Time for another longstanding Stock Gumshoe tradition — every Thanksgiving, for 15 years in a row now, we have looked back over our teaser tracking spreadsheets and called out one terrible pick as the Turkey of the Year. That’s the teaser pitch that provided us with the worst-performing, most-overhyped, or otherwise just the goofiest gobbler of the past twelve months. We try to avoid those that were just bad luck or bad timing, but, like creating a great Thanksgiving dinner, it’s not exactly science.
This honor is not bestowed lightly — to be named Turkey of the Year in Gumshoedom, you must have been a truly awful stock idea, chosen within the last twelve months, and, ideally, you should stand for all that is entertaining (and misleading) in stock newsletter teaser ads.
Most years, we’ve got plenty of candidates… over-promised technology names, failed biotech trials and puffed-up mining stocks tend to fill out the bottom of the Teaser Tracking spreadsheets here at Stock Gumshoe in any given year, with the occasional smattering of frauds and bankruptcies, so who are the most promising nominees for our annual prize?
The time frame we work on is “about a year”… but it doesn’t feel fair to call out a Turkey just a month or two after it is teased, so we actually usually use the September-to-September period to find a qualifying bird.
And I should start with the standard caveats — we don’t subscribe to all these newsletters, we just review their promotional materials, so we don’t usually know when they first recommend a stock to their subscribers, whether their commentary to subscribers is more nuanced than their promotional materials, or if or when they might recommend selling it… all we know is when and how they dangle a recommendation as bait to recruit new subscribers.
There are plenty of losers on the Turkey Table… we saw some picks that were clearly very richly valued story stocks at the time they were touted, like Matterport (MTTR), Asana (ASAN) and FuboTV (FUBO), and the speculative psychedelics play Cybin (CYBN), all of which were picked way back in that different world in the early Fall of 2021, when growth and fever dreams were ascendant… and there’s at least one “repeat” tease in there, with Luke Lango’s Ilika (IKA.L, ILIKF), a play on solid state batteries, in there as a legacy of Matt McCall’s earlier work for that publisher. The cryptocurrency brokerage Voyager Digital (now at ticker VYVGQ) was a trainwreck even before FTX collapsed, part of an earlier “contagion” in the crypto world, and Wonderfi (WNDR.NEO, WONDF) was similarly a victim of cryptocurrency weakness (as was that Jeff Brown pick of Ethereum, of course, whether he was actually recommending the actual crypto or ETHE, that exchange-traded fund which tracks it). There are almost too many candidates. And if you want to look at the more recent teaser pitches, Naked Wines (WINE.L, NWINF) has been the worst pick teased in the 2022 calendar year, with Carvana (CVNA) very close behind. If we use our 13-month September-to-September year, these are the ten worst-performing teaser stocks in the world of Gumshoe:
Turkey Table — Worst Teaser Picks from the Past Year
What stands out when we look through that list? Well, you can see that September of 2021 was a pretty terrible time to be picking stocks — six of the stocks were added to the spreadsheet in that one month. That was, at the time, an all-time high for both the Nasdaq 100 and the S&P 500… though both of those indices ended up climbing a little higher in November and December before the wheels began to really come off the bus.
And as of today, at least, these are all very small companies — Wonderfi, Ilika and Voyager are all worth much less than $100 million, real penny stocks… and of the ten, only Asana is currently valued at more than a billion dollars. That wasn’t always the case, though — Asana and Carvana were both large and well-loved stocks when they were picked, with market caps above $20 billion, and even FuboTV and Matterport were close to $5 billion.
In terms of consistency, there are a couple stocks that aren’t on that table that were weak most of the way along, starting right after the moment they were touted — Energy Vault, teased as the pioneer of the “Newton Battery” by Jason Williams in ads for his Future Giants newsletter, and Applied DNA (APDN), which was one of the “bonus” picks in Adam O’Dell’s “Imperium” pitch, were among the worst performers ten days after we covered each teaser pitch, and the worst six months after publication, and are still down a good 550% or more… though APDN had a big surge on some monkeypox testing hype over the summer, and NRGV climbed a bit off its lows of a few weeks ago, so both were able to stay just off the Turkey Table. (We track the stocks over several shorter periods of time on our spreadsheets, just in case they “pop” and then come back down.)
