This isn’t really about a new teaser pitch, but I’ve had lots of readers ask what’s going on with the flurry of changes at Palm Beach Research and MarketWise recently… so if you’re interested in that bit of publisher crisis, stick with me for a few minutes and I’ll share my perspective, a little back story, and some opinion.

If that sounds miserably boring, you’re probably right… and there’s no Quick Take this time, sorry, it’s all a little too complicated for me to summarize in a paragraph… but have no fear, we’ll be back to covering stocks before you know it.

Every year or two, we get another reminder of how shady some of the folks in the newsletter and “investment advice” industry are — sometimes even the high profile folks who REALLY should know better, and were good enough at selling themselves to investors and building their personal brands that they probably could have made tons of money just by continuing to do their coloring inside the lines… but couldn’t resist grabbing for those extra dollars.

Here’s the first part of the press release from the Department of Justice that got this all rolling last week…

Feb. 5: “LOS ANGELES – Federal criminal charges were filed today against an analyst for a newsletter promoting unregistered securities and over-the-counter stocks, his money-laundering associate, and the CEO of a Beverly Hills company, all of whom participated in a bribery scheme in which leaders of various companies paid more than $4.2 million in undisclosed compensation to have their stocks touted by the newsletter.”

There were several folks named in that press release, but the one who really catches the eye if you’re a newsletter follower was Jonathan William Mikula, because he was an analyst for Palm Beach Research and worked with Teeka Tiwari on Palm Beach Venture, a newsletter whose over-the-top promotions of unlisted investments we covered from time to time.

Here’s a little more from the press release:

“From December 2019 to August 2022, in exchange for Mikula touting certain securities issuances through ‘Palm Beach Venture,’ Beri and others provided Mikula and Fernandez with both cash payments as well as undisclosed, indirect compensation, including lavish meals, beverages, and other illicit entertainment….

“The conspiracy allowed some of its participants to raise tens of millions of dollars in investor funds through securities offerings described and promoted by ‘Palm Beach Venture’ without required disclosures that such promotions had been obtained via direct and indirect payments to Mikula.

“For example, in March 2020, Mikula caused to be published an article in ‘Palm Beach Venture’ entitled, “Curing Incurable Diseases and Giving Us Over 4,900% Potential Gains.” The article touted Emerald Health Pharmaceuticals (EHP), a San Diego-based life sciences company and falsely stated that neither the newsletter nor its affiliates had received compensation and that ‘as publishers of financial information, we make general recommendations based on our own analysis.’ In fact, negotiations were underway between EHP, Beri, Mikula, and Fernandez toward concealed payments in exchange for the article.

“In total, Mikula, Fernandez, Beri and others received more than $4.2 million in undisclosed and misrepresented payments as well as hundreds of thousands of dollars of compensation in the form of undisclosed entertainment and illicit services.”

And the somewhat more legalese-y summary in the docket:

“According to the allegations in the charges, and knowing that placement within and promotion by an investor newsletter called Palm Beach Venture permitted securities issuers to reach additional investors and raise additional funds, and knowing that Palm Beach Venture would make the materially misleading representation that neither it “nor its affiliates receive compensation for bringing this deal to you,” defendant Mikula agreed with his codefendants and others to write and place articles and other promotional pieces regarding the securities of specific issuers on the understanding and agreement that such issuers and their associates would pay undisclosed direct and indirect compensation to him, defendants Fernandez and Beri, and others.”

This isn’t really a new scandal, but the criminal part and the Department of Justice are clearly a bigger deal than the SEC enforcement action against these same folks, for roughly the same behavior, over the past couple years.  We’ve talked a little about that SEC action over the past year, and Emerald Health specifically was under the microscope before that, but it’s good to see these kickbacks and bribery scams come further into the light.  Here’s what I said in a Friday File back in May, when the SEC charges were getting attention:

That strikes me as a huge black eye for Palm Beach, part of the MarketWise group, though many of the publishing houses have experienced similar black eyes… and it’s a flashback to the bad old days of newsletters (which are still with us, though to a more limited extent), when those who sold newsletters also rented out their own name as a spokesperson for shady penny stocks, particularly when their “real” newsletters died on the vine but they still had a “name brand” reputation among investors that they could use for promotions.

