A few of my dear readers have been steadfastly reading every missive from the Gumshoe’s tired keyboard for well over a year now, but there are new folks every day here … and lots of you who only catch an occasional article, so I thought I’d try to catch everyone up on what has been coming in hot and heavy in the ‘ol mailbox lately.

This is just what I’m seeing in the last week or two — these aren’t the long-term most popular posts, for that you can always hit up the Greatest Hits page, which is linked from the top.

So what am I seeing a lot of these days?

Our friend Dan Denning has apparently caught the attention of his Agora and Stansberry colleagues with his Australian advisory service, because he’s gotten access to their mailing lists and is going crazy trying to see if he can pick up some American subscribers. The email teaser was all about Aussie resource companies, going out under the name, “Pilbara Profit Secret” — there are a bunch of companies teased in that ad, so I spread it out a bit:

Here’s the first Pilbara writeup — it’s all about an iron ore crusher that also does pipeline work.

And here’s the second on Pilbara — it’s about three companies, an iron ore miner, a mining services firm, and a natural gas giant. Denning also sent along a note/rebuttal after reading my comments, so I appended that to the writeup in case you’re interested.

The other one that’s getting some crazy play is Andrew Mickey’s looooong teaser of companies that are somehow related to Russia — and ways to play a fear of Putin. This was also a hefty one, so it’s broken out into three articles:

Profit from Putin, part 1 — LNG

Profit from Putin, part 2 — Nickel

and Profit from Putin, part 3 — agriculture

I’m also seeing a big resurgence in Motley Fool mailings — the two that are coming across my screen most frequently are the Tier Two Cities teaser from Bill Mann’s folks at Global Gains, and the New American Super Brand, which was one of the very first Gumshoe writeups back in March of 2007, and is still going strong (though the Brand itself is in a bit of a tough spot at the moment, scraping around right about at its 52-week low). Here are the links:

New American Super Brand (this is the “updated” article, still quite old)

and

Tier Two Monsters — The Indian Bank, and the Chinese Hotelier.

The big writeup of the Motley Fool’s four favorite alternative energy plays is still apparently making the rounds, too — if you missed that the first time, it’s available here.

Also in that energy space, just to close this out with a final note, I’m also seeing lots of questions about the Alternative Energy Speculator’s natural gas trucking teaser, the “Clean Air Cash-outs.”

So that’s what I’m seeing a lot of these days — and what my readers have been asking the most about. Hopefully some of those are new to you, too … or at least worth of revisiting.

And if not, stay tuned — I can confidently tease you with the fact that there will be more brilliant, insightful and witty Gumshoe goodness coming your way soon.

For full disclosure, some of my holdings in the companies mentioned above may have changed since I first wrote about them. Of the companies mentioned in these writeups I now own shares of Westport Innovations, and I remain a shareholder of HDFC Bank. I also have overlooked some of my Russia fears and picked up shares in Vostok Nafta when they seemed to be trading at a small discount to net assets (Vostok Nafta was not directly teased by anyone — it is a Lundin-affiliated Sweden-based Russian investment fund that’s a major investor in Black Earth Farming, which was one of the Russian investments discussed, and I did mention the fund in that writeup). It’s a strange bird of an investment, but whether or not it appeals to you the annual reports are worth reading for an interesting perspective on investing in Russia.