Happy Thanksgiving Week! It’s Turkey of the Year time again!
One of our grand traditions here at Stock Gumshoe is the awarding of the annual Turkey of the Year trophy — this prize goes to the teaser pitch that provided us with the worst-performing, most-overhyped, or otherwise just the goofiest gobbler of the past twelve months. We try to avoid those that were just bad luck or bad timing, like maybe a hotel or travel stock that was recommended a month before COVID hit, but, like creating a great Thanksgiving dinner, it’s not exactly science. There are usually a few reasonable candidates, and your friendly neighborhood Gumshoe gets to make the final call as a committee of one.
This honor is not bestowed lightly — to be named Stock Gumshoe’s Turkey of the Year, you must have been a stock idea that performed terribly, chosen within the last twelve months, and, preferably, you should stand for all that is entertaining (and misleading) in stock newsletter teaser ads… or teach us a useful lesson.
Most years, we’ve got plenty of candidates… over-promised technology names, failed biotech trials and over-hyped mining stocks tend to give us the most “red” in the teaser tracking database here at Stock Gumshoe, with the occasional smattering of fraud and bankruptcy… so who are the most promising nominees for our annual prize this year?
I should start with the standard caveats — we don’t subscribe to all these newsletters, we just review their promotional materials and name the secret ‘teaser’ stocks they’re promoting and recommending, so we don’t usually know when they may have first recommended a stock to their subscribers (some tease picks they’ve already made, others tease brand new picks), whether their commentary to subscribers is more nuanced than their promotional materials, or if or when they might recommend selling it… all we generally know is when and how they dangle a “next great stock pick” recommendation as bait to recruit new subscribers. So with all the picks on our tracking system, we assume that the stock is bought the day they tease it… and held forever. Some newsletters hold stocks for decades, others trade more actively and are quick to take profits or use stop losses, so our teaser tracking system tracks the value of the idea more than it necessarily tracks the results a subscriber to that newsletter might have gotten.
And the timeframe we work with for naming the Turkey of the Year is roughly the past year… but it wouldn’t be fair to call out a Turkey just a month or two after it is teased, we want to give it at least a little time to cook, so we use the September-to-September period to find a qualifying bird.
This year, there are two candidates who stand head and shoulders above the others… or perhaps knees and ankles below the others?:
Our first candidate is Iovance (IOVA), because it was teased as a takeover target by Dylan Jovine not just last Fall, getting in before our 2025 Turkey starting line, but also a few times over the previous several years. And the company did (and does) have some real scientific and business achievements, they have revenue and didn’t just drop in value because of a failed clinical trial, as we see with so many little biotech stocks. They developed an FDA-approved treatment for solid tumors, and they did ramp up sales to commercialize that treatment… but because it’s a personalized treatment, not a mass-produced pill or infusion, it hasn’t been growing nearly fast enough to cover the massive costs of building up capacity to provide those personalized treatments, and it’s still far from being profitable.
Similar challenges have come to roost for lots of past “personalized medicine” leaders, probably most famously with Dendreon, which had an exciting-sounding prostate cancer treatment called Provenge on the market about a dozen years ago, and was hyped up by a bunch of newsletters at the time, but couldn’t ever get sales to match the investor excitement.
Iovance (IOVA) was covered as a teaser stock at $10.44 on Halloween of 2024, and closed on Friday at $2.25, for a loss of about 78%… and we always look at relative value, since the easy choice whenever considering a teaser stock is, “do I buy an S&P 500 index fund, or do I bet on this specific company?” — and relative to the S&P 500, which has roughly a 20% gain over that time period, IOVA would have brought you a loss of about 95%.
The lesson with this one? Even though biotech is all about finding or building something that works against a particular disease… scalability still matters, you still have to be able to turn that product into a viable business, which means it has to be good enough to earn a premium price that generates a profit after you incur the costs of producing the treatment, and you need the per-unit costs to go down as you increase sales. That always looked like it might be a challenge for Iovance, even though they’re predicting that this will be a “blockbuster” drug that eventually hits $1 billion in annual sales, and that’s been the case for this first 18 months or so — and so far, they have had some decent revenue growth, but not enough (a little over a year ago, they expected to have $450 million in revenue in 2025… and it’s going to come in closer to $250 million this year), and, probably just as importantly, their gross profit margin has been going down as the revenue grows, not up.