This time around it’s private company fundraising deals, which are always a little murky, but it certainly looks ugly for on-camera spokespeople like Teeka Tiwari and others, who like to think they’re above such things, that the pundits and researchers and analysts at Palm Beach might have been taking kickbacks for pushing half-informed newsletter subscribers into terrible deals to invest in private companies. And really, maybe the named principals that we’re familiar with, like Tiwari, should catch more blame than he has this time — the fact that Palm Beach was involved with Mikula at all, given his past run-ins with the SEC, and that apparently Tiwari relied on him to identify private investments is pretty ridiculous, and reminds us to be cynical of pitchmen in general. It is hard to believe that Teeka didn’t realize how shady these private companies and their promoters were, though, to be fair, I don’t really know how involved he was, or if he knew about the kickbacks, and he isn’t named in the complaint. Hopefully he has at least made some personal apologies to any Palm Beach Venture folks who got sucked into some terrible private fundraisings over the past few years.

I don’t know whether such apologies were made, but I’d guess not.  So many of the “buy into this private pre-IPO deal” promos over the past few years were so light on facts, and so misleading, that I wonder how many more of them might have been genuinely criminal, especially in those first years of Reg A deals when “little folks” could get in on these private “pre-IPO” placements and similar deals through crowdvesting platforms.  One thing that “private investing” and “crowdvesting” and cryptocurrencies have in common is that they’re much more lightly followed and overseen by regulators (and other entities, like the stock exchange and large brokerage houses) than “regular” investments in equities and bonds, and therefore it has probably been a lot easier to scam people with “too good to be true” promotions without getting noticed…  though bribes and kickbacks and “pump and dump” schemes have certainly surfaced in listed securities many times over the years, too.

This is what I said about the deal that the Justice Department mentions as an example of their misconduct, as part of my coverage of that teaser for Emerald Health Pharmaceuticals from Teeka Tiwari back in September of 2020…

“I thought I’d delve a little bit into Teeka Tiwari’s goofy ‘Pre-IPO’ pitch for you today — he promoted a ‘Set For Life Summit’ teleconference this week that was an infomercial for his Palm Beach Venture newsletter ($2,500/yr, no refunds), and in that ‘presentation’ he talked up the whole idea of private pre-IPO investing and, more specifically, the first biotech stock that he is recommending as a private pre-IPO buy, which must be Emerald Health Pharmaceuticals.

“I don’t get the appeal, frankly — yes, there is the marginal hope for some moonshot potential, but they don’t have any human efficacy data at all yet for their drugs, and raising money from small investors before they get that data seems pretty sketchy. I don’t speculate on early-stage biotechs in general, personally, but if I did I would generally avoid those that are attached to Avtar Dhillon. (And in many ways, frankly, the small private companies that are trying hardest to raise money from individual investors… are often the ones that are least appealing as investments.)”

It seemed to be a crappy deal even if the newsletter and the company weren’t colluding to scam investors, though we didn’t yet know about the bribes and kickbacks at the time… or about the reports of Teeka Tiwari having a “consulting deal” on the side that meant he received compensation from other entities which owned the stocks (or cryptocurrencies) he was covering four times, according to Porter’s letter to MarketWise employees this week.

