Interest rates will be near zero for three more years now, we expect — that’s the basic takeaway from the Federal Reserve’s press conference this week. So what does that mean? In order to make money to meet their future obligations, retirees and pension funds and other investors have to take more risks. That’s ugly […]
Author Bio
Travis Johnson is an individual investor who founded Stock Gumshoe in 2007 as a way to air his dissections of overhyped marketing pitches... and to share the "secret" stocks that stock newsletters hype to get your attention and your subscription dollars. His thinking? If you already know what the "secret" stock is, you can make a much more reasonable and thoughtful decision about whether or not to commit to an expensive newsletter subscription. (And if you don't pay for the info, you'll be more free to think for yourself about whether or not the investment is worth your money.)
In his charmed life he has been, among other things, a university faculty member, a fundraiser, a writer, and a world-champion ice-cream scooper. Now he runs Stock Gumshoe for you, allowing us all to discuss and dissect the latest overheated stock ideas... as well as review and talk about investment newsletters and enjoy the commentary and opinions of Stock Gumshoe's other special contributors and the discussion with our unusually attractive, erudite and polite readers. He lives with Mrs. Gumshoe and all their little Gumshoes in the wilds of Western Massachusetts.
Author Archives
ed. note: The first version of this article was originally published in September of 2018, when we initially saw these ads rolling. It has been re-circulated several times, most recently because of the attention Jeff Bezos is getting for becoming the wealthiest person in history, so readers are asking again and we’re re-posting the answers […]
This article was originally published about a month ago, on August 20, but there is a new push behind the stock, premised on the idea that “a ferocious short-seller ‘hit piece’” has suppressed the share price — “temporarily,” they believe. So we’re re-publishing our answer here for you, and I’ve added a deeper look into […]
September 15, 2020
What’s Brown’s “Project Xi” All About?
Jeff Brown is out with a new pitch for his entry-level newsletter, The Near Future Report (currently “on sale” for $49/yr, as is typical of his promotions). The ad is all about the potential gains being driven by “Project Xi” … so what’s the big idea, and which stocks are getting the teaser treatment here? […]
I’ve gotten a pile of new questions about Stansberry Venture Value this week, all relating to their pitch for some cloud SaaS stocks — and I found the first pitch about these stocks pretty compelling back in February, and even ended up buying two of them, so I thought it would be worth digging in […]
September 11, 2020
Friday File: “Pre-IPOs” and some Real Money Portfolio updates
My spirits have been lifted a bit in the last week… not so much by the general state of the world (unemployment is horrifying, the pandemic remains scary, politics has sunk even further into the gutter, a big chunk of the world is literally on fire, again), but by the return of some seasonal patterns […]
This article was originally published on April 23, 2020, when we first saw the ads from Paul Mampilly — most recently this has been more aggressively pitched with the idea of the “12 million mile battery,” so we’re re-posting our solution for you. The ad has not changed and is still dated April 2020, and […]
This article was originally posted on August 27, when we first saw these ads circulating… apparently lots of folks missed it, and the ads are running hot and heavy again, so we’re re-posting it here to help answer a flood of new reader questions. The stock teased has popped 40-50% or so on the Stansberry […]
Yesterday it was a long-running but newly urgent (or so they said) pitch from Tom Gardner at the Motley Fool that got my attention… today it’s a piece from their Canadian offspring, as Iain Butler from Motley Fool Canada teases a “next Shopify” company. Here’s how the ad launches: “Not to alarm you, but you’re […]
September 7, 2020
What’s “Motley Fool’s Double Down Stock” Pitched by Tom Gardner?
Lots of readers have asked about this latest ad from the Motley Fool Stock Advisor, so we’re going to dig in and see if we can get a good answer from the Thinkolator… don’t worry, I’ll be quick this time. I promise. Tom Gardner was pitching this last week as a “I’ve decided to do […]
September 4, 2020
Friday File: Overvalued Holds (and a Sell), plus more Video Games
This would have been a good week to take a vacation. Market soaring on Tuesday, market crashing on Thursday, but when we look back on the whole thing it almost evened out — any ebullience we might have felt in the up days was matched by the panic as the market crashed back down on […]
The latest teaser for Divide.com’s Premium service ($149/yr) had a headline that caught my eye: “Discover How Our Latest Best Dividend Pick in Insurance Space Is Thriving in the Pandemic” Who wouldn’t be interested in that, right? The insurance business is under scrutiny and pressure to some degree because of coverage (or lack thereof) for […]
This is an ad I actually haven’t seen, but a couple readers have sent in questions that include some clues, so we’ll try to solve them for you. That means, by the way, that we’re being a little bit unfair — since I haven’t reviewed this full ad, what we’re quoting from is hearsay… it […]
This ad is being circulated again, and sending a lot of questions our way, so I’m re-posting our solution (which first appeared on September 4, 2019) and taking an updated look — the ad itself has not been updated at all, as far as I can tell, but I’ll add my updated thoughts throughout and […]
Today I thought I’d take a look at the latest teaser pitch from Extreme Fortunes, a “no refunds” monthly stock-picking newsletter that they’re currently pricing at $2,995/yr., positioned as the “upgrade” letter from Paul Mampilly’s Profits Unlimited over at Banyan Hill and focused more, they indicate, on smaller-cap stocks. Mampilly, by the way, headlines no […]
Shall we stop for a moment to sing an early “Happy Birthday” for Warren Buffett? He will turn 90 on Sunday. And maybe another surge in Berkshire’s share price will get his fortune up to $90 billion before too long, fingers crossed on that (OK, probably not, he’s giving away his money so quickly that […]
August 26, 2020
What’s that “The Big Long” pitch for a gold miner about?
