rewrite this title Top Teaser Stocks of 2024!

It’s been (another) wild year, so now it’s time to give some credit where it’s due… what were the most successful teaser picks of 2024?

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 also want to pin down the best ideas of the past year.

The past couple years have been extraordinary, so the top performers have posted some very big numbers. In 2022, sometimes surviving was enough to make you look like a winner… but in 2023 and 2024, you had to be one of the hyped-up stocks — which as of this moment means you probably had to be somehow involved with artificial intelligence, which includes the associated hype-trains of nuclear power revivalusts and quantum computing hopefuls.

That was partially true in 2023, when those names mostly topped the charts, but it was much more true in 2024. Last year, in the first strong year after the 2022 bear market, anyone who picked NVIDIA did very well but we also saw a smattering of other kinds of companies leading the way alongside AI — a biotech takeover was the top performer, and e-commerce and homebuilding recoveries were in evidence. Heck, even 2024’s Turkey of the Year was a top-20 performer in 2023.

So who leads the pack this year? Well, surprisingly enough, good ol’ NVIDIA didn’t make the cut — if only just because we haven’t covered any new teases of NVIDIA in the past 14 months or so (we go back to November 1 of 2023 just to be fair in calling the top pick of the year, since otherwise late-year picks would rarely make the top of the spreadsheet).

But unsurprisingly, the November surge of meme stocks, cryptos and smaller AI-related plays pushed a lot of names up the sheet — here are your top 20 teaser picks since November of 2023 (like all of our full Teaser Tracking sheets, this top-20 spreadsheet is publicly available if you want to make a copy and sort them yourself, or click through to the actual articles when we covered those pitches):

As usual, there are a few repeats for the most popular stocks — either because the pundit put out a couple different ads teasing the same company (like James Altucher with Innodata over the summer, or the Motley Fool Canada with Propel in late 2023), or because lots of folks jumped on the same theme (Navellier and McCall for IonQ, which has also been picked by others over the past couple years, or Dylan Jovine, Adam O’Dell and Hiral Ghelani all teasing Palantir in this timeframe), and the two “pure play” small modular reactor hopefuls, NuScale and Oklo, each got a couple recommendations as AI enthusiasm bubbled over into nuclear power pitches.

And there were some other blasts from the past once you move down the list a bit, with perennial hopeful Vuzix recovering of late, and with the Argentinian oil company YPF, the best performer of 2022, making a return performance, along with the insurance disruptor Lemonade, which was a leading performer during the 2020-2021 mania.   

On a more personal note, I liked only a few of these companies when I first wrote about them, and do not currently own any of them — as of today, to your somewhat curmudgeonly writer, this looks like a list of investments where the story has gotten ahead of the company’s financial fundamentals…. I love the story at Oklo, NuScale and IonQ, for example, but they’re too early in their commercialization to inspire much confidence in someone like me, a non-expert in the unique technology any of them might bring to the table eventually.  I’m sure a great many of you have done quite well with some of these names, and they may continue to go higher, but I don’t find anything on this list especially tempting as a potential long-term investment today, and only a few of them seemed at all reasonable to me when they were first teased.

All of this data comes from our Teaser Tracking spreadsheets, which anyone can view, and we pulled the data on December 30 and ranked them by relative performance vs. the S&P 500 (so you don’t win just by being lucky and hitting the bottom of the broad market)… and our standard caveats apply: We don’t subscribe to these newsletters, this is based on the Thinkolator results for all the teasers we’ve investigated throughout the year (historically, the Thinkolator is right 99% of the time… but 99% and 100% are very different numbers). We also don’t know what an editor might have done with a stock after teasing it, whether they bought or sold since or said something different to their actual subscribers, we are left to assume they bought it on the day they were teasing it and held it forever. And we account for stuff like stock splits, of course, but we do not track dividends, so companies that are dividend-driven will generally look weaker in the spreadsheets (though they would also very rarely get anywhere near the top of those performance rankings, regardless).

That’s obviously not what happens to these newsletter stock picks in real life — we know that Dylan Jovine has publicly talked about selling Palantir at around $40, for example, so folks following his advice would have sold a while back and missed the most recent 100% gain… but we don’t generally know that about other teaser picks in other years, so the only way to be fair is to just assume “hold forever.”