And that was an eye-opening bit of news, since it had previously seemed like Teeka was spared that legal attention that fell on others following those initial SEC investigations in 2021 and 2022, and maybe he wasn’t part of the criminal behavior, but he has now at least been clearly and publicly tarred by his (now former) employer for that “conflict of interest” over recommendations he made to subscribers (Porter didn’t say which recommendations were conflicted).   The shadiness of those deals emerged fairly slowly, given the rotational velocity of the wheels of justice, but within a year or so after that Emerald Health promo was running, Avtar Dhillon was charged by the SEC for his role in a “pump and dump” scheme related to a company that Tiwari and Mikula had apparently recommended, and the SEC charged Dhillon and these same folks (Mikula et al, but not Teeka Tiwari) for behavior around some of those same deals another year after that.

And while Porter’s letter says that J. William Mikula was fired by Palm Beach/MarketWise before the SEC charges were brought in 2022, as a result of concerns raised by other employees, he was an analyst and writer for Palm Beach for years (it looks like he was working for them starting in 2014 or so, which is also roughly when Teeka Tiwari started working with that publisher, through at least most of 2021), and for some time he was, in Porter Stansberry’s words, “surreptitiously receiving large payments for recommending low-quality stocks to subscribers of Palm Beach Venture, while claiming falsely that his work was independent.”  And that was all many years after Mikula was accused by the SEC of running Ponzi scheme in 2007, then being a “recidivist securities law violator” in 2008, so somebody didn’t do much of a background check when he was hired… or didn’t care about the violations.

Being blocked from working in regulated financial roles does not keep you out of the financial newsletter business, which Tiwari also knows — he started his professional life as a stockbroker, and worked at a dozen little brokerage firms over the course of a decade or so before being barred by FINRA from acting as a broker or associating with a broker-dealer (a couple of those little brokerage firms he worked for, usually for 6-9 months at a time, also got shut down over the years).   Ironically, the FINRA allegations were somewhat similar to what Porter said he did at Palm Beach, conflict-of-interest side deals… in this case, soliciting customers to buy private securities outside of his brokerage firm’s oversight and not telling the firm.  Tiwari did not admit or deny the allegations, he just consented to the sanctions in 2005, and I guess not long after that he started working in newsletters, first at Tycoon Publishing, which eventually merged into Agora, and then later with Stansberry veteran Tom Dyson at Common Sense Publishing, which started publishing the Palm Beach Letter around 2011 and later became Palm Beach Research Group.

I don’t know a lot about Mikula, other than seeing his past SEC transgressions and noting that his byline popped up in Palm Beach emails from time to time, but he did have a pretty high profile for a while at that publisher — he certainly penned some promotional articles about Teeka’s other “private deals,” including the one that Teeka (and Mikula) did on location in Brazil to promote Brazil Potash.  I don’t know if that deal involved bribes and kickbacks to get them to sell the idea to their Palm Beach Venture subscribers or not, that particular name has not come up in charges that I’ve seen, but I wouldn’t blame you for being a bit suspicious. Brazil Potash still exists as a company, by the way, and they’re still trying to get their potential mine permitted, though the folks who participated in that private fundraising that Teeka championed are still just essentially locked into their shares for the foreseeable future, and Brazil Potash is again trying to raise money through another private placement now… there’s no obvious sign of the company going public or getting bought out anytime soon. [Correction: that’s not true, I mixed up Sky Quarry, which is again trying to raise money, with Brazil Potash, which is not currently raising money, apologies… I mention Sky Quarry a little further down in this article]

Given the amount of lousy and scummy behavior you can legally get up to in the world of investment publishing, as long as you disclose how scummy you’re being and don’t care about your subscribers, I’m always still a little surprised (naively, perhaps) when people push it this far.  And yes, I know that we’re not talking about a conviction here for Mikula… maybe nobody’s actually guilty of anything criminal (other than the guilt they’ve already admitted to the SEC), but it sure sounds terrible, and looks bad.  Which is probably at least part of the reason why Porter and the rest of MarketWise management are burning it down.

