry when I read that his recommendations have not done nearly as well as touted.
Now he is selling information about -if Obama does one thing, the whole world will crash type thing.
From what I have read, I will stay clear of his recommendations. . . .
What is the connection between him and Doody?
Although it’s early days for me with John, I’m quite impressed. Audited results over the last 10 years show very impressive returns. He does very detailed analysis (lots of numbers) on all the gold stocks out there, and reports all the facts in a shorthand form. The top ten are the ones the best bets at the moment, with a balance between big gold, juniors, and royalty companies. I’m investing a significant percentage of my account in his picks, because I think gold will be what will keep its value over the next ten years.
A great value at $600 per year. Then the price skyrocketed and I did not renew. At $1500, if you follow his advice, you still come out ahead. Now for the $600 you only get the top 10. 🙁
He did’nt see coming the big fall of gold…, and I lost a lot of money
Better go buy the gold etfs gdx or gdxj they will outperform GSA Top ten all all day lomg
Have been a subscriber for about a year now. Doody recommends investing equally in the top ten stocks. So I did. As of today, I am down 90% – only one of his ten is profitable. The other nine are all down over 90%. None of them appear in his latest newsletter. Like any newsletter hawker, if one picks enough stocks eventually something will hit. Might be better off throwing darts at a dartboard.
Wow, down 90% after a year is pretty shocking! Gold is up about 5-6% over the past year, the average big miner is up 23% now after being down 30-40% late last year (that’s the GDX ETF) and even the TSX venture index (which is heavily weighted to junior resource companies) is close to being back to even, down about 3% over the past 12 months.
Most novices investing in Doody’s approach do not follow the very simple rules. Firstly you are only supposed to buy in half positions to start. Most importantly I’ve seen many idiots buy microcaps on the day a new position is recommended and don’t use limit orders and pay 2x what the blasted thing is worth. Then you then buy on dips. John has a very methodical approach to investing and his returns speak for themselves. I’ve used his services periodically but I tend to only use it when miners are hated then I jump in.
Did he just hold them all for one year or did you forget to sell when they dropped out of the top ten?
By far the best of all the precious metals guys out there.
Don’t waste your money on anyone else. This is it.
I see Doody is at it again. Stay away from the guy.
I was a GSA subscriber for 2016. The big take away was the power of rebalancing positions at year end. He showed a chart comparing a reblanced GSA portfolio to non-rebalanced GSA portfolio. Huge difference. Between 2001-2014 the rebalanced port did +591% vs. +192% for non-rebalanced. From the charts I could find, the HUI actually beat the non-rebalanced GSA port over the same period. So there is no special stock-picking talent on display. You could pick any 10 gold stocks, equal weight them, then re-equalize annually and match his performance. If his newsletter was cheaper, I’d still subscribe, but his own chart showed that his outperformance was entirely due to a single good portfolio management technique.
John and Garret ‘s Gold Stock Analyst has been purchased by Stansberry Research. Any word on whether it has positively improved their results?
Stansberry has been selling Doody’s newsletter for more than a decade, though I guess they didn’t formally own it. Maybe like some other newsletters they’ve marketed it was because Stansberry doesn’t allow their editors to own the stocks they cover, or maybe something else changed… but in reality, they’ve been joined at the hip for a long time. Doody has always talked up a very quantitative approach, considering only miners with reserves and late-stage projects and judging them based on production capability and expected operating costs, as I recall, and I think I remember that he bragged about having his results audited (not sure what that means in this context), but I haven’t heard a lot about his overall results since the days when all the miners were doing great in 2011-2012. I haven’t seen the actual newsletter in recent years, but I’ll bet, with some confidence, that the results will be great if gold goes up a lot, and lousy if the gold price goes down a lot 🙂
Just received an E-Mail from Doody , he is pitching his Gold Stock Analyst for the “Bargain Price” of $2500 which is $1,000 off his regular $3500. Holy cow Ididn’t know his service was so expensive! For that price I will decline the Bargain price !
Let me give you on of my own picks I researched for “FREE” , and that is the Gold Stock ELYGF . Check it out , and I think you will like what you see., at around 65 Cents per share you can buy 1,000 shares for $65o , a lot cheaper than the Doody Service!