And now it’s time to give some credit where it’s due… what were the most successful teaser picks of 2022?

Each year, we spend a few minutes highlighting the worst idea from the investment newsletter world when we name our “Turkey of the Year” at Thanksgiving… but as the year comes to an end, we also want to pin down the best ideas of the past year, and maybe think a little bit about what made them the best performers.

It was an odd year, for sure, with big market forces that rocked all the ships in the ocean, so some of the teased ideas were company-specific winners, shares of firms that did interesting things or enjoyed big breakthroughs, some were commodity plays that benefitted from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or other big picture trends, and some, in a year when collapse seemed to be the norm, were just relatively boring companies that survived. In 2022, sometimes surviving was enough to make you look like a winner.

All of this data comes from our Teaser Tracking spreadsheets, which anyone can view, and we ranked them on December 27, so our standard caveats apply: We don’t subscribe to these newsletters, this is based on the Thinkolator results for all the teasers we’ve investigated throughout the year (historically, the Thinkolator is right 99% of the time… but 99% and 100% are very different numbers). We also don’t know what an editor might have done with a stock after teasing it, whether they bought or sold since or said something different to their actual subscribers, we are left to assume they bought it on the day they were teasing it and held it forever.

It’s also possible that by the end of the day on Friday, the rankings will be slightly different… but here’s the excerpt of our 2022 teaser tracking spreadsheet with the top ten teaser stocks of the past year — the company name links to our article:

(And yes, as we do with the Turkey of the Year, we go back a bit to make sure that we give a stock time to percolate… so we would have included any great picks made in the closing months of 2021, as well, but, well, stocks were a lot pricier back then, and none of those late-2021 teasers made the “best of the year” list).

The runaway winner was the Argentine oil company YPF (YPF), teased right when oil prices were going bonkers with the Russian invasion of Ukraine — I thought that was a “it’s so cheap that it could go crazy” stock, but also one that merited some caution because it had been so cheap for so long, and for good reasons (it’s Argentina, and the company is majority controlled by the state, so the good reasons were mostly “the government”). So far, it has worked out very well, the stock bottomed out in August and has climbed quite steadily since. And by any conventional metric you want to use, it’s still cheap. And still risky, for pretty much the same reasons.

Among the other performers, it’s interesting that many of them were not the primary focus of teaser campaigns — the relatively conservative pick of California utility PG&E (PCG) by Whitney Tilson was hidden underneath a much more aggressive teaser pitch for “next big monopoly” Ginkgo Bioworks (DNA). It wasn’t exactly a traditional utility play, PCG came out of their wildfire bankruptcy just a year or two earlier, but it was certainly the safest stock teased in that ad.

Likewise, the Alex Koyfman pitch of ShotSpotter (SSTI) was actually the third stock teased in an ad for Microcap Insider that focused mostly on non-lethal weapon companies Byrna (BYRN) and Wrap Technologies (WRAP)… both of which would have lost money for you.

And that Fool pitch of Donnelley Financial Solutions (DFIN), a rare “value” stock tease for them, was actually hiding inside a pitch for the South American travel agency Despegar (DESP), which has been cut in half.

The other Motley Fool pitch in this year’s list, incidentally, was the tout of Absolute Software (ABST) by the Motley Fool UK — and that ad was very similar to a spiel from Motley Fool Canada about that same “secret” stock about eight months earlier — the Canadians were too early, and that pick was a dud, but the Brits were luckier or wiser in their bottom-picking.

My, how a year changes things — twelve months ago, when we looked back at 2021, these were the top ten teaser stocks of that particular year:

Back then, in the flush of excitement about revolutionary change and new technology companies, most of the top performers where somehow connected to electric vehicles and batteries, or to the metaverse or other technology trends.

And in case you’re tempted by any of this year’s top ten teaser stocks, here’s a public service: this chart of the one-year return for last year’s top ten teaser stocks is a visual reminder that buying the best recent performers doesn’t always work out — that orange line is the the S&P 500, so you can see that all the hottest stories of a year ago have done much, much worse than the broad market.

And yes, if you’re looking closely, you’ll see that no newsletter or pundit is on both of those lists — nobody who got a “top ten” pick in 2021 also picked a great winner in 2022.  At least, not among the teaser ads we covered.

The real lesson of everything that comes crawling off the page here at Stock Gumshoe, or in any newsletter missive, is that you have to think for yourself. Take the ideas the world throws at you, try to wash off the marketing hype and the “investing pornography” daydreams of 1,000% gains, and make your own decision about a company’s valuation and prospects, and be prepared for the likelihood that you’re going to feel stupid about your decision probably at least half the time.

For most of us, the only way to hold on through the crazy ups and downs is if we understand a company well, have some conviction about their business remaining viable in the future, and allocate our portfolios so that we won’t suffer too much if we’re very wrong about a company or a trend.  We’re all wrong sometimes, there isn’t an analyst or a stock-picking pundit out there who can predict the future with any degree of accuracy or consistency, but the best companies do, eventually, rise to the top and become long-term winners that can fuel a portfolio for decades.  Sometimes the hardest part is staying with the companies you are certain have good long-term prospects, even if they’re maybe a little boring, and tuning out the most exciting stories — if you find the story enthralling, probably lots of other people do, too, and that means you’re likely to overpay.

Or, of course, you can just stick with some low-cost mutual funds and ETFs, either actively managed by sober people or simply tracking broad market indexes, and ignore the daily drama — it won’t be as fun or interesting, but history pretty clearly indicates that most of us would do better, most of the time, with that kind of strategy.   Nobody likes to aim for “average” — but when we get ourselves emotionally involved in stock picking and watching the daily gyrations of the market, there’s a pretty high probability that we’re going to have results that would make “average” look pretty attractive.

And in case you’re curious about shorter-term considerations, since I know some folks are traders, the best performers if you measure from one month after the teaser pitch were very different. The top short-term picks were Carvana (CVNA) back in July and IonQ (IONQ) in January. Both, sadly, have been disastrous over the longer term. IonQ was also the top performer if you measure ten days out, too (all of these measures are on the tracking spreadsheets, if you wish to browse on your own), which could either be an accident of timing or an indication that the newsletter pitch fell on ready ears and drove some buying.

How did the whole year in teasers end up? Well, we don’t have tracking data about most of the cryptocurrencies teased, since Google Finance doesn’t give quotes on most of them (we know they were mostly terrible, but haven’t mined the data further), but if we look just at the stock investments… there were a total of 35 teaser picks that outperformed the broader market last year (out of 127 teasers covered… so if beating the market is your measure, that’s a 28% “success” rate). If you had bought every single teaser stock that graced the pages of Stock Gumshoe, at the moment they were being pitched as the next big thing, you would have lost about 24% of your money — and in relative terms, you would have trailed the market by about 16% (the S&P, if you bought it on all of those same days, would have given you an average loss of 8%).

And I always like to look to see which were the most-read pages here at Stock Gumshoe throughout the year… and whether that matches up with the best-performing stock picks in any way. Usually it doesn’t, the sexiest idea that sends questions our way or gets people excited to seek us out and read an article is rarely the best-performing investment idea… but sometimes there’s a bit of crossover. So what were the most popular articles at Stock Gumshoe in the past year? These are the top five, in order:

Dividend Hunter’s “If I Had to Pick One Stock to Retire On, I’d Pick This” pitch for Hercules Capital (HTGC)… that one has almost kept up with the S&P 500, if you include dividends, though even with those high dividends the stock performance doesn’t get it into the top ten (we don’t include dividends in the teaser tracking, and it’s extremely rare for a high dividend-payer to be a top overall performer in any given year — dividends are a major driver of long-term results, but don’t create many huge one-year winners. Even in bad markets, that generally falls to growth stocks or companies that are leveraged to discovery or innovation, like biotechs or junior miners).   Since being touted way back in January (the pitch was repeated for most of the year), HTGC has a total return of negative 17% (the S&P lost 14% during that same time period)

Adam O’Dell’s “Imperium Machine” pitch of Twist Bioscience (TWST) for Green Zone Fortunes was number two for reader requests in 2022… though that ad had also run throughout 2021 (and I just saw it again this week). The stock has been a slow motion disappointment for most of that time, following a huge and exciting runup in late 2020.  Since we first covered that ad in April of 2021, the stock has lost about 83% of its value (versus a 5% loss for the broader market) — since we updated the story back in January of this year, it’s a 74% loser (versus a 19% loss for the S&P 500).

Number three was Monument Traders’ pitch of Rolls-Royce (RYCEY) as the “Last Great Value Stock” — and it probably makes this list because they promoted it so heavily all year, with urgent deadlines from May to August to October and December. This one does make the top ten list for best performers, too, though that was just for the more recent August re-tease, which turned out to be better-timed — if you started buying when they started teasing it as a $2 value stock, way back in March, at this point you would pretty much match the market — an 18% loss, versus a 16% loss for the S&P.

Next was Nomi Prins and her most aggressively pushed “Great Distortion” ad back in May — that one primarily pitched ChargePoint (CHPT), the EV charging company that has continued to disappoint investors despite the big-picture tailwinds, though, in a cruel twist, it looked to me like she also pitched crypto-enthusiast bank Silvergate Capital (SI) in that ad, and that stock has been caught up in the FTX crisis and the crypto collapse. That one sticks in my brain as maybe the most aggressively advertised pitch I saw all year, probably because so many readers asked about it over the past few months.  ChargePoint has been a wild rollercoaster of a pick in just a half-year period, it’s been up 30% twice and down more than 30% twice — right now, it’s down 42% (the S&P is down 10% for that same timeframe).    Silvergate Capital, in case you’re wondering, is currently down 89%.

And rounding out our top five was a more thematic pitch, the tease by Dan Ferris at Stansberry’s Extreme Value for his Ten-Stock Inflation Protection Portfolio — some of which was later echoed by his pitch for a five-stock inflation protection portfolio from Stansberry’s lower-cost Stansberry’s Investment Advisory.  We only identified about half of Ferris’ stocks with certainty, most of which were commodity-related — and they mostly spiked up with the Russian invasion of Ukraine a few weeks later.  That led many of them to hold up well versus the market, so there were no big gainers but there were several positions that did well at treading water (Altius Minerals (ALS.TO, ATUSF), Sprott (SII), and the Sprott Physical Gold trust (PHYS) all lost less than 5% if you bought in early February, so they’re holding up better than the market’s 14% loss, though Altius Renewable Royalties (ARR.TO, ATRWF) and Brown & Brown (BRO) have so far done worse than the broad market — interestingly, among the “guesses” I threw out to fill in the other five slots were infrastructure/construction plays Construction Partners (ROAD) and Atkore (ATKR), both of which have done very well in recent months).

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The general sense that “losing less” wins this year, and that we’re clinging to life rafts that would have  bored us to death in prior years, rings true in my personal portfolio, too — I still hold a bunch of technology stocks that have done quite poorly, including large ones like Alphabet (GOOG) and Amazon (AMZN) that I think are very attractive at current levels, as well as some much more speculative ideas that have gotten clobbered, but the biggest winners are pretty sleepy companies — U-Haul (UHAL) has been by far my best new buy this year, and most of the other good news out of my portfolio this year, as of today, comes from the several times I bought more Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-B) or Keysight (KEYS) or Exor (EXO.MO, EXXRF), none of which are going to get anyone’s heart rate up.

So that’s what the year looked like in the pages of Stock Gumshoe… how was yours? Any great ideas or big lessons learned? Feel free to share with a comment below.

And this will be our last note for 2022, so… Happy New Year!  We’ll be back with more teaser solutions and attempts at wisdom and insight next week.

Disclosure:  Of the companies discussed in the article above, I own shares of and/or options on Altius Minerals, Ginkgo Bioworks, U-Haul, Alphabet, Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, Keysight, Exor, and Brown & Brown.  I will not trade in any covered stocks for at least three days, per Stock Gumshoe’s trading rules.