Winners and Losers from the Gumshoe

by Travis Johnson, Stock Gumshoe | July 16, 2007 12:59 am

Well, I have consistently failed to keep up with my originally planned “monthly updates” on the teaser companies we sleuth out here, but better late than never — let’s take a look at how they’re doing.

I have a standing offer, by the way, for anyone who wants to get into the spreadsheet and do anything useful like adding comparative S&P numbers, or annualizing the data, or standardizing the newsletter names. Any volunteers? I can barely keep up with just adding the basic numbers every couple weeks, but at least we’ve got a baseline to work with.

For those who haven’t been with me long, what I do is essentially assume that I bought shares of each company that’s teased on the day that I first saw the ad email. I track it from that day’s closing price, and of course don’t really know if the newsletter went back and sold it later or anything — they almost never brag about selling, except to take credit for their biggest gainers.

So anyway — on to our teaser companies. How’s the performance?

Big winners — up nearly 100% (or more)

Lynas, from Ann Sosnowski[1]’s MicroCap HotSheet[2], continues to be the best performer yet — up 294% since December. This was one of the first stocks I sleuthed out, so I’m happy to see it doing well.

Rusina[3] Mining, another Aussie miner, continues to be one of the strong performers — still up 127% three months after the recommendation.

And yet a third resources company from down under, oil[4]-investment-in-somalia.html">Range Resources took off with the Somali oil hype almost immediately back in May, and has settled down only a little bit since to remain an 83% gainer so far.

Force Protection[5], from Brian Hicks[6] back in November is up 114%.

The Motley Fool[7] hit one out of the park with their Rule Breakers[8] push for aQuantive — thanks to a very rich buyout from Microsoft (maybe they were afraid the “next Google” would beat them as badly as the last one?) that put the shares up 127% from the teaser price.

And Bottarelli[9], which hasn’t made the “best” list before (far from it, actually), made it here with solar[10]-power-and-water[11]-and-small-cap-in.html">World Water and Solar, a little name that’s up 123% since their teaser email hit me.

Trina Solar has done very well[12] — up 88% for RObert Hsu’s China[13] Strategy.

Duluth Metals, one of the Lake Superior mining companies[14] from Greg McCoach[15], is booming as well — up 183%. The other company he teased in that same ad, the much larger PolyMet,[16] is up a more modest 24%.

And finally, Playfair — the Canadian Tungsten company that I did a hatchet job of a wrong writeup on[17] — has made Andrew Mickey[18] quite proud, up 79% in just about a month so far.

And the stinkers: Down near 50% or more, there have been actually a pretty small number of these so far, thankfully.

Ann Sosnowski must be pretty happy with Lynas, because it’s helping to offset the weak performance from SignaLife, the Cardiovest company[19]. This one has moved steadily down, now a 52% drop.

Go Fish is the worst one we’ve gotten here at the Gumshoe yet[20] — from Quantum Investor, it looks to be well on its way to 0 with an 84% decline.

Second worst is Atherogenix, which was a Volume Spike selection[21] for a short term kick based on news expected from a medical conference. The news disappointed, to put it lightly, and it’s down 73% — almost all of that decline came within a week of the recommendation back in March, and no recovery has launched yet.

Also in biotech land, where quick winners and losers are certainly not unusual, we find Bottarelli recommending a stock that prostate[22]-cancer-stock.html">quickly fell nearly 50% in Dendreon.

Mike Shaeffer’s Coal Bed Methane company, Big Cat Energy[23], has also taken quite a haircut — down 52% since he emailed me an ad to push it, and Bottarelli, which recommended the same company a bit later[24] at a lower price, is down 27% on that one, too. I believe this is the only company I’ve seen teased by two different services, both of who probably regret it at this point.

So … it’s been quite a run since I started compiling this data and writing up these teaser companies — and though I haven’t done the real spreadsheet work, the large number of companies that are up between 20-50% indicates to me that over all, these teasers companies are probably doing better than the market at large. Of course, some of them are doing a LOT worse.

Best to all — enjoy your week, happy sleuthing, and get warmed up, there will be another Gumshoe contest starting at the end of this week over at the forum.

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