And the most recent terrible teaser pick has been Carvana (CVNA), which was teased as an “insider buy” stock by the Oxford Club just four months ago, in July — that insider, the CEO’s father, has probably regretted all the buys he’s made as the stock fell from the $200s to $100 to $60 to the mid-$20s, when Oxford teased it, and now it’s down below $7.
2022 Turkey of the Year
But over the course of the last year, there’s no competing with Voyager Digital (VOYG.TO, now VYGVQ) — that was also teased near a peak in the overall markets (which makes its relative performance look slightly better — it’s down more than 99%, but the S&P is down sharply since then, too, so relative to the market it’s “only” down 86%, though that’s still the worst pick in the last year). And to pile on, it’s not just the only stock that’s down 99% or more… but Voyager Digital is also the only teaser stock we covered in the past year which actually went bankrupt, something that happened with much more frequency in the early years of Stock Gumshoe (probably because there were generally more junior mining and early-stage biotechs being pitched back then).
That bankruptcy is why the US ticker for Voyager now ends in “Q,” for those who haven’t seen that before — that scarlet letter is for a company that’s currently in bankruptcy proceedings… which means that for investors, the Q should really mean “Quit looking at this, dummy!” Some people are always tempted to trade these bankrupt “Q” penny stocks, either because they hope some suckers will trade against them or because they’re holding out a smidgen of hope that, if it’s a Chapter 11 bankruptcy (like Voyager’s), the company will keep operating and might eventually refinance, recover or be acquired, and that there might be a tiny crumb or two left over for shareholders after the creditors have been satisfied… something that happens once in a dozen blue moons, just often enough to keep the hope alive. (Chapter 7 bankruptcies are the other common one — that means a company is shutting down and selling its assets and liquidating, which usually offers even less hope.)
Is it fair to call Voyager Digital our Turkey of the Year when it was actually a repeat pick, though? I’m inclined to say yes, if only because it was a stock that was ardently promoted by Enrique Abeyta over at Empire Financial for pretty much the whole year in 2021… and the two previous picks of Voyager were actually worse than the October 2021 pick, because they were at higher prices.
More importantly, this was not just a repeated and stale teaser that the publisher kept rolling out because it worked to get subscribers — this was indeed a new “back up the truck” call from Abeyta that he sent out last October, in part because the stock had been falling. Here’s a little excerpt from the ad for Empire Elite Growth that we covered on October 27, 2021, at the time the headline was Abeyta calling this the “Most Obvious 10X Opportunity I’ve Seen”:
“A stock we’ve been pounding the table on just got crushed.
“It’s down to around $10 from its high of $30 earlier this year.
“And we LOVE it!
“That might sound strange, but we’re still extremely bullish on this stock…
“Which means now is an even better time to buy.
“You can load up on shares while they’re still extremely cheap right now…
Are you getting our free Daily Update
"reveal" emails? If not,
just click here...“And we firmly believe this stock could easily go up anywhere from 500% to 1,000% from its current prices.
“If I were allowed to buy shares myself, I’d be backing up the truck.”
And, frankly, it seems a little extra fair to pick on Abeyta’s pick of Voyager… because I fell under the same spell, at the same time. I bought that stock back when Abeyta was touting it, trying to catch a falling knife (you probably know how often that works out). Add in that Abeyta was banging the drum so loudly for “buying the dip” on this stock that he had loved all last year, and doing so in the service of a premium-priced newsletter ($2,250 was the “on sale” offer price for Empire Elite Growth back then), and I feel pretty good about selecting Voyager Digital as our new Turkey of the Year.
Really, though, if you’ve got a 99%-loss stock that’s in bankruptcy as one of the possible choices, you have to have a really good reason to slap the Turkey label on somebody else.