Guessing at the business viability of any drug is always a challenge, since it takes some real expert knowledge to assess the potential price that product might bear, and the size of the likely market… but personalized “drugs” make that even tougher, since you have to build each unique treatment for each individual. I’m always hesitant to “bet” on biotech, but in this case investors had the benefit of knowing the Dendreon history going in, and about the past challenges of these kinds of treatments, so we at least got to mention some of those risks at the time we covered the pitch.
Iovance might still survive and thrive in the future, we can’t know that, but things are still challenging for them — they have kept raising money (increasing the share count by 20% or so), and pushing new treatments through clinical trials, and they have enough cash to keep going for a while, with some plans in place to centralize their operations and get costs down, so, well, good luck to them. Fighting these tough-to-treat cancers is a valuable thing to do, hopefully they’ll become a meaningful part of the cure someday and figure out how to make the business side more effective.
Our second candidate is Sable Offshore (SOC), which was clearly a bet on CEO James Flores’ Trump connections getting him the permits and regulatory runway he needed to restart production at the old Santa Ynez oil field, offshore Santa Barbara, CA.
We noted at the time, when Porter Stansberry was pitching that it “could be the #1 stock for 2025” in his teaser ads for Porter & Co., that this was a pretty clearly binary “bet” of an investment: Start producing soon using the existing pipelines and infrastructure, against the wishes of environmentalists and some folks in the local area but perhaps with some tacit state support and a boost from President Trump, and it could soar several hundred percent thanks to the plentiful reserves and mostly paid-for infrastructure… fail to start producing, or fail to extend the ExxonMobil deal to sell Santa Ynez to SOC, and it could lose 100%.
It hasn’t reached either extreme, yet, but it’s been a tough ride that seems to remain tangled in court challenges and permitting difficulty, even though they announced the restart of production in May of 2025. The challenges have mostly been related to permitting for repairing and upgrading the old pipelines and using them to move the oil onshore to their processing plant, or maybe trying to do an expensive end-around and just use a floating tanker loading facility offshore instead of using those pipelines… particularly because the reason the field was closed by ExxonMobil a decade ago was, you guessed it, an ugly pipeline spill that started on the beaches of Santa Barbara and spread 100 miles or so along the coastline.
Memories of something like that don’t necessarily disappear in a decade, and this is a sensitive area where the history goes back much further than that — many folks consider the much larger 1969 oil spill in this same area, from a rig blowout (the biggest U.S. oil spill in history at the time, though it was later eclipsed in dramatic fashion by both the Exxon Valdez and the Deepwater Horizon spills), to have been one of the major catalysts for the environmental movement that gained traction in the late 60s and early 1970s (Earth Day and the creation of the EPA in 1970, the Clean Water Act a couple years later, etc.).
Porter Stansberry pitched this one hard and heavy for several months after the election, leaning on that Trump connection, and with the gift of hindsight, the absolute worst teaser pick of SOC, on a relative basis, was on April 8, when Porter was talking up SOC as one of the special reports as a way to benefit from Trump’s “controlled demolition of the U.S. financial system — and that’s probably a date you remember, since that happened to be the “Tariff Panic” moment back in the Spring, when Trump first announced the initial “reciprocal tariffs”, so that was a near-term bottom for the S&P 500… which meant that choosing something which went down after that day ended up being exceptionally bad timing.
We covered Porter’s first tease for Sable Offshore as part of his “Trump’s Secret Stocks” pitch on January 2, when it was at $24.19, and it closed trading on Friday at $4.47, so that’s about an 80% drop, pretty bad, and relative to an investment in the S&P 500 at that time it would be about a 98% loss. Porter’s three different teaser pitches for Sable that we covered in the early months of 2025 are three of the five worst performing stocks in the database when it comes to the actual loss in value, and the worst-timed of them, the one that hit right at the time of the Tariff panic, was the worst pick on a relative basis, even though the stock had already dipped below $20. Relative to the S&P 500, that pick now shows a loss of 114% in our system (as of Friday).