Here’s a little more from Porter’s letter to MarketWise employees (which was released in an 8-K, since MarketWise is a public company and the closure of Legacy Research, which was home to roughly 1/5th of MarketWise employees, is clearly “material”):

“Following the SEC’s charges against Mikula, the company learned that Teeka Tiwari had a consulting agreement with DeFi Technologies Inc, a company owned in part by a Canadian merchant bank, which was also involved in Mikula’s activities. Whether Tiwari knew of Mikula’s fraudulent actions or not, it was a violation of Tiwari’s contract and of company policy for him to receive compensation from anyone that owned shares in companies Tiwari was recommending to Legacy Research’s subscribers – something that happened on four occasions.

“Unfortunately, even after learning of Tiwari’s violations, Legacy Research’s senior managers neither terminated him nor took any steps to alert Legacy’s subscribers about this very serious breach of our company’s most important ethical standard.”

So apparently being under the auspices of the largest financial publisher around, and a publicly traded one at that, wasn’t enough to keep all the Palm Beach folks on the straight and narrow — Palm Beach Venture stopped being promoted a while ago, perhaps in connection to this Mikula stuff, though it was mentioned in the “annual report card” grades given out last week by Palm Beach’s parent, Legacy Research Group, so I guess it still existed in some fashion, at least before Legacy Research is wound down over the next few months.  The last Palm Beach Venture promo I covered was in the Spring of 2022, when Tiwari was pitching a pretty silly-sounding company called Sky Quarry that he said was as an oil company which could challenge Russia’s dominance — no sign that Mikula was involved in that one (Legacy Research Report Card here: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3, if you want to see the details — seems a bit of a shame that they did all that “grading” work just before starting to shut down operations.)

After skimming through those report cards, one might also conclude that closing down Legacy Research and most of its publications isn’t all that much of a hardship for the parent — it looks like performance was pretty weak for many of the larger Legacy/Rogue/Palm Beach products, even though they made the unusual move of starting the “grading period” for their self-evaluation at the market lows in 2022 (newsletters are typically levered to the market, in my experience — the “growth and hype” letters, which is where most of the entry-level interest usually is, probably outperform in great years and underperform in terrible years).   And as a financial matter, it sounds like the Legacy Research division didn’t make much money for MarketWise in 2023, either, though I’m sure they raked it in back in 2021.  (Porter’s letter says Legacy had about $9 million in net income in the second half of 2023 — we don’t have MKTW financials for the full year yet, and it was likely declining in the second half of last year anyway, but the trailing twelve months net income for the full company was about $80 million as of September).

It’s hard to consistently pick good stocks, of course, and to manage risk for subscribers if you take on that task, so everyone who does so publicly ends up with poor performance at least some of the time, if you’re using fair yardsticks… I’ve certainly had plenty of terrible investments in the past, too, and some bad years. But I will confess that I experience a little shiver of schadenfreude whenever I see the newsletter guys start getting snippy with each other. We’ve seen the first salvos of that this time around, and the very public PR disaster for the biggest publisher will probably lead to more of that… maybe time to start making that popcorn.

Matt McCall was dropped by Stansberry Research several months ago (after previously being hired away from Investorplace, which Stansberry had previously acquired — this was before MarketWise was born and the company went public in its SPAC merger, the conglomerate had a couple different names along the way), and you can read between the lines to find the “why” of McCall’s departure if you check out one of the letters that Porter Stansberry wrote to MarketWise and its shareholders last year, when he was very publicly criticizing many things about the folks who he thought stole his company from him as part of the awful SPAC merger that took MKTW public… here’s what he said about McCall then:

“Matt McCall’s MegaTrend Investor has a win rate of 5% — that is, 95% of the time investors taking his advice lost money. His annualized return was just shy of negative 60%. Virtually every investment he recommended lost almost all of the investors’ money. Did any of you see his flying car promo? McCall thought that flying cars were such a good idea for investors that he led a promotion with the idea. What happens when you lose money for your readers 70% of the time? They cancel and they never buy from you again.”