Did Abeyta ride this stock all the way down to bankruptcy? I have no idea — he’s much more of a trader than I am, so it seems somewhat unlikely, but we only see the tease, we don’t see the actual newsletter recommendations or any followup. Personally, I sold my small speculative stake in Voyager about six months ago, when it hit the 50% stop loss level that I was using for that position, and that forced me to reconsider and re-evaluate… here’s an excerpt of what I wrote at the time:
“My gut feeling is that Voyager has probably lost its opportunity to build a meaningful competitor, as Coinbase and Crypto.com have effectively advertised and acquired new accounts and built dominating scale so quickly in the US. It’s still possible, my gut is often wrong and their platform is a little easier to use for trading, and their “Robinhood” like features, particularly commission-free trading, are appealing… but it’s also less engaging when it comes to creating a community of crypto enthusiasts and educating new crypto speculators, something Coinbase is really trying to do with its content and educational tools. I continue to have both Coinbase and Voyager accounts and use both of them from time to time, but I have a lot more money in Coinbase, and I do think it has been improving over the past year while Voyager has mostly stood still. That’s subjective, but in the increasingly competitive world of crypto brokerages and exchanges, with vast amounts of venture capital spawning new “disruptors” every month, I am now less hopeful that Voyager can build something meaningful.”
Occasionally, when I select the Turkey of the Year, I have to also offer the caveat that “maybe it’s more appealing now than it was then” — sometimes stocks fall for dumb reasons, sometimes a big drop in price makes a company look more appealing. Sometimes the markets are just depressed around Thanksgiving time, and something decent falls through the cracks.
So, to be clear, that’s not the case here.
Voyager Digital filed for bankruptcy back in July of this year, which means they couldn’t pay their debts or meet their financial obligations, and that’s usually the beginning of the end, at least for equity holders (if the company comes back and eventually emerges from bankruptcy, it’s almost always the former creditors who end up owning any equity that still exists). That filing came, at least in part, because their executives foolishly approved some rescue loans for Three Arrows Capital, the crypto hedge fund that then went insolvent and brought down a lot of other investors with it, one of many smaller crises that led to the “run on the bank” at FTX a few weeks ago and the cascade of failures and bankruptcies that is already starting to follow.
And everything in the crypto world seems interconnected these days — when Voyager collapsed in July, they were on the phone to Sam Bankman-Fried for a rescue investment from FTX, like many other cryptocurrency companies who were in trouble at the time, and they even had an agreement to be acquired out of bankruptcy by FTX… until FTX itself went under this month. There’s now talk that Binance, which quickly backed away from its own possible deal to rescue FTX, is considering making a bid for Voyager Digital… but it’s pretty hard to imagine that any deal might somehow lead to compensation for Voyager Digital shareholders.
(I also have had a little money in Voyager as a customer over the past 18 months or so, just to make this extra fun, though most of my small allocation to crypto assets is still in Coinbase accounts.)
How has the year shaken out overall?
Well, when it comes to relative performance for these hype-selling pundits, 2021 picks ended up being terrible… and the in 2022 have been a little bit better. If you bought all of the stocks teased in equal amounts at the time they were pitched by a newsletter promo in 2021, you would have “underperformed” the S&P 500 by about 38%. If you bought all the stocks in 2022, you would have only done about 13% worse than if you had just bought the index on each of those days instead. That 10-12% underperformance is more typical of teaser stocks in general over a year or two, so on that front 2022 is back to being somewhat of a “normal” year.
Turkey History
If you’re newer to Stock Gumshoe, we’ve been tracking heavily promoted teaser stocks since 2007, and named our first Turkey of the Year in 2008 — and you can go all the way back to see how those 14 previous Turkeys matured or recovered.
A visit with past Turkey of the Year winners will quickly turn into a cautionary tale about the dangers of bottom fishing — last year it was Intrusion (INTZ) that walked home with the prize, and it was hard to imagine their story getting any worse… but the stock is down another 20% or so since then.
The 2020 winner LimeLight Networks later changed names (it’s now Edgio (EGIO)), but has continued to fall, down another 67% or so since it was named the 13th Turkey of the Year.
And most of the older ones have continued to disappoint as well — 2019 marijuana pretender Crop Infrastructure (CRXPF) merged with Vert Infrastructure, then went into receivership a year or so later and is essentially gone.
Others have been through the occasional hype cycle in intervening years but still fallen over time, like 2017 winner Aqua Metals (AQMS)… the only one that has ever really meaningfully recovered has been 2018 winner Indivior (INDV.l, INVVY), teased by Chris Mayer. Coincidentally, I think Chris Mayer is the only winner of this prize that has left the newsletter business (he now manages a private fund, managing some of newsletter pioneer Bill Bonner’s money, among others).