(For what it’s worth, I generally agree with Jovine’s assessment when he says that Palantir has grown its business by about 30% over a couple years, but the stock went up 1,000%, so there’s some irrational exuberance in the stock today and selling it may have been the more rational choice, and I also found Palantir relatively attractive back in the $8-10 range, where he first recommended it, though I didn’t ever actually by the stock — but dealing with “overvalued” stocks is also very personal, and depends on the rest of your portfolio. To have extreme long-term performers that can really reshape your portfolio, you probably do need to hold some stocks that you think are overvalued, especially if you’re only managing your own money… but it’s very hard, and too risky for me, to have a portfolio dominated by those kinds of stocks, which may be the situation a lot of growth investors find themselves in after two wild years).

And finally, dear friends, we always want to think about the big picture — did the investment newsletter teaser pitches help or hurt during the past year, on average?

Teaser stocks are almost always below average, as a group — if you bought every stock on the day it was teased over the past 17 or 18 years of Stock Gumshoe coverage of the investment newsletter world, you would have done worse in that year than if you had bought the S&P 500 on those days — but some years, it’s pretty close. Typically, we’ve seen that less than a third of the teased stocks beat the market, more than half do worse than the market, and there’s a big chunk in the middle that is roughly in line with the performance of the S&P 500.   You do get some “power law” distributions that impact the longer-term performance, so anyone who held on to huge growth stories like NVIDIA or Netflix for long enough might have done quite well over the very long term, since one or two 10,000%+ returns can make up for a lot of 99% losses… but as anyone with a huge winner in their portfolio can attest, it can be hard to hold those tigers by the tail, especially if they grow to become a giant percentage of your personal portfolio.

This year? I think we’ve enjoyed the single best year for teaser stocks, as a whole, since we started doing these calculations. The average teased stock has gone up about 21.5% at this point, and if you had instead bought the S&P 500 on those same days your return would have averaged 10.6%… so the teaser stocks beat the S&P by about 11%. And as always, the heavy lifting was done by a relatively small number of stocks — the top 19 teaser picks each did at least 100% better than the S&P 500. We usually have a few stocks beat the market by that much, but usually just a few, and never more than 10 in my memory.

I don’t want to skim over how extraordinary that is — the best years for teaser stocks have generally been when the newsletters only trail the “monkeys throwing darts” by a few percentage points, so beating the average stock pick by 11% is pretty exceptional.

But I do want to confess that it also makes me quite nervous. That signifies a pretty high degree of enthusiasm for the best “story stocks” that have caught the eye of individual investors, and it reinforces my general anxiety about the overvalued state of the stock market. Doesn’t mean the market is about to crash, or even that 2026 will necessarily be a bad year, we don’t get to know the future… but after two years in a row of historically extreme S&P 500 returns, and with the newsletter picks indicating that individual investors are most excited about some of the most speculative stories, I feel more nervous than optimistic.  I’m not doing that much about it, of course, because “feelings” don’t generally make for great investment decisions, but I do worry that a lot of folks are getting sucked in to the most speculative stories at a time when they are probably too popular. We’ll see how it shakes out.

We’ve covered 203 teaser picks so far in 2024, and roughly half of them are beating the S&P 500… which is in line with the best years.  And on the south end of the sheet the story is a little better than average, too — only about 30 of these teaser picks have lost more than a third of their value, relative to the S&P 500, and — drum roll please — NONE have gone bankrupt! We often have one or two 100% losses from a bankruptcy or fraud of some kind, but not this year. There haven’t even really been many genuinely terrible performers — we went over a few of those back in November, but it’s quite unusual to have a year when only a few teased stocks are down by more than 50% on an absolute basis.

I thought last year was pretty extraordinary, but we’ve stacked a pretty crazy one on top of that. And in case you’re wondering, since someone almost always asks, my personal performance is more average this year — if we include my fund holdings and my stock and option investments, along with my cash position, my overall portfolio has trailed the S&P 500 by about 1.5 percentage points over the past year, and has beaten the S&P 500 by about one percentage point per year over the past five years.  I’m fine with that, particularly given that my portfolio includes a fair amount of expensive hedging and some relatively large allocations to stuff that I know will never keep up with a bull market, including a meaningful exposure to gold, but it’s always a little sad to see the ones that got away.

Thanks for joining us on these adventures in teaser-revealing and teaser-tracking as we try to help investors think for themselves, and please feel free to chime in below if you think any of the best pundit picks of the past year deserve some more attention — or if you think we missed somebody.

Happy New Year to all, and Stock Gumshoe will be fully back from our holiday break on January 2, so please keep sending in your favorite teaser ads… and stay tuned for our next reveal.