It’s been another crazy year, so now it’s time to give some credit where credit is due… What are your picks for the biggest trailers of 2024?
Every year, we take a few minutes to highlight the worst ideas in the world of investing newsletters Name our “turkey of the year” on Thanksgiving…but as the year comes to an end, we also want to make sure best Thoughts from the past year.
The past few years have been phenomenal, and as a result the top-performing companies have posted some very big numbers. 2022, sometimes survived Enough to make you look like a winner…but in 2023 and 2024, you have to be one of the hype stocks – which means you probably have to be involved in AI in some way, including the associated hype – Train nuclear power desire to revive and Quantum computing A hopeful person.
That's true to an extent in 2023, when most of these names are at the top of the list, but it's even more true in 2024. People are doing well, but we're also seeing a handful of other types of companies taking the lead in AI – biotech acquisitions are the top performers, and resurgences in e-commerce and homebuilding are also evident. Heck, even the 2024 turkey of the year cracked the top 20 in 2023.
So who is leading this year? Well, surprisingly, good NVIDIA No Make the cut – if only because we haven’t covered any new NVIDIA's teases over the past 14 months or so (we're going back to November 1, 2023 just to be fair about the year's top picks, because otherwise end-of-year picks rarely end up at the top of spreadsheets).
But it’s no surprise that November’s surge in meme stocks, cryptocurrencies, and small AI-related games pushed a number of names onto the list — here are your top 20 teasers from November 2023 (like all Our complete trailer tracking sheetThis top 20 The spreadsheet is publicly available If you want to make your own copy and sort it, or click to see the actual article as we cover these pitches):
As usual, there is some duplication in the most popular stocks – either because experts have released several different ads teasing the same company (e.g. James Altucher Work with Innodata over the summer, or Motley Fool Canada with Propel in late 2023), or because a lot of people are focusing on the same theme (Navellier and McCall's IonQ, also picked up by others in the past few years, or Dylan ChauvinAdam ODell and Hiral Ghelani (who both mocked Palantir during this time frame), as enthusiasm for artificial intelligence spreads to the nuclear power field, two “pure” small modular reactor hopefuls NuScale and Oklo each got some advice.
Once you move down the list a little further, there have been some other blasts in the past, long-time hopeful Vuzix has recently bounced back, and the Argentinian Oil 2022's top performer YPF returns to performance, with insurance disruptor Lemonade leading the way during the 2020-2021 boom.
On a more personal note, I only liked a few of these companies when I first wrote about them, and don't currently own any of them – as of today, for you slightly grumpy writers out there For example, this looks like a list of investments where the story is already ahead of the financial fundamentals of the company… For example, I like the Oklo, NuScale and IonQ stories, but their commercialization is too early to inspire something like The confidence of someone like me, I'm not an expert on the unique technology that any of them might ultimately bring to the table. I'm sure a lot of you have done well on some of these names, and they'll likely continue to move higher, but I don't find anything on this list to be particularly enticing as a potential long-term investment today, and only if they're the Once I was laughed at, I thought some of it was totally justified.
All this data comes from us Trailer Tracking Spreadsheetanyone can view it, we pulled the data as of December 30th and ranked them based on their relative performance to the S&P 500 (so you don't win just by luck and hitting bottom)…and Our standard warning applies: We don't subscribe to these newsletters, this is based on Thinkolator results for all the trailers we surveyed throughout the year (Historically, Thinkolator is right 99% of the time…but 99% and 100% is quite correct) different numbers). We also don't know what editors might do with the stock back Whether they bought or sold it after teasing it, or said something different to their actual subscribers, we can assume they bought it the day they teased it and held on to it forever. Of course, we'll look at things like stock splits, but we won't track them dividendso dividend-oriented companies often look weaker in spreadsheets (although they're rarely near the top of the performance rankings anyway).
That's obviously not what happens with these newsletter stock picks in real life – we know Dylan Jovine Openly talking about selling Palantir for around $40for example, so people following his advice might have sold a while ago and missed out on the recent 100% gains… but we generally don't know about other trailer picks from other years, so the only way to be fair is to assume “always keep ”.
