Ah, I haven’t looked at one of these in a while. John Doody is one of the more respected gold stock analysts, at least according to the comments I receive from readers, and he provides an extremely analytical and data-heavy service with his Gold Stock Analyst newsletter that is, as you might guess, all about gold mining stocks.

But his latest teaser ad for the letter is of the category that I like to call, “envy me because I’m a rich jackass.” It’s all about how he left a lousy job teaching economics and got divorced by a shark of an ex-wife, which led him to his current life investing in and writing about gold miners, and living the good life in his condo in Florida, becoming, essentially, the perfect sitcom brother-in-law or father-in-law: rich, obsessed with younger, beautiful women, and proud to taunt others with their ocean views and timeshare in St. Barts.

Here’s a small sample …

The headline is perhaps the perfect intro:

“How I Use Penny Stocks to Date Women Half My Age”

But it gets better:

“You see – I’m old enough to collect Social Security… yet I have a beautiful girlfriend who’s less than half my age… along with a classic Porsche in the garage… and a $500,000 British yacht docked steps from my door.”

Just makes you want to slap him, doesn’t it? Of course, that’s the idea — you fume while secretly acknowledging that you want this life, too …

“But here’s what I can do: After studying finance for the better part of the past 50 years, I have a secret that could dramatically improve your wealth.

“As you’ll see, it could make you $109,600 a year… and as a result – attract more of the things you want in life (including beautiful women) than you ever thought possible.

“Please keep in mind: I didn’t always have such a nice life.

“For 20 years… I was an economics professor at a snobby college near Boston, quietly doing research later profiled by Barron’s. But I was bored, and had very little money.

“It was only when I left teaching that things changed for me. I’d been researching one tiny niche of the stock market… and uncovered a little-known way to make triple-digit gains on the most obscure penny companies….

I’ve got a vacation house on the Caribbean island of St. Barts… a deep tan… and a life most guys can only imagine – all by using this secret. “

This “dating women half my age” stuff, along with the “classic Porsche,” is the kind of sales job you often see from the real shysters of the business, the guys with “secret trading systems” whose ads are full of photos of the fancy boats and mansions they own and whose subscribers write in testimonials to brag about driving a new Mercedes (until you read the disclaimer and find out that those testimonials are “faux.”)

Other legit newsletters like Doody’s sometimes use this tactic, too — I seem to remember Steve McDonald did it a couple years ago for his Bond Trader newsletter … but it always leaves a dirty taste in my mouth. Must work though, I guess, or they wouldn’t keep doing it.

And hey, teaching economics at a snobby college is indeed a dream come true for some folks, including many that I used to work with before I too shucked the coil of tenure to do my own thing (no Porsche in the Gumshoe garage, sorry … actually, no garage, to be honest, and I remain quite enthralled by my original trophy wife) — so it takes all kinds. John Doody, just FYI, taught at Bentley College, now Bentley University, I have no idea how successful his academic career might have been.

But anyway, aside from the somewhat sleazy undertone of the letter, he does tease one of his favorite gold stocks — Doody publishes once a month and uses his letter to analyze a few stocks, with charts and tables that only an economist could love, but in each issue he also lists a “top ten” of the stocks that are his best buys at the time. I’ve written about a few of these, and at least a couple of them have done pretty well, so I thought it might be worth our time to find out about one of the top names on his current list.

Doody, after talking about his beautiful girlfriend and their trip to Paris, goes on to tell us that he focuses only on companies with NI 43-101 documents filed, which gives him the chance to take some credit for sniffing out fraud at Bre-X, the company whose massive fraud in pretending to have a vast Indonesian ore reserve led to the Canadian system that requires these 43-101 filings which basically involve third-party experts certifying the reserves of mining firms. And that fraud led to one of my favorite pieces of advice in an old Alan Abelson column in Barron’s, “When the lead geologist of a speculative gold-mining company falls out of a helicopter, sell the stock.”

But that’s neither here nor there — we’re told that Doody has a favorite stock on his top-ten list right now, and that, of course, you can get your mitts on it as soon as you subscribe.

And oddly enough, the stock he’s teasing is called the “#1-ranked stock” on his top ten list right now — though he goes out of his way, in the actual newsletter (I’ve seen samples), to say that the top ten are not listed in any kind of order of preference.