So to be fair and consistent, Porter’s pick of Sable Offshore (SOC) really has to be our “Turkey of the Year” for 2025. Congratulations!
I should add some context, too. In this case, we do happen to know that Porter & Co. also recommended selling the stock on October 15, just because I checked on their website and the headline of that story is in front of their paywall. We don’t usually know what happens to a teaser stock recommendation after it’s been made, so our tracking systems are built to always just assume the stock is held forever… which means, to be fair, that we should mention it to you, but we shouldn’t let it sway our “Turkey” declaration.
If you sold on October 15, when Porter & Co. reportedly issued a “sell” recommendation, that would have meant selling at $14.13. So we can at least give them credit for getting out when the story turned, since two weeks later the stock had lost another 50% or so, trading well below $8, and it has since continued to decline, touching $4 last week. Sable Offshore has now become one of the most virulently argued-about “battleground” stocks in the shoutiest neighborhoods of Twitter/X, where short sellers and meme stocks and stock superfans spend their days in angry contemplation (short interest is ~25% — pretty close to Iovance, coincidentally enough), and I can’t say that I’m sure where it will go next… they might still end up with the Feds overriding the courts and the California Coastal Commission and pouring money into Sable Offshore’s project someday to get it producing again, that’s clearly the hope of the bulls, but they’re also in financial straits and raising money at high cost these days to keep the project alive, and oil prices are pushing toward post-COVID lows at the moment, too. I can say I’m glad to not have bought the stock, and that I’m not tempted to try to predict which way the wind will blow and get involved with it today.
The lesson here? Well, the easy lesson is to be ready for a binary bet to go against you, and remember not to get stubborn and go down with the ship if you happen to make the wrong call.
For me, the most timely lesson is that we may need a little more of a buying rationale for a stock beyond, “Trump’s going to fix things for them.” A company’s political connections do not guarantee that things will work out for an energy or minerals project, or even for a more benign real estate or industrial development, particularly if there’s also meaningful opposition from local groups. President Trump has reportedly been very supportive of Sable Offshore’s plan, part of his more ambitious strategy to encourage more offshore oil production throughout the US, including Florida and California, where those plans are opposed by local politicians of both parties, as well as Alaska and elsewhere… but so far, at least, that hasn’t mattered for Sable.
Why is that lesson timely, you say? Because there are now a half-dozen teaser ads running, from different publishers, that are all trying to pick the next stocks that will benefit from the Trump Administration’s moves to buy into natural resources projects, like rare earths deposits, or make investments in companies that are in line with other strategic priorities, like chipbuilding or nuclear power. Those investment ideas may end up working out, clearly traders have gotten excited when the government has bought (or taken) share of a company this year and caused a quick price surge… but those, again, are binary bets, usually on a single mine or similar project, and can easily go wrong and either not make progress toward production or not get an official investment or other real boost from the government, even if the President says nice things about them.
So this year, Porter Stansberry gets his first Turkey of the Year award (he came close with Tellurian a couple years ago, but we’ve still never had a repeat winner)… and we’ll get him a piece of pie, too, to soften the blow, since he also recommended a sale of the stock around $14, which would have been a more middle-of-the-pack ~40% loss.
Other candidates this year? The only one that was pretty close to that ~90%+ loss relative to the S&P 500 is graphene-stock-for-10x-potential-or-higher/”>George Gilder’s pitch of Orgenesis (ORGS), which was so odd, in part, because he apparently ran a couple ads at the same time, with roughly the same “tease,” but mixed up the text and mistakenly pitched Orgenesis as a “graphene stock” before sending out a more rational-sounding ad which pitched it as a “New You Revolution” personalized medicine stock.
I feel like all I have to tell you about Orgenesis is that the share count has increased at an average rate of about 30% per year over the past decade, but the revenue has declined at an average rate of about 13% per year, that’s a scenario which is quite familiar for anyone who has watched a biotech company circling the drain. Sometimes it’s a slow process, and I haven’t looked into their actual business at all since I covered that pitch last December, but it’s extremely hard to ever “pull out” of that whirlpool of death when you’re selling more and more shares every year just to pay the rent.
