Insight Investor
Porter Stansberry: selected emails about Aids shot tip
Reports at this website arising from inquiries by Brian Deer during his Sunday Times of London investigation of and its “world’s first Aids vaccine”, published in October 1999, brought the spotlight on small cap stock hypester Porter Stansberry, who claimed imminent success for the company in February 2003 as it headed for financial disaster.
Examples of Porter Stansberry’s material can be seen here and here. Below are some of the many responses from visitors to this website.
VAXGEN: 24 February 2003
Great articles !
Do you know of any groups of “organized peasants” that are sueing Stansbury ?
I would like to join them.
Regards.
Ralph B.
VAXGEN: Monday 24 Feb
I fell for the Stansberry story and would be interested in any possible recourse action you are considering.
Thank you,
Steve H.
PORKER SCAMSBERRY: 25 February 2003
Brian,
Thanks for posting on yahoo the link to the latest on the “Porker Scamsberry” exchange. I have followed Vaxgen and Aidsvax for years as an interested scientist in another biomedical field. I first got drawn into the Yahoo message list after reading a PR from Vaxgen that was perilously close to or maybe even over the edge of hype. I started following the “it works in chimps” litany that has pervaded the company’s message for years and I have been shocked at their fast and loose approach to Investor Information.
In the process of reading both science and journalism I came across you piece on the Vaxgen Experiment. It was a remarkable piece of work that has stood up well. I have visited your site and find your stories to be a terrific blend of investigation, explication and entertainment. Congratulations.
I think this is my first fan email to a journalist. Keep up the good work.
Don C. Newport, Oregon
VAXGEN: 26 February 2003
Brian:
Have you checked the Stansbury website at www.pirateinvestor.com?
Click on the Due Dilegence special report on Vaxgen that came out in 2000.
It states ” Currently , Aidsvax works against two of the most common strains of HIV-1: the B strain, common in North and South America; and E Strain, common in Southeast Asia.”
The next paragraph will really make you gag:
” Don Francis is a veritable saint, the only person you’ll ever meet who is a candidate for both the Nobel Peace Prize and the Nobel Prize for medicine.”
If you want to get into the protected archives use my username: xxxxx and password: xxxxxxxx
I suggest you check out the archives of Porter’s ” The Blast”
Last but not least: Do you know of any good litigation attorneys ?
Regards:
Ralph B.
a working class peasant in Houston Texas that is $ 20,000 poorer
PORTER STANSBERRY: 28 February 2003
Dear Sir:
I am a retired physician who received the promotional adds on the aids vaccine from Mr. Porter’s website and immediately saw the true purpose of the unsolicited letter. Since then, he has been included in one of my paying financial services.Of course I routinely bypass his letter.
I briefly visited your website and I am very impressed with the work you and your staff do. Please continue your excellent work. I will become one of your most avid readers
J.A.T., MD.
HAVE I EVER? 9 Mar 2003
lost $4100…am losing my house, and this was supposed to be my savior. I really thought they’d do it.
AIDSVAX: 11 April 2003
Dear Brian,
I was one of those small investor’s who fell for Porter’s hype. In his email responses to you he said that he touted Vaxgen at a $5 range and warned investor’s to risk only 1% of their portfolio. I joined his newletter in January of 2003 and all I ever got were the newsletters hyping to purchase the stock before the Phase III report came out or I’d miss the price increase. I was convinced by his newsletter and bought the stock at $20 per share and then was further incouraged to buy the put options. I invested just about everything I was planning to invest in the market into that stock and those options. After, the stock lost it’s value, I emailed him about my situation and got his reply that he advised investors to limit their investments in Vaxgen. I obviously started receiving his newsletters to late to get the warnings and the lower entry price. But I was new to personal investing and new to this type of hype and fell for his stories about how thoroughly he investigated the company and the aids vaccine. I still own the stock and have seen it fall almost everyday. I was encouraged to hold onto the stock after the outcome of the trials were released with news that as soon as the media found out about the future of the vaccine, that the price would sour. Later, I was encouraged to hold on to the stock for the April meeting annoucements and for sure at least until the late fall report of the Asian Phase III trial.
After reading Porter’s newletter, I actually thought I was buying into a company that had soundly and successfully found a vaccine against aids.