And he was equally critical of McCall on Twitter at that time, too…

When I ran our partnership, we didn’t ever publish anything we didn’t fully believe in or anyone who didn’t match our values. How about today? You think Matt Mccall’s flying cars and crypto is worthy of my brand?

— Porter Stansberry (@porterstansb) February 2, 2023

(Porter previously wrote a letter to MarketWise in January of 2023, highlighting some of the other missteps the company had made since he left… including buying out the firm of another Agora Financial guy who had been fined by the FTC for defrauding investors.)

But I do love the back and forth, even when they’re a little subtle about it… McCall is planning to launch his own publishing house, looks like he’ll call it NXT Wave Research, and this was his smirky response to the DOJ press release this week:

This can’t be good for your share price!!!!

Stock Newsletter Analyst, Beverly Hills Executive, and Money Launderer Charged with Conspiring to Tout Securities in Exchange for Money https://t.co/TBfHKlqlWO

— Matt McCall (@MatthewMcCall) February 12, 2024

If that criteria, “don’t publish anything we don’t fully believe in,” is going to stand for all of the MarketWise publications, not just the stuff which is attached to the Stansberry name specifically and carries his brand, like McCall’s letters which were published by Stansberry Research, then perhaps we’ll see Porter use this restructuring as another reason to swing the axe more aggressively.  We know that Legacy Research division is being shut down, but don’t know yet if any of the pundits will be kept on under different imprints.

If you’re wondering whether this will hit any subscriptions you’ve had, they published a lot of less-promoted stuff, and there are some trading services under the Legacy Research name, but for the most part Legacy Research Group is made up of three subsidiaries:  Rogue Economics; Palm Beach Research, and Brownstone Research.  That’s more than a dozen fairly high-profile newsletters which will either be moved, absorbed into some existing MarketWise product, or just disappeared.

Kris Sayce is the guy in charge at Legacy Research at the moment, and has been an Agora newsletter guy for a long time, initially helming a bunch of Australian newsletters for them (we covered a few of his Aussie teasers from 2009-2014, and he got in trouble with Aussie regulators at least once, too, according to this 2020 story).  He has been Editor-in-Chief of Legacy Research since 2019 and calls himself “Publisher” now, this is how he described the situation it in his email to Palm Beach subscribers this week (if he’s held that “Publisher” title since 2019, then maybe he’s on his way out now, too, for not cracking down on Teeka earlier — or perhaps he was a battlefield promotion this week and is expected to be part of the solution, I guess we’ll find out in due time):

“This is the most serious breach of the trust you and your fellow subscribers place in us.

“For these reasons, we parted ways with Teeka and are working on finding an alternative to the publications you’ve been receiving.”

None of this is really new, this has always been an “easy come, easy go” industry where the failing letters or pundits are quietly canned and the publishers often forget about the “lifetime” promises they made and just scooch paid subscribers over to products that they hadn’t chosen (many publishers like to sell “lifetime” subscriptions as if they’re attached to a prominent name they’ve built up as the world’s best investor, and those lifetime or package deals are the most profitable things MarketWise sells, that’s the ultimate target of the marketing funnel into which every email address is poured… but in reality most of those subscriptions are to a title, or to a publisher, with no promises made about who will write those publications… and they tend to stick to their “no refunds” policies, though hopefully MarketWise will do right by all the Palm Beach and other subscribers who are impacted in the coming months). Turnover is constant in newsletters, and prominent pundits are fired or quit every year, with subscribers shifted around to try to keep people reasonably happy, but is certainly unusual to see this much turnover, this fast, at the biggest publisher.

And like I said, business was already pretty rough at a lot of publishers… so some of this was probably already coming, frankly, with Porter Stansberry back at the helm, even if Teeka Tiwari hadn’t been caught breaking the rules and his bosses hadn’t fumbled their response.  Porter was always pretty decisive in shutting down unsuccessful products in the past (like Matt McCall and Empire Financial last year, or Frank Curzio a few years before that, and many more over the past 20 years — and for the most part “unsuccessful” probably means “can’t recruit enough subscribers,” not “has a poor stock-picking performance”)… but this Palm Beach Venture scandal seems to have turned the regular culling of underperformers into a St. Valentine’s Day massacre in Baltimore and Delray Beach.