And we had a small clump of big losers that weren’t quite Turkey-worthy over the past year, each of them generally had losses of about 60-70% relative to the S&P 500 — pretty bad, and bad enough to win the coveted Golden Gobbler in some years, but not enough to top our couple of 90-100%+ losers this year. That includes Alex Green’s pitch of Sabre (SABR), James Altucher’s pitch of Innodata (INOD), and even Porter Stansberry’s pitch of Venture Global (VG) back in June is at close to a 70% relative loss (no, I don’t know whether he still likes it or has since sold, like he did with Sable Offshore), as is Cabot’s pick of Duolingo (DUOL) back in February.
This is but a snapshot in time, of course, and we mean it to be fun and educational, in reminding us that even impressive-sounding stories sometime go to zero, and you need to own stocks because you understand them and have some rational reason to believe that the company will grow in value, not just because someone spun a compelling tale.
If we tweaked our timeframe, many much more dramatic losers would emerge — you can never lose more than 100% of your investment, of course, as long as you don’t use borrowed money or borrowed shares, but you can have an opportunity cost that’s well over 100%, because the other easy option, when you were buying that stock, was just to buy the S&P 500 or some other broad-based index. The worst teaser stocks of 2023, for example, would today, if you had bought and hold, have effectively lost you 150% of your investment, relative to just buying an S&P 500 index fund. (That’s names like Plug Power (PLUG), Critical Elements (CRECF) or MyMD Pharmaceuticals (was MYMD, now TNF), in case you’re wondering)… and some of the worst picks from the boom days of 2021, for example, like Akoustis (AKTS) or Clovis Oncology (CLVS) or the EV startup Arrival, actually went bankrupt and registered 100% losses, which would mean an opportunity cost approaching 200% (and climbing, since the market has continued to rise). You get the idea.
Which isn’t to say this is the worst of times in newsletter land — it has actually been a pretty good year for the teaser stock peddlers, even if, like the US economy, it was a year of the haves and the have-nots, with spectacular performers driven by AI and quantum computing (Palantir, IonQ, etc.) and the AI-adjacent boom in nuclear power interest (Oklo, Centrus and others) leading to an unusual number of teaser picks that returned 300-1,000% over the past couple years. And there have been, as usual, a lot of picks that trailed the market pretty meaningfully (usually about 2/3 of teaser stocks do worse than the S&P 500in any given year), though not a huge number that really scraped the bottom of the barrel. We’ve been calling out these Turkeys since 2008, including during some much less pleasant bear markets, and have had plenty of past years when we had to choose which of several bankrupt stocks that went to zero should be the Turkey of the Year… and so far, at least, there aren’t any bankruptcies among this year’s teaser crop.
Why choose Sable Offshore over the almost-as-poorly-performing Iovance? Partly because of the size of the ad push, with Porter & Co. laying it on thick for several months as “maybe the best stock of 2025,” while Iovance was pitched less aggressively as a takeover target by Behind the Markets, though that’s a judgement call… and partly because when in doubt, the win goes to the mathematically worst performer. And yes, we might give Porter extra credit because we know he pulled out before the collapse was complete… but, again, that’s not really fair — maybe Dylan Jovine sold his Iovance shares a few months after recommending them as a takeover trade, too, and we just never heard about that sale.
This “hold forever” rule for our teaser tracking sometimes works out in favor of the pundits in our tracking system, too. For example, we know that Jovine teased Palantir (PLTR) several times back in 2023, at around $8, so that stock has spent some time at the top of our tracking system with an almost 2,000% gain… but we also happen to know, since he has talked publicly about it, that he recommended selling Palantir (PLTR) shares in late 2024, at around $40, so subscribers who followed him would have made more like a 400% return, missing that move from $40 to more than $200. Still, to be fair and consistent, it’s just in our system with the “hold forever” returns, since it’s extremely rare that we have clear and verifiable knowledge of a newsletter selling a position, either at a loss or a gain.