As I said, this was my foray into the world of personally controlling my stock trading and I planned to spread my money over about a dozen stocks and monitor them for success. When I got Porter’s newsletter, I fell for the hype and invested it in just one stock with promises of multiplying my investment almost immediately. The worst part of all of this is that I even talked my father into investing some of his retirement money into the stock also. Now, I’m hurt by trusting him both financially and trust in financial advisors AND am feeling really bad about what I’ve done to my own father. It’s bad enough that I was fooled, but I dragged my dad into this. When my dad called his broker, his broker warned him against putting alot of money into Vaxgen, but my dad listened to my enthusiasm over what I read in Porter’s newsletter and bought the stock anyway.
Now I read your emails and I feel sick. His replys are overly defensive and his original advise on price and percentages may have been delivered early but they were not consistant and often. He was still hyping and pushing the stock at $20 and above, something he does not refer to in his responses to you.
thanks for your insights,
Rick
PIRATE INVESTOR – PORTER STANSBERRY: 25 June 2003
Dear Brian,
I found your correspondence with ps this afternoon after typing his name in google search. I’d read an interesting promo for his newsletter and thought I’d see if there was any info. I thought it was pretty obvious that,at least concerning AidsVax, he was not someone to trust for investment decisions.
Imagine my surprise when I went to pirateinvestor website and am reading the promo for his newsletter and it USES HIS LETTER FROM MARCH 2002 PROMOTING THAT
COMPANY as a sample letter. I wish you’d check it out. I wonder if it’s just been there a long time and they forgot to remove it, or am I crazy, or do they just figure enough people will not know about the scandal?
I enjoyed your correspondence with ps,and I have to admire his ability to get people to buy his newsletter if in fact they do. You could probably make a mint writing a newsletter exposing (or maybe rating) newsletter writers.
Do you know much about Agora? I don’t like that they let lots of apparent hucksters advertise on their newsletters, but I enjoy their writing in Daily Reckonning, Sovereign Society and International Living. Many of their predictions of two years ago have come true and some of their advice would have made money had I followed it.
What do you think of them?
Charles C. Austin, Texas
STANSBERRY’S INVESTMENT ADVISORY: 8 July 2003
Dear Mr. Deer,
In today’s mail I received a solicitation written by David Lashmet to subscribe to Porter Stanberry’s Investment Advisory. I found the solicitation so compelling (Lashmet is very persuasive and logical in a low key way—that style always kind of gets to me) that I thought about subscribing and I decided to go on the Internet to see what I could find out about Porter and his Advisory.
There I ran into a whole bunch of stuff about VaxGen with e-mails back and forth between yourself and Stansberry. After reading a lot of it I found that I didn’t really understand whether either of you was able to convince the other that he was substantially correct. I didn’t understand what the “outcome” of all that was.
So I am basically writing this e-mail to ask you whether, when all is said and done, you feel that Stansberry made an honest and reasonable mistake (happens to everyone) or whether you feel that he intentionally mislead his subscribers, or mislead them without conducting skilled “due diligence” regarding what he advised. If he deliberately mislead people, or even mislead lackadaisically, why would he have done so unless he was going to profit in some way as a result (has it been established that he had no connection to the company, as an investor or otherwise?)
I realize you may not have strict proof of your opinion but I just wanted your gut feeling as I respect the logic of many of your assertions—was Stansberry able to convince you that he was substantially justified in his advice, even though mistaken (by the way, I have absolutely no relationship with the Advisory, Stansberry or anyone associated with him—I merely received the solicitation in today’s mail—I’m a retired lawyer and xxxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxxx.)
Thank you.
Larry K. Florida
VAXGEN AND P STANSBERRY: 16 July 2003
Brian,
After having read a couple investment emails from Porter Stansberry, I decided to do a google search on him and see what I could come up with.
BRAVO ! Your website has given me alot of information.
FYI, HIV is not yet proven to cause anything, let alone AIDS. The HIV/AIDS hypothesis of Dr. Robert Gallo was fraudulent and he was duly sued by the US Government for presenting fraudulent data. ( This did not stop the AIDS industry however from marketing this hypothesis as “science”, with the US Government’s seal of approval. )
If Porter Stansberry was so smart, he would have realized that the FDA is unlikely to approve any drug that cures or prevents “AIDS”. The R&D game is where the money is… not in cures. When it comes to the FDA…follow the money. There are plenty of cures for diseases tucked away on the shelves ;>
mark j l
VAXGEN: 28 July 2003
Dear Mr Deer,
As a VaxGen shareholder, I was aware of the February 2003 results of the AIDVAX clinical trials and was waiting for the August results. Fortunately, I didn t go to their Website for information about the August trials but rather entered the words VaxGen in Google. This took me directly to your site. I began investing for the first time in June 1999. At the time, I had a total of $20,000 in savings (10 years of work) and was ready to start investing. Since I knew absolutely nothing about investing, I decided to take out three subscriptions, all of which were about $190 per year:
Porter Stansberry s PirateInvestor
Oxford Club
Sovereign Society
All of these companies are linked.