For posterity’s sake, here are the other previous winners… most of them are gone now, either reverse split to infinity or shedding shareholders through a bankruptcy or two. A couple of the names still exist in some form, but I’m pretty sure that all of them ended up being 100% losses for investors who bought anywhere near when they were initially teased and held through to the bitter end:
SunEdison in 2016 (Kent Moors’ Energy Advantage)
CT Partners in 2015 (Louis Navellier)
Solazyme in 2014 (Jimmy Mengel and the Motley Fool both pitched this one
HRT Participa in 2013 (Byron King)
Gasfrac in 2012 (Sean Brodrick and Keith Kohl) (even the company that bought Gasfrac’s assets out of bankruptcy several years later, STEP Energy (STEP.TO), has lost most of its value since)
Tengion in 2011 (Steve Christ)
SuperMedia in 2010 (Hilary Kramer) (that one recovered briefly when merging with Dex One, and the ashes persist as Thryv Holdings (THRY), but in the meantime it went through at least one investor-destroying bankruptcy)
Raser Technologies in 2009 (Nancy Zambell and the Oxford Club both teased this one)
Potash North in 2008 (Andrew Mickey).
A few caveats for this whole exercise, just to be clear:
- As I noted above, we don’t know what the specific advice was from any of these newsletters — maybe they doubled down on the stock when it dropped, maybe they stopped out or changed their minds the day after we covered the tease, we don’t subscribe so we don’t know… because all we know about a stock is when it was teased as a world-beater, we set our tracking to just assume that you bought the stock on the day the newsletter teased it and held it forever.
- And as a corollary to that, this is not necessarily a reflection on the newsletter pundit who promoted the Turkey — yes, we should use this moment to remind ourselves that the marketing pablum skews our perception and has to be actively ignored, but sometimes the newsletter editors don’t even really have anything to do with the teaser pitches their publisher uses… and the overall performance of a newsletter’s portfolio is presumably often different from the performance of their most actively touted “teaser” stocks.
- This is not necessarily meant as a criticism of those particular newsletters — I think of the annual Turkey Award as being a bit more light-hearted than that, since we all do dumb things sometimes, but also as a reason to be cautious about exciting stories. The best way to do that is by pointing out, at least once a year, a few of those moments when the emperor, at least in retrospect, wasn’t wearing any clothes.
Past Turkey of the Year winners have won for lots of different reasons — sometimes they ended up being actual frauds or scams, with management who lied… sometimes they just borrowed too much money at the wrong time. Often they were sold as a story but hadn’t yet gotten past the first chapter and turned that story into a real operating business, and occasionally they were bets on a big event that failed (like a hoped-for oil discovery).
What’s missing? There has (very) occasionally been a little bit of revenue growth behind a Turkey finalist, and once or twice one of them even reported a profit, but the winner has never been a company with any kind of history of stable operating results… let alone rising revenues or growing earnings.
So what’s the lesson? How about… Stories disappear more easily than dollars.
If you stick with companies who have proven their promise to some degree, with evidence of actual growth or meaningful profitability in their financial results, not just in their future daydreams and their investor presentations or in the minds of optimistic pundits, maybe you can avoid bringing a Turkey home.
Nobody’s perfect, though — and now the last two Turkey of the Year winners are both stocks that I personally speculated on for at least a while. This has been a year when a lot of us had a lot of losing positions (I wrote last month about where I’ve been most wrong, in case you’re curious), and the world continues to be unpredictable. I imagine we’ll all make more mistakes than we’d like.
So that’s it for this year’s roasting of the Turkeys…. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! I’m thankful for your continued readership and your support of Stock Gumshoe, and delighted that you continue to make this the finest spot in cyberspace. We will be closed for the holiday, so enjoy your break from my blather — no Friday File this week, and I’ll be back to dazzle you with more stories of promise and peril on Monday… thanks for reading!
P.S.: In case you’re wondering, we do have an optimistic version of this look-back as well… right around the end of the year, usually between Christmas and the New Year, we’ll highlight the BEST teaser stocks picked over the last year. And, of course you can always peruse the Tracking Spreadsheets to see which winners… or turkeys… might be your favorite.
P.P.S. Have a Turkey of your own to get off your chest? It can be good for the soul to acknowledge it and move on, and we’re ready to listen. Think I should have picked somebody else? Feel free to share with a comment below.
