Review: Stock Gumshoe

If you're reading this blog, it's likely that you have at least one email account full of teaser emails from various financial and investment newsletters. Perhaps you receive a few emails a week from investment sites like The Motley Fool or Morningstar, goading you to sign up (for a monthly fee) to find out what their stock picks are. If you're tempted to sign up, you might first consider going to a blog I've recently discovered, Stock Gumshoe.


As most teaser emails contain many hints about what investments the newsletter is selling, it's possible to figure them out without actually paying $1000s a year. That's what Stock Gumshoe does. The blog gets the same emails as you do, as well as those readers contribute, and it determines what the investments are. Then it tracks them so you can see whether it was a good investment or not.


Here's the good:

1. It's completely free. You can visit the site any time, or can subscribe to emails.

2. The "sleuthing" process is written out in detail, so you can see all the steps the author took to determine what the teaser stock is. (That is, you can see that it's not just a blind guess).

3. Although very well written, if you don't have the time or inclination
to read everything, just scroll down on each post until you see what the investment in question is.

The not so good:

1. Although the Gumshoe is very thorough (see #2 above), because the person does not actually subscribe to the newsletters, he might be wrong. That is, the revealed investments are (very) educated guesses. The blog, however, appears to have a very good track record.

The bad:

1. Nothing much to say here, unless perhaps you happen to be a subscriber of one of the sleuthed newsletters, in which case it might not feel too good to know that information you're paying for is available for free. But, of course, see #1 above (the not so good).

Bottom line:

Stock Gumshoe is a great little blog that can potentially save you a lot of money by revealing those tempting stock picks newsletters tease you with. And as it's a free service, there's nothing to lose.