Today I wanted to start by looking at an abrupt move from a stock I’ve been watching in recent months. Lemonade (LMND) soared 20% yesterday and a bit more still this morning, on no news… the stock is not quite back to its post-IPO highs of July, but it’s awfully close now.

What the heck is going on there, besides the gyrations of a volatile stock that has already been both below $45 and above $95 in its short life (five months now) as a public company?

I don’t really know for sure — like I said, no real news from the company (they reported about three weeks ago, there was a not-unexpected wash of insider selling over the past couple weeks as some of the locked-up insider shares were freed after the quarterly report, and they aren’t presenting anywhere this week or releasing any other updates, as far as I know), but I have my suspicions.

Do you know who releases their recommendations at 1pm on the first (and third) Thursday of the month? The gigantic Motley Fool Stock Advisor, with its hundreds of thousands of paid subscribers. When they tip a new stock, it always jumps at 1pm on that day as people rush to buy whatever it is that Tom or David Gardner is recommending that month. I think it’s Tom’s turn in the rotation yesterday, from what I read, but, again, I don’t know for sure.

So that’s my guess: Lemonade has now made it to Stock Advisor. It may have already been a Motley Fool recommendation, they disclosed in November that the Motley Fool as a corporation owned shares before it had been recommended in any Motley Fool newsletters (which is a little odd, I don’t think I’ve seen that before), and as of November 24 it was disclosed as a newsletter recommendation — my guess is that it made it into the slightly edgier and growthier Rule Breakers service first in November, then got the call-up to Stock Advisor yesterday, but, again, just guessing there. Rule Breakers used to release their picks after the market close on the fourth Wednesday of the month, which would have been the day before Thanksgiving, and that’s a wacky time to be judging the impact on share prices (low volume on Friday after Thanksgiving, lots of folks distracted), but LMND share did jump 10% ...