(For what it's worth, I generally agree with Jovine's assessment, saying that Palantir's business has grown about 30% in a few years but the stock price has risen 1,000%, so there's some irrational exuberance in the stock today and sell it Probably the more rational choice, I also find Palantir relatively attractive in the $8-10 range, which is the first time he's recommended it, even though I've never actually really understood the stock – but deal with it.” “Overvalued” stocks are also very difficult to identify individually, and depending on the rest of your portfolio, to own long-term outperforming stocks that can truly reshape your portfolio, you may actually need to hold on to them. Some Stocks that you think are overvalued, especially if you only manage your own money…but owning a portfolio is very difficult for me and too risky dominant This is probably the situation many growth investors find themselves in after a wild two years with this type of stock).
Finally, dear friends, we always want to think about the big picture – on average, has investing in newsletter trailers helped or hurt over the past year?
The forecast stock is almost always Below average, as a whole – if you buy every Over the past 17 or 18 years of the investment newsletter world's stock-saw coverage, you would have done worse in that year than if you had bought the S&P 500 in those days – but some years, it closed pretty nicely. Typically, we see less than a third of derided stocks outperform, more than half underperforming, and a large chunk of the middle performing roughly in line with the S&P 500. There is a “power law” distribution of long-term performance, so anyone who sticks with a huge growth story like NVIDIA or Netflix for the long term will probably do pretty well in the long run, as one or two 10,000%+ returns can make up for 99% of the losses …but as anyone with huge winners in their portfolio can attest, it’s hard to catch these tigers by their tail, especially when they grow to become a huge proportion of your personal portfolio.
This year? I think we've had the best year overall for trailer stocks since we started doing these calculations. At this point, the average gain for teaser stocks is about 21.5%, and if you bought the S&P 500 on the same day, your average return would be 10.6%…so teaser stocks outperform the S&P by about 11%. As usual, the heavy lifting is done by a relatively small number of stocks – the first 19 have it all done At least 100% better Higher than the S&P 500 Index. only There were a few, never more than 10 in my memory.
I don’t want to lose sight of how remarkable this is – the best years for previewing stocks are usually when the newsletter only comes out trace “Monkey throwing darts” is a few percentage points higher, so beat The average stock pick range is 11%, which is quite rare.
But I do want to admit that it also made me nervous. This means there is considerable enthusiasm for the best “story stocks” that attract the attention of individual investors, and it also adds to my general anxiety that the stock market is overvalued. This doesn't mean the market is about to crash, or even that 2026 is necessarily going to be a bad year, and we have no way of knowing what's ahead…but after two consecutive years of historically extreme returns for the S&P 500, and Newsletter picks show individual investors are most excited about some of the most speculative stories, and I feel more nervous than optimistic. I'm not doing Of course, there's only so much to say about it, as “feel” doesn't usually make for great investment decisions, but I do worry that many people are attracted to the most speculative stories at a time when they may be too popular. We'll see how it shakes out.
We've covered 203 preview picks for 2024 so far, and about half of them have outperformed the S&P 500… which is consistent with the best years. On the south end of the paper, things are a little better than average, too — only about 30 of the stocks in these trailers have lost more than a third of their value relative to the S&P 500, and — drum roll please — Not a single stock fell in value. Every so often we come across a situation or two where we lose 100% due to bankruptcy or some kind of fraud, but not this year. There aren't many stocks that are truly doing poorly – we reviewed a few of them in November – but it's unusual to see only a handful of derided stocks fall more than 50% in absolute terms in a year.
I think last year was a pretty phenomenal year, but we layered on top of that a pretty crazy year. In case you're wondering, because I'm almost always asked, my personal performance this year has been relatively average – if we include my fund, stock and option investments, as well as my cash position, my overall portfolio has lagged the S&P 500 is about 1.5 percentage points higher than the past year and has led the S&P 500 by about 1 percentage point each of the past five years. I feel comfortable with that, especially considering that my portfolio includes a lot of expensive hedges and some relatively large allocations that I know will never be able to keep up with the bull market, including investments that make sense goldBut it's always a little sad to see those who escaped.
Thanks for joining us on our adventures in trailer reveals and trailer tracking as we try to help investors think for themselves, and if you think the best expert picks from the past year deserve more attention, feel free to chime in below – Or if you think we missed someone.
Happy New Year to everyone, Stock Gumshoe will be fully back from the holidays on January 2nd, so go ahead and send in your favorite teaser ads… and stay tuned for our next reveal.