Remember Abeyta is part of Empire Financial-home of Whitney Tilson. Tilson predicted along with Porter Stansberry that TSLA stock was most likely going to ZERO. Each of these 2 narcissists eats their heart out over Elon Musk. Both interested in selling subscriptions-period. They don’t deserve ink on your pages.
Will Tesla buy a large stake in Twitter from Musk?
Based on your review and the ability to link my brokerage account to Voyager via Plaid (I was also interested in Plaid at the time), I made a small investment and also made my first investment in Bitcoin using Voyager. Within two weeks, on multiple occasions, Voyager’s computers were not “available” for transactions or balance inquiry due to “maintenance”. That was a big red flag to me as a former programmer in the electronic funds transfer business. So, I blew out both positions with a net loss of less than a grand. Ain’t I smart. Actually, I left a balance of about $10 in my account. I don’t like my odds of getting that back. I love the Turkey-of-The-Year articles. Thanx
cbwtf
So is it a good time to buy? 😉
maybe!
Hurry! The opportunity may soon be gone forever. The buy-and-hold speculator has not seen VYVGQ at a more attractive price!
Always enjoy reading about these awards Travis, reminds me of the ones I nearly bit on and fortunately didn’t. Happy Thanksgiving to the Gumshoe family.
Great article! Thanks! This reminds me of the Dot.com bubble of 2000.
I bought GLXY! and sold it at what I thought then was a huge loss of 50%. Does anyone remember Global Crossing? a huge dot.com disaster! at the time–it was THE biggest FAIL of all time. Going from over $200 billion to ZERO. I subscribed to some fancy newsletter that made up for this turkey with QCOM–which was the biggest gainer of the decade 1990–2000.
I am glad we can all laugh at this stuff. Though I hit the great rise of 2020–investing $300K —with MF–to see it rise to $890K—then I freaked out and sold almost all of it in FEB of 2021. wish I had stayed out! I bought more MF (they’ve been awful!) stocks and lost about $300K
the good news? I SPENT a ton of cash instead of buying stocks. So now I own a new car –40K–a ew van –60K–and a chunk of land in Mexico 200K.
I got into OIL stocks late (why no MF interest in oil?)–but am up about 20-25% on the big oil corps. Who’d a thunk “energy” would be the ONLY sector to rise (out of 12) in 2022?
I’m with you on GLXY but I didn’t sell.
Its now almost worthless. I can only hope that there be a face saving Bitcoin bull run to save it in the lockbox (and my account).
I can’t figure out how the entries are listed on the spreadsheet.
Can you please tell me the sequencing? Mark
The list above is just by relative return (vs. The S&P). The main spreadsheets are also sorted that way, but have to be re-sorted manually so sometimes the order is off.
I’ve had more than a few stock losers during 2022, mostly because short sales are not permitted within an IRA. But one thing I’ve steered clear of is any investment having to do with crypto, primarily because I have yet to understand what gives crypto value other than the greater fool theory. Some fans of crypto say its value lies in the inability to inflate the currency. Others that the processing effort to create coins is expensive in and of itself, which is like saying a boulder is valuable after it’s been rolled up a hill. The dollar, on the other hand, has value simply because the government forces partners in a transaction to accept it as currency (“all debts public and private”). The day the American government no longer has the ability to enforce its laws, the dollar will lose its value. Interesting that ILIKF made the list. I bought the stock three years ago, held it for year and half, and finally gave up on it. I sold at a loss, but I’m amused by the fact that the stock continued to fall after I sold, leading me to believe it will never produce a useable solid state battery at scale.
Travis, I know there are a lot of newsletters to cover. I would however like to see some coverage on anything written by Keith Schaefer. Hope I’m spelling it right. I am totally convinced he buys into a company and then pumps it up. CALM, ICAN and CNI(?) are three stocks that come to mind. They have all tanked big time. I have also noticed way at the bottom of his newsletters it will say “This is a sponsored ad”. I think that means he is taking money for promoting these stocks. That’s lower than a snakes belly in a wagon rut. Just my opinion of course. Thanks, Andy
That is indeed what his ad disclosures mean, he started running sponsored promos like that a few years ago. You can go pretty far in misleading people as long as you tell them in the fine print that you’re misleading them.