Here’s the headline of an ad that a few folks have been asking about recently… “The man who made $4 BILLION shorting the housing market in 2008 goes all in on… “THE BIG LONG “This same legend just made an even bigger bet on the crash of 2020… only it’s NOT a short trade. “Instead, […]
August 25, 2020
Small Tech Stock Builds the “Eyes” Behind Self-Driving Vehicles
This pitch is a little bit of a follow-on to the still oft-requested “TaaS” piece by Whitney Tilson — Tilson began teasing his “Transportation as a Service” idea for his Empire Stock Investor newsletter, and some stocks that play on that, in “presentations” that primarily recommended Waymo (a division of Alphabet (GOOG)), Aptiv (APTV) and […]
August 25, 2020
Empire Elite Growth
Upgrade service ($3-5,000/yr) from Empire Financial, this is Abeyta’s long-term “buy and hold” service for small or mid cap growth stocks (he also offers a short-term trading service for generally larger stocks, Empire Elite Trader).
The teaser pitches from Dan Ferris tend to get a lot of attention from Gumshoe readers, both because there aren’t all that many of them and because the big Stansberry marketing machine sometimes pushes them pretty hard… and I have a lot of sympathy with Ferris’ general “value investing” strategy, and do sometimes find his […]
Recent Author Comments
Posted on September 20, 2020
Posted on September 20, 2020
I last wrote substantively about that here: https://www.stockgumshoe.com/2020/07/friday-file-music-royalties-swedish-betting-and-gold-speculation/[...]
Posted on September 20, 2020
CHWY options trade like any other, and January 2023 LEAP options just rolled out this month. If you have options trading permission from your broker, you should see an "option chain" for the stock in your brokerage platform, you can just find the strike p[...]
Posted on September 20, 2020
It's in the article above.[...]
Posted on September 19, 2020
Well put.[...]
Posted on September 19, 2020
Great comment and really helpful perspective, thanks![...]
Posted on September 18, 2020
Good news, now to see if Amazon’s product introductions next week fire a shot across Roku’s bow....[...]
Posted on September 18, 2020
Most of these businesses don't look so great once you actually read the offering filings, and I think the growth for "me too" cannabis companies is very uncertain -- these two don't look like firms that have a real advantage to me. But beyond that, my d[...]
Posted on September 18, 2020
The shares are partially locked up, but an unusual number of them are freed up for immediate selling -- 15% of the insider shares can be sold in the next two weeks if they wish, and another 15% over the next three months. We'll see whether that puts sell[...]
Posted on September 17, 2020
I wrote about that one here, I suspect it's still the same ad running a few months later: https://www.stockgumshoe.com/reviews/lou-baseneses-trend-trader/whats-baseneses-hands-down-perfect-2-stock-for-5g/[...]
Posted on September 17, 2020
Didn't look into it, given my complete lack of interest in Teeka's pitch about these -- but according to lots of other folks who've written in to me, that's their consensus.[...]
Posted on September 17, 2020
It depends on what you mean by “pre-IPO” — people buy and sell chunks of private companies all the time, like friends investing in your new restaurant, and most of those never become publicly traded companies. In the past few years, the SEC has mad[...]
Posted on September 17, 2020
Well, then I guess he'll stop peppering us with the ad... what a relief! Just kidding. Thanks for the feedback![...]
Posted on September 17, 2020
Fell about 5% on the short attack on August 26th, then recovered immediately... then a week later, when they announced their fundraising, a dip of about 25% began before recovering about a third of that dip more recently.[...]
Posted on September 17, 2020
I'm putting together my thoughts on GAN, and will share today or tomorrow once I've made a decision, but in terms of the price action I suspect it's mostly that the "day trading" enthusiasm for the shares drove them much more than I expected in their early[...]
Posted on September 17, 2020
Sorry, we’ll get the contact page back up shortly — in the meantime, ILoveStockSpam@gmail.com works[...]
Posted on September 16, 2020
Neither yet. Thinking. I’ll let you know when I decide.[...]
Posted on September 16, 2020
That happens very regularly with stop losses of any size — you have to be able to handle that if you want to stick to a stop loss discipline.[...]
Posted on September 16, 2020
Last time I wrote anything substantive about Tiptree was here, about a month ago: https://www.stockgumshoe.com/2020/08/friday-file-mostly-boring-real-estate-stuff-this-week-sorry/ -- no particularly meaningful company news since then, though they have pres[...]
Posted on September 16, 2020
Not offhand. It got to be a day-trading favorite so volatility is certainly higher than it was six months ago.[...]
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I still own PAR and have written about it Many times — latest articles are at the top of this page: https://www.stockgumshoe.com/tag/par-technology/[...]