But we’re also told about a few clues, so let’s see if we can identify this one without subscribing … here’s what he tells us:

“Personally, I recommend investing in all my top 10 stocks.

“But the reality is: when it comes to high-flying penny stocks like these, all it takes is just 1 or 2 to change your entire lifestyle…

“Believe me: There’s nothing like the feeling of watching a penny stock take off by 1,000% or more. Even now – after 15 years… I still pick up the phone and call my friends when it happens. Sometimes I dance around the office.

“But the reason I’m telling you this is simple…

“Right now, a top-ranked stock is just 75¢.

“It’s an early-stage mining firm with a 2+ MILLION-ounce goldmine – just outside the Mojave Desert in southern California.

“Based on its most recent data… I expect you could easily see an 800% return. But you’ll have to get in soon – BEFORE it starts production…

“You see – gold miners can only file a ’43-101′ after a proven discovery – based on actual drilling results. And often… that’s when the stock takes off….

“One of my favorite stocks right now is a 75¢ gold miner with a 2-million ounce mine outside the Mojave Desert. By my measure – it ranks #1 out of all 75 stocks.”

So … John Doody tells us that he’s about to raise his price (heard that before? Me, too), and that you have to get in now if you want a risk-free trial (minus a 10% fee if you ask for a refund) for $895. You can decide for yourself whether or not you’re interested in taking him up on his offer … but don’t do it just to find out what his number one stock is, because I can tell you that I’m pretty sure it’s …

Golden Queen Mining (GQMNF on the pink sheets, GQM in Toronto)

Golden Queen has been publicly noted as a stock on his top ten list several times over the years, and it does have a potential mine near Mojave, CA, and it does trade for about 75 cents.

Golden Queen’s property is called the Soledad Mountain Project, and it does have two recent (last several years) 43-101 technical reports filed, the first of which indicates a “measured and inferred” resource of 2.162 million ounces of gold, so that 2-million ounce mine rings true for this teaser, too. The second one seems to be more specifically targeted at a portion of the mine’s life and has an overall number of about half that number — both are explained, in rough highlights, on Golden Queen’s website here.

I don’t know much about Golden Queen’s potential Soledad mine, but it has been, like many mines, a loooong time coming, if indeed it does get built. It’s in a historic mining area of California, and was mined before World War II, but it sounds like the permitting has been quite a bear. There’s a long history on Golden Queen’s website that details the environmental review hoops they’ve been jumping through, and apparently the next step is a response from the County for their latest air quality findings, but I have no idea whether or not the mine will end up being built. Whenever you read about these kinds of projects, it’s always worthwhile to look back — I read this article about the mine, and noted the optimism of management that they could be building the mine within a year or so … and then I saw that the article was 13 years old.

I am very glad that I’m not involved in trying to get mines permitted and built, I think I’d quickly lose hold of whatever hairs still remain on my head.

So … the teaser wasn’t exactly bursting with clues — we learned as much about Doody’s girlfriend and tan as we did about this “#1” company on his top ten list, but my best guess is that it’s Golden Queen … other stocks that I know have been mentioned as being on his top ten list in the past year or so, or that I’ve sniffed out in his teaser ads, include Royal Gold and Franco-Nevada, both royalty companies, and miners Minefinders and European Goldfields, but his list changes every month so I have no idea what’s really on it right now.

Golden Queen, assuming this is still a Doody pick, has so far sunk about $50 million into exploration and permitting, and they’ll have to raise a lot of money or do some joint ventures to take the next step if all the permits finally are approved … which, of course, doesn’t mean it’s a bad gamble at 75 cents — two million ounces is, after all, a heckuva lot of gold. Just do expect some major financing or partnering to come through if the mine is to be developed, they raised a little bit of money this summer but they don’t really have any cash to begin the actual work of building a mine. And the share price is getting pounded so far today, I don’t know if that’s just a leveraged reaction to the dip in gold prices, or investor panic with most other stocks going down … or if there’s actually any news bubbling to the surface that I just haven’t seen yet.

If you’ve got an opinion on Golden Queen, or any insight about when they might actually become a miner, feel free to let us know … as I hope I’ve stated often enough, I’m far from being a mining analyst and I can’t offer any great insight into the permitting process in Kern County, California, I just work with the clues I’m given.

And if you’ve ever subscribed to Doody’s Gold Stock Analyst, as I know several of my readers have, please take a moment to click here and review it for us today. Thanks!