One deeply confused publisher
Stock Gumshoe is an online newsletter that teases teaser pitches for stocks. When stock newsletters promote unnamed stocks claimed to have growth potential, Stock Gumshoe snoops out what stock is actually being teased, and reveals how it may not be such a good stock pick after all. Beyond this, which you get without subscribing, it is tough to know what this newsletter really offers subscribers. There are contributing writers, but Travis Johnson, the publisher, seems to want to play them off against each other.
The site's best writer is someone who blogs as Dr. KSS, an MD PhD gastroenterologist and hepatologist. His advice on biotech companies and medical matters is brilliant. For some reason, the publisher hides him under a bushel. Meanwhile, there is an aging contributor named Doc Gumshoe who is not a doctor, who purports to write on medicine, and who makes many many errors in writing about medicine because he is not a doctor and has no medical insight of any kind. Doc Gumshoe seems to think that by dusting off textbooks, he can grasp medicine without actually having done it. This is wrong. The site just ran a column by him about colonoscopy absolutely riddled with errors. Since Dr. KSS IS a gastroenterologist and expert on colonoscopy, my prediction is that he is justifiably outraged and not likely to stay with Stock Gumshoe, which is otherwise rinky-dink. Myron Martin blogs about mining investments, but isn't a good writer, and meanwhile attacks Dr. KSS constantly because Myron is preoccupied with nonsense ideas about herbs and vitamins and has axes to grind with science and medicine.
A fourth columnist named The Blind Squirrel has good general investing insight, but doesn't contribute very often.
It is an odd place. One credentialed expert that people listen to, who is attacked and disagreed with by two people with no credentials of any kind. But when the resident medicine expert is usurped and abused by having someone with no expertise pretend to hold forth about something (colonoscopy) that Dr. KSS is an expert in, something is very wrong......a publisher with no common sense, or one with a creepy desire to keep infighting among the columnists going on so that he himself looks good. Very very bizarre.
May 21, 2014
Unprompted review