All of the tech stocks he recommended would rise dramatically about two weeks before I received his newsletter and plunge about two weeks after I bought the shares. The culmination in loss took place when the Nasdaq crashed in January 2000. I lost about $10,000 but I m still holding onto a few shares, one of which is VaxGen. The fact that the companies actually existed and were involved in technology that existed prompted me to invest.
The investments that I made from Oxford Club recommendations met similar fates with roughly the same patterns. I always seemed to be jumping onto the bandwagon too late. The worst case happened with their recommendation that I buy Argentinian government treasury bonds. This was about a year before the Argentinian government defaulted on its foreign debts. I lost another $10,000 in that deal but, since I still own the bonds, I may recover my money in 2008. Or maybe I will not.
Another ill-fated investment had to do with California s energy crisis about a year ago. Porter predicted it would happen a year in advance and it did. The problem was that the stock price of the company he recommended (Calpine) did not react at all the way he had predicted. And I lost money. So he was completely right about the technology he described in the newsletters but completely wrong about the investment advice.
As a direct result of this experience, I will never invest my money ever again. It has taken me five years to save up $10,000 and I have the sneaking suspicion that by hyping up a bunch of small investors, the big investors in the Pirate Investor/Oxford Club/Sovereign Society group benefit from the hike in share price. Then, when they sell to pocket their gains, the small investors lose. In addition, with all of the money from subscriptions, investment seminars, CDs from the investment seminars, etc., they continue to get plenty of money to use for investments.
I invite you to take a closer look at the Agora group. Right now, I am on holiday but as soon as I get back (September), I can give you more details about the stock advisors and the subscriptions that I took out with them (and subsequently canceled).
Best regards,
Randall J.
VAXGEN AND PORTER STANSBERRY: 2 August 2003
I was one of the unfortunate ones along with my wife, who fell for this guys line of crap. If there is anyway I can assist in putting this son of a bitch behind bars or worse, please let me know… At one point I had thought how great it would be to meet that Stansberry guy in person and whip his you know what for him. I lost around $4,000.00 on that VaxGen scam. I’m a disabled vet and my wife and I had saved a long time for that $4,000.00. I mean, a long time.
Best of luck to you and your endeavors to expose such shit heads as this guy.
Thanks,
Mark S.
SEC STANSBERRY 7 OXFORD CLUB: 3 August 2003
Read your ‘back & forth’ with Stansbury, & about the SEC suit against him and Agora Publishing. Thought about getting his newsletter. Investigated his tip about “Proteosome Technology”. Found he didn’t get some details right. Which I wondered about since am a retired Ph. D. biochemist type. So I’ll away stay from him. Question? Have you any info about the Oxford Club? Since it has that same MD address, I’m wondering.
Tom D. Texas
PORKER SCAMSBERRY: 26 August 2003
Brian
Just wanted to let you know what a wonderful time Im having following the dispute & the above mentioned crook. I was a subscriber to his newsletter & an investor in Vaxgen.
Luckily I was (by some miracle) stopped out of my long position as a result of manipulation by market makers in the stock. I am wondering if you know anything about ANTIGENICS as this has been his Biotech pick on the backburner w/ similiar rave reviews that accompanied VXGN’s rise & fall. He claims a similiar relationship ala Don Francis w. the CEO accompanied by the same amount of hype,hearsay,bullshi* & innuendo about the future prospects of Antigenics & their drug. I came to realize after being a subscriber for 2 years that Porter Stansberry knew nothing about stocks & investing but everything about BS’ing & hyping.
BTW his track record is a joke. Long CORV short AMGN Long JDSU … I think you get the picture. The guy really should be in prison.
Sean
PORTER STANSBERRY: 20 September 2003
Dear Mr Deer,
I find your message board regarding Porter Stansberry and the Vaxgen situation disturbing. Some of the posts are incredibly naiive and some questions kept popping up in my mind:
Why would anyone place their entire savings on one trade recommendation?
Did they paper trade?
How experienced are these investors?
Did they have stop losses in place?
Did they seek further advice from other advisors prior to placing the trade?
How often does Porter get it right?
Where is the complete picture (from both sides I might add)?
More importantly, why are you not helping these poor souls positively by directing them to reputable advisors and assisting them from being completely