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Travis Johnson, Stock Gumshoe

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

I’m getting this Friday File out to you a little earlier than usual, because I’m bringing one of my kids to Detroit for the first Lions home playoff game in 30 years (well, I’m trying to bring him, at least… crossing my fingers that the weather allows planes to land in Detroit tomorrow). The city […]

This article was originally published on September 18, when we first saw this Teeka Tiwari ad circulating… it is still in very heavy rotation, and still has a “September 2023” date, so the ad has not been updated. What follows has also not been updated, but questions are still rolling in so hopefully this will […]

Here’s the lead-in from an ad for Nick Hodge’s Foundational Profits ($199/yr) that a few readers asked me about this week, his latest subject line for these ads was, “The Little-Known Mining Stock Everyone Wants”: “The ‘King-Maker’ of Lithium Has Already Made Me and My Readers 582% Gains “Now It’s Time to Think Even Bigger…. […]

January… ’tis the season for forecasting, and for planning… which means it’s the best time of the year to pretend you know what’s going to happen. Or better yet, to argue with other people on CNBC about what you’re sure is going to happen. And that means we should note, if for no other reason […]

Entry-level investment newsletter from Manward Press, with a monthly investment idea and further commentary now based on “the latest opportunities within Manward’s proprietary Modern Asset Portfolio (MAP).” Gilani took over and revamped the newsletter strategy in late 2023 when Manward founder Andrew Snyder left, so this is very different from the previous Manward Letter which […]

And now it’s time to give some credit where it’s due… what were the most successful teaser picks of 2023? 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 […]

Every year we highlight the “Turkey of the Year” at Thanksgiving time, calling attention to the worst performing teaser stock picks of the previous twelve months… so it only seems fair to highlight the best picks, too, and that’s what this time of year is all about… between Christmas and New Year’s Day, when Stock […]

This is how a recent ad from Louis Navellier begins… “For the First Time in Over 40 Years… “Wall Street’s ‘King of Quants’ Reveals His Secret $6 BILLION AI Blueprint “‘If you apply my “Secret Blueprint” to the red-hot AI market, the next 12 months could be extremely lucrative… even if you’ve only got $500 […]

Motley Fool Canada is selling their version of the “bundle” that so many newsletter publishers push — they call theirs Market Pass ($799 first year, renews at $999), and it includes access to the North-of-the-border versions of Stock Advisor, Rule Breakers, Hidden Gems, Everlasting Stocks and a Canada-only publication called Dividend Investor. But what caught […]

Here’s the lead-in for the latest ad from Tim Plaehn’s Dividend Hunter ($79/yr): “In the summer of 2014, I quietly recommended 3 no-name dividend stocks to a small group of retired folks… “A decade later… these 3 stocks generated $671,727 of dividends inside an average IRA portfolio “TODAY — I’m releasing a new set of […]

Recent Author Comments

On Thursday File: A Buy and a Sell before Good Friday

Sorry about that. I bumped it up by about 15%[...]

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On Friday File: NVIDIA by the Fingernails, Gold (and other shiny things), Energy Storage and more...

Glad you were smarter than I was about LLY, never ended up buying it myself.I think Fluence is in decent shape, assuming things go well with the Diablo liability and the new plant, I just don't have a good handle on the business or what the value sho[...]

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On What's Lashmet's "Hunger Switch" Stock?

Simple for some, not so simple for everybody.[...]

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On What's Lashmet's "Hunger Switch" Stock?

That's been a hot story of late, lots of folks were excited about their early stage oral GLP-1 results.[...]

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On Friday File: NVIDIA by the Fingernails, Gold (and other shiny things), Energy Storage and more...

Haven't ever owned that one or analyzed it very closely, but if we do get a manic market in gold I'd assume that the big and profitable gold miners should soar higher. Barrick seems to be a fine operator, it's just that mining is a pretty lousy b[...]

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On Microblog: New class of medicines could earn you an absolute fortune (Jeff Siegel's Claim)

The various GLP-1s are certainly being pushed by a bunch of newsletters, and have been for a year or two, but Siegel's latest pitch is for a return of the pschedelics stocks... wrote about that today: https://www.stockgumshoe.com/reviews/green-chip-stocks/[...]

