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Friday File: Tracking Half a Year of Teasers

Stock Gumshoe will be closed next week, so we leave you with the first six months of teaser stocks and their performance to date


Today I’m leaving you with just a short note for your Friday File, as I wrap things up to vacation with family — Stock Gumshoe will be closed next week, and we’ll be back on our regular publishing schedule on July 9… enjoy!

One of the things that we do to keep us sane here at Stock Gumshoe is collect data — we track the price of each of the stocks we “uncover” from these gloriously hyped-up teaser ads.

Ideally, of course, this would tell us that there are a couple teaser-meisters who consistently tout the very best ideas, and we could focus on those and we’d all be living on yachts and being served peeled grapes… but, sadly enough, no one consistently picks stocks that actually do as well as their fantastical stories of wealth would have you believe.

Some do better than others sometimes, and there are occasionally excellent stock picks touted in these teaser ads — so that’s enough to keep us going as we look for the diamonds in the swamp… but the best lesson we can learn from our teaser tracking is that no, you can’t ever take the promised returns from an investment newsletter ad seriously.

For every 100% gainer, there are usually a few 80% losers (if running a portfolio of positions of similar size, of course, you need a 100% gain just to match every 50% loss)… and though most newsletter teaser pitches hold out the “very real” possibility of a 500% or even 5,000% gain, it’s an extremely rare performer that gets to that point. And, of course, none of us get to know in advance which of those picks will be the 1,000% winner, so we have to diversify… and if we’re looking for 1,000% winners, well, the odds are pretty good that we’re digging in risky territory — the same land where you’re likely to find lots of 90% losses.

We all know that, of course, just like we know that we’re not going to win the lottery… but still, temptation comes to visit, so a look at a nice, long spreadsheet with lots of scary numbers on it can help us to at least step on temptation’s toe and slow him down a little bit.

Which is a long way of saying that yes, I’ve finally gotten the 2018 spreadsheet up for you… so ...

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