Nobody buys at the bottom and sells at the top with any kind of consistency, and selling is harder than buying, so I’m not saying any of this to cast real aspersions on Dylan Jovine or Porter Stansberry, both of whom have endured in the newsletter business for decades, with plenty of fans (and detractors)… but the fact remains that we know when a stock is teased in a newsletter ad… but only rarely, and anecdotally, know if that advisor later recommended selling it or doing anything else.
And don’t worry about us focusing too much on the losers, Thanksgiving is our time to call out the Turkeys who help to make life so interesting here at Stock Gumshoe… but we do also highlight the big winners every year, right around Christmas, so that’s coming soon.
For those who love to see more data, we’ve always made our tracking spreadsheets publicly available… but we’re in the process of launching the beta version of a much more useful new teaser tracking database, so our Irregulars Plus+ members will get access to that soon as our first guinea pigs… and in addition to being the best way to search and scan through recent teaser picks to see what you might have missed and how those picks have performed, you’ll also be able to see the best (and worst) all-time performers all in one place.
Right now, those long-term winners are mostly stocks like NVIDIA (NVDA) and Tesla (TSLA), the huge 20,000%+ gains in our tracking system right now are all from picks of those hot stocks and similar performers like Shopify (SHOP) that were made before 2020 — and really, no surprise, it’s NVIDIA that blows away almost everything else, over time. Starting with David Gardner’s pick of NVDA for Motley Fool Stock Advisor in 2014, which has shown a gain of more than 40,000% (about 70%/year), something like 15 of the top 50 teaser picks over the past dozen years are various NVIDIA touts by a variety of different newsletters.
And though we’re still adding data and don’t have all of the full teaser tracking info in our new system yet for the 2007-2012 period, I did go back and update the entries for one of the past losers I mentioned above — so Dendreon (formerly DNDN), for example, shows up with one of the worst all-time results, a loss relative to the S&P 500 of more than 800% (that was a 2009 pick from a newsletter that no longer exists, so “hold forever” in that case means you bought in 2009, which would have been a historically great time to buy almost anything else, and held on through their bankruptcy in 2014, so that zero really piled up in opportunity cost as time passed).
So with that, dear friends, we’ll release you to your Thanksgiving festivities — I hope you have a wonderful time, whether it’s a great meal or some shared moments with family and friends. Stock Gumshoe will be closed down for the holiday for a few days, but we’ll be back to find you the next great (or terrible) teaser stock next week. Thanks for reading!
P.S. Ready for some Turkey History?
For posterity’s sake, and in case you’re tempted to “bottom fish” among Turkey of the Year candidates, here are the previous winners… most of them are gone now, total losses for the investors who got sucked into those stories. A couple of the names still exist in some form, mostly because they came back out of bankruptcy after washing out their shareholders… but all the pre-2017 Turkeys ended up being 100% losses for investors who bought anywhere near when they were initially teased and held through to the bitter end, and only one of the more recent Turkeys is anywhere near break-even (that’s Indivior, from 2018 — the other more recent ones are all still down at least 80%, several have lost 99% or more)… and in case. you’re curious, about half of these folks are no longer helming newsletters, and I remember getting sucked in and buying two or three of those names over the years:
P.P.S. Since I’m highlighting bad stock investments, I always like to point out my own worst investments when I post these Turkey of the Year awards — It’s almost always true that my worst decisions are selling something too early, or holding on to a long-time position after it has clearly begun to see a real decline in quality, and I’ve made some add-on buys of existing positions that were mistakes over the past year, including most glaringly Evolution (EVO.ST, EVVTY), a position I’ve since sold out of after changing my mind about management and the trajectory of the business… but when it comes to comparing to teaser stock picks, the two worst new equity positions I’ve added to the Real Money Portfolio over the past year are the Japanese fintech SBI Holdings (8473.T, SBHGF) and the Swedish serial acquirer Röko (ROKO-B.ST), both of which are still in the portfolio and currently showing a loss of roughly 20%.
If you’d like to unburden yourself by sharing your own worst pick this year, feel free to use our happy little comment box below — don’t worry, we’ll be kind. We all make mistakes, and perhaps we can learn from yours — sadly, we usually have to learn from our own mistakes, since we tend to be stubborn beasts… but it’s worth a try.