He almost won the Turkey one year with his company that was “cornering the market on storage tanks” during one of the fracking boom periods, but I haven’t written about his stuff recently. Will keep an eye out.
sounds a lot like “Tokyo Joe” from the dot.com bubble days! he had a loyal following who’d buy a ton of tiny dot.com stocks–then dump them at a huge gain. he was busted–and did time in prison, I believe.
I think he settled with the SEC. It wasn’t a criminal case.
One of my favorite posts of the year. I owned Voyager this year. I might have even read about it here and gotten swept up in the crypto hype. Proud turkey right here!
Me too. Thankful today for small positions!
Thanks Travis. I always love reading about the Turkey of the Year, and I always feel relieved when I discover it’s not a stock I own. I did own some Voyager Digital a few years ago, but I sold it long ago. Thank you for reassuring me that I’m not a complete moron.
To avoid the disaster of catching falling knives, it helps to view a candlestick chart. Ignore the fancy terminology and pattern drawing. By just looking at the repetitive downward red sticks, an investor realizes that the phrase “buy the dip” is antiquated in this age of technology and should not be taken literally. Ask : “Which dip?” — the 1st…3rd…10th?…?”
Instead, watch for the TURN (or two, or three)AFTER the series of dips to consider buying in. At that point, the stock would be trying to get out of the Oversold zone and the short-sellers will have exhausted themselves. If those falling knives still refuse to turn upwards, move on to another stock recommendation.
Remember, too, that Enrique Abeyta works for Whitney Tilson who, by his own admission, has a history of short-selling that cost him his hedge fund.
Fair enough, but let’s keep in mind about 20 years ago (give or take) Amazon also became a proud member of the Turkey Club. Look at it now.
Indeed, Stock Gumshoe wasn’t around back then but it’s certainly possible Amazon might have been a Turkey during its 90% drop in those years after the dot-com mania. I doubt they would have topped the list, given how many truly terrible companies were briefly popular back then… but you never know. Netflix in the pre-streaming days was once among the worst teaser stocks, and is now one of the all-time best.
There’s always at least a little hope to keep us going… though the odds of a recovery must be a lot worse with Voyager than with the other “top ten” candidates.
I think it’s the lack of acknowledgement by these Newsletter writers that is most disheartening. I get a daily email from Luke Lango, it’s mostly teasers trying to you to sign up but it is absolute fantasy land on the bigger picture. If you only read that and acted on it, you would believe that the FED were about to pivot next week, Tech stocks would hit new heights in first 1/4 of 2023 but then as time moves forward so does his timelines and predictions.
Luke should go on YouTube and listen to the various FED Presidents who give interviews and I can tell you a FED pivot is not on the horizon and if it happens, it will be as a result of a big mishap and the ensuing carnage will further wreck growth stocks.
Luke trots out “don’t fight the FED” and then proceeds to do exactly that.
If he is representative of the thinking in Newsletters of this ilk, readers should see the wider picture also.
I fell for the cannabis hype back in 2018, #acb. #aux. A Class action suit happened a few years later for both of those ,But one had to have lost at least$50,000.00 in order to be a part of it. Be forwarned.
HI All,
Unfortunately we all had – not one but many – turkeys this year! Let us hope for better days and many reasons to smile next year. I wish you and yours Travis, and the entire Gumshoe Family, a very happy Thanksgiving!
I am hearing we will get $5 per share once Voyager comes out of bankruptcy, because it will become a reddit meme. Hey why not if Cathie says btc will be worth a million by 2030 lol
Happy thanksgiving
LOL YOUE GOOD
My vote for Turkey of the year goes to Palantir PLTR as pitched by Paul Mampilly who has now left the scene telling all his readers to continue to hold all his mostly loser portfolio. I initially bought the stock somewhere around $20 and as I learned more sold out around $18. What I hate about this company is the GREED of management which has diluted the heck out of the company by voting itself billions of dollars worth of the stock screwing the stockholders!
Palantir is my large holding at a net cost of $7.75. But unlike other turkeys, it has increasing revenue, positive cash flow, and healthy balance sheet with no debt.
The Voyager Digital pick as Turkey of 2022 is incomplete without credit to the asstoot (that’s deliberate) writers who recommended it. Stansberry’s analyst MATT McCALL recommended Voyager Digital including holding it to its worthless end. Does this make him Turkey Man?