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On Microblog: Bitcoin Challenger

Haven't seen that one, but I'll look for it... thanks![...]

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On Microblog: 75 Billion $ patent Anyone familiar with this recent pitch by Future Retirement Success?

That sounds like yet another repeat of the Dylan Jovine/Behind the Markets tease of Editas, an ad we've been seeing for about six years now. I haven't noticed any recent updates to that spiel, but I last covered it here: https://www.stockgumshoe.com/revie[...]

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On Microblog: The number one Tech Stock of the Decade --Ross Givens

That's an ad which has been running since mid-2022 -- we covered it most recently here: https://www.stockgumshoe.com/reviews/stealth-trades/de-tease-gen-z-stock-could-be-worth-trillions-from-ross-givens-whats-the-1-tech-stock-of-the-decade/[...]

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On What's King's "The Next Gen Coin?" Tease says "Musk, Dalio and Cuban Are Loading Up"

Most of those pitches for Ethereum which said you can buy for as little as $20 were actually teasing the Grayscale Ethereum Trust (ETHE), which has often been below $20... but the price of a cryptocurrency is even more irrelevant than the price of a stock.[...]

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On Hiral Ghelani's "Top AI Stock for 2024"

Glad to hear it! Back then I was saying that I could justify buying Palantir up to $13-15 or so... too bad I didn't bite on that advice myself.[...]

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On Friday File: Berkshire Valuation, "Mystery" Insurance, and a new Energy position

Thanks for the update... good luck to you! The altcoins mostly just scare me, I have a hard time investing in anything that I can make a financial argument about, since it means I don't have anything to hold on to on days when they're going down... but th[...]

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On Reveal: Lichtenfeld's "10,000% Dividend" Strange Oil Investment -- what's his "#1 Oil and Gas Royalty for Huge Monthly Income?""

Most of them are publicly traded partnerships or trusts, I don't know if there are any exceptions among the royalty companies but there might be (there are exceptions in pipeline world, I think Kinder Morgan and OneOK are both corporations now... and the E[...]

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On Friday File: NVIDIA by the Fingernails, Gold (and other shiny things), Energy Storage and more...

We'll see how it goes -- SAND definitely has more explosive potential, given the valuation and their growth prospects over the next few years... but the risk is pretty high with yet more Hod Maden challenges and their debt burden, particularly if gold drop[...]

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On What's Porter's Controversial "A.I. Keystone?"

Yes, Karin Rahemtulla has used the nuclear angle in some of his Rolls-Royce promos over the past year or so.Haven't checked, did the UK govt ever fund their small reactor project? That was the initial hope, though all these SMR projects take forever.[...]

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On Sleep: Order and Disorder

re: Travel, mine is small enough to be easy to travel with, comes with a carry case. Still annoying, but the travel part is easier than I expected.[...]

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On What's Altucher's "NVIDIA Backdoor" Company for the "X-Chip" -- Big News Coming on March 21?

His Chaikin Money Flow has been a quantitative indicator that folks have used on Wall Street for years, some folks have sworn by it as a relatively short-term indicator of buying pressure and therefore potential share price growth, but I don't use it. It'[...]

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On What's Altucher's "NVIDIA Backdoor" Company for the "X-Chip" -- Big News Coming on March 21?

They did make the big announcement that everyone expected, that they'll have a new chipset this year based on their Blackwell architecture. Altucher was just trying to piggyback on that and hope people would believe that NVIDIA might mention a small compa[...]

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On What's Altucher's "NVIDIA Backdoor" Company for the "X-Chip" -- Big News Coming on March 21?

Almost every stock related to technology or AI went up over the past couple days, so I'm sure Altucher will take credit for a win, whatever his actual pick was.[...]

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On Answers: "Your #1 'Buy, Hold, & Retire' Tech Stock of 2024" teased by Tim Plaehn

That's mostly a quirk of the tax law, not a real management fee -- because of the way BDCs are taxed, the ETF, which the SEC considers to be a "fund of funds", has to report the passed-through "acquired expense ratio" of all of the BDCs it owns. You "pay"[...]

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