So… who’s on the way out?  We don’t know for sure, but some folks we write about quite a bit are published by that Legacy Research division of MarketWise…

The headliner at Rogue Economics is Nomi Prins, though they did also just bring on Chris Weber, who has run a newsletter independently for decades and was briefly pretty well known as a whiz-kid investor in the mid-2000s, and a year or so ago they brought on Brad Thomas, who had a SeekingAlpha following as a REIT guru, and promoted his income-focused investments quite aggressively.   Rogue certainly promoted the heck out of Prins’ entry-level newsletter over the past few years, too, but given the grade Legacy Research gave her, I doubt many of her new subscribers were very impressed.  She’s still got a brand name as an economist and author, and as a bit of a libertarian touchstone among the folks who love to hate the Federal Reserve, so perhaps they can continue to sell her using politics, much like Paradigm Press does with James Rickards, but she probably wasn’t making the stock picks herself, anyway (just as Rickards probably isn’t), so I don’t imagine we’ll see the analysts who worked under her becoming newsletter stars anytime soon.

I don’t know anything about the other folks at Rogue… and the folks who I think Prins might fit in best with, like Rickards, James Altucher and Ray Blanco over at Paradigm Press, don’t seem to be directly connected to MarketWise (though Paradigm used to be called Agora Financial, and Bill Bonner’s massive Agora network of financial publishers launched Stansberry Research 20 years ago and owned part of it).  No official word yet on whether any of those Rogue letters or pundits will continue to be published by MarketWise under a different imprint or title, and the website hasn’t changed yet.

Palm Beach was already down to being mostly Teeka Tiwari, whose name has already been erased from their website with this belated firing, and my impression is that publisher had become pretty overwhelmingly focused on cryptocurrencies in recent years.  Some of their other analysts have been around for long enough that I recognize their names, like Sam Volkering, but I’d say the Palm Beach brand is really all about Teeka and cryptos… so given Porter’s statements, it would be a little surprising if many of the Palm Beach pundits and analysts stay with MarketWise, but we’ll see.  The only publication that has so far disappeared from the Palm Beach website is Palm Beach Venture, though that happened well before this latest Department of Justice announcement.   Teeka’s byline pretty much stopped appearing in the free publications at Palm Beach on February 1, though I don’t know if his paid newsletters have been going out over the past couple weeks or not.  I would guess that the Palm Beach subscribers will be moved to existing Stansberry or Investorplace products (Luke Lango, Whitney Tilson, Eric Wade’s crypto stuff, etc.), but those subscribers will probably find out before I do.

Brownstone Research used to be made up of Jeff Brown’s newsletters, he was a hot ticket tech-stock guru for a few years, but after a terrible year of performance in 2022, Brown and Brownstone had an “amicable parting,” and when he left it essentially became the Colin Tedards show… no idea whether those tech-focused letters will survive, or if Tedards will move to another nameplate, that probably depends on whether or not the Brownstone letters were making money for MarketWise, but the two main letters, Exponential Tech Investor and The Near Future Report, did OK during the tech boom of the past year or so, not keeping up with the Nasdaq 100 but not terrible.  Not a peep out of Brownstone yet about what will happen to their subscribers.

I imagine the “trading” services under Legacy Research, from Larry Benedict and Jack Clark, will probably survive in some fashion if they were selling OK, they got good grades by the publisher… but those are generally short-term trading and options trading services that I don’t write much about, and I don’t know how they benchmark those or how real-world subscribers would have done.

MarketWise Founder and CEO Porter Stansberry didn’t immediately speak publicly about this at the beginning of the week, beyond his letter to MarketWise employees (and indirectly, investors) that was filed with the SEC.  Should be an interesting time, I wonder if he knew what he was getting himself into when he fought his way back into leadership to try to fix the company and protect his brand and rescue the value of his shares.  Might be a heavy lift from him for a while, but I do at least admire him for finally doing the right thing with Teeka Tiwari and trying to follow that up by clearing out the other folks who created that culture of accepting impropriety from a headliner, even if the company acted way too slowly… and even if this probably made a lot of Teeka fans and subscribers angry, though hopefully the publisher will do right for all those subscribers.

And yes, Tiwari’s promotions were always absurd… but I’m sure that Teeka’s actual newsletters were probably a lot more sober than his marketing pieces — I haven’t seen those letters, but that’s true of most newsletter guys.  And I’m sure he had a lot of real fans among his subscribers, who may well not care about his conflict-of-interest consulting deals, since as a mostly-crypto guy he probably had some hugely successful recommendations (and some terrible ones too, of course… I don’t know his track record, but he did recommend Ethereum and Bitcoin back in 2016 for Palm Beach Letter subscribers, so those were massive winners for anyone who held on, and anyone who has been active in recommending cryptocurrencies over the past five years should have a bunch of 1,000% gains that would have pleased at least some of their subscribers).

I’m guessing that Stansberry’s return to MarketWise as CEO hasn’t been as fun as the work he did last year with his much smaller Porter & Co. Dealing with closing down several publications and re-homing or firing 100+ employees can’t be fun, let alone facing the ire of other shareholders as the MKTW stock price drops, and I’m sure this will lead to a lot of annoying long meetings with lawyers, too.  Maybe that makes you smile… I know plenty of people hate Porter, who seems to cultivate a controversial persona as part of his brand, and people often tell me that Porter was essentially convicted by Netflix of killing one of his friends. I’ve been quite critical of many of his over-the-top promotional pitches over the years (he was the pioneer behind those interminable “presentation” videos, for which I’m not sure we can ever forgive him, even if he is a great storyteller when he gets into financial history)… but I actually mostly like the guy and think he’s pretty genuine in person, I haven’t watched the Netflix show about his friend’s death, I thought the SEC overstepped in its case against Porter 20 years ago (as did many other publishers and first amendment advocates, including the AP and the NY Times), and I often find his investment recommendations interesting and rational when I write about them.  Your opinion may well differ, of course.

(My Disclosures? I’ve only communicated with Porter a few times in person, and went to Baltimore to meet with him once about 15 years ago, but that’s more than I’ve interacted with most newsletter folks on a personal level — and to be clear about my conflict of interest, I ended up on the Stansberry Research Christmas list for a brief while and he sent me a couple good bottles of wine about ten years ago, which I drank and enjoyed, to the best of my recollection. I’m sure Stansberry Research and other MarketWise publications have advertised on Stock Gumshoe from time to time, too, though that’s probably true of many of the newsletter publishers we write about — we outsource the ad management for our website and email newsletter to a broker and to Google, to avoid dealing directly with publishers or implying that we pick and choose among them when it comes to our ad space).

The merry-go-round never seems to really stop in financial publishing, and probably Teeka Tiwari and any other targets of this culling will find a place to land eventually, too — Tiwari has been mostly selling crypto ideas in recent years, an audience that is probably used to conflicts of interest and doesn’t seem bothered by it in the search for lottery ticket winnings, and he continues to be fairly active on Twitter, and already has his own website that will undoubtedly become a home for whatever publications he decides to sell in the future.  Salesmen always end up selling, and people who cultivate a personal brand in the financial world always seem to land on their feet eventually.

If you’ve subscribed to any of those Legacy Research letters and have been told what will happen to your subscription, feel free to share any details in the comments below… we’ll try to keep track of the ongoing reorganization, and which pundits we’ve followed end up with new homes.