Now that we’re about a third of the way through 2023, I checked back on the 2022 spreadsheets… and it’s looking like all is kind of right with the world: Teaser stocks are back to being, on average, lousy investments, after slightly beating the averages for a while during the 2021 excitement.

There are some winners, as always, we’ve got two or three stocks that are beating the S&P 500 by 100% or more, and there are a couple dozen that are beating the S&P pretty meaningfully (by at least 10%)… but as has typically been true over the past 16 years that we’ve been tracking these investments, less than a quarter of the teaser picks are beating the market… and if you bought every stock that we covered which was teased in 2022, in equal amounts, you’d currently be losing 18%, while those who bought an S&P index fund on those same dates would be almost exactly breaking even as of today.

So far, the worst one that wasn’t yet eligible for our Turkey of the Year piece at Thanksgiving was the “Liquid Energy” pitch from Nomi Prins for ESS Tech (GWH), which is down 80-90% since we covered it in early October… and the worst overall is still Jeff Siegel’s “Spray on Solar” pitch that made the rounds again last summer (we’ve been covering WNDW as a pretty wildly “overpromised” story stock idea SINCE 2010, though it has changed names and tickers a couple times — pretty remarkably, about a third of the teaser stocks we covered back in 2008 or 2009 don’t even really exist any more, having changed dramatically or delisted or gone bankrupt or been acquired… and for that matter, many of those newsletters we covered back in 2009 don’t exist any more, either).

You can see always see our teaser tracking spreadsheets here. Don’t worry, 2023 sheets will be coming soon… we’re a little behind schedule, but need to get a reasonable amount of data into them before we post the spreadsheet.

It’s a relief that we’re all above average, no?

*****

So… what else is going on this week? A few relatively minor notes to get us started…

Illumina (ILMN) got another rejection from regulators, with the FTC ordering it to “undo” its acquisition of Grail. Illumina is appealing the decision, of course, but it’s wild to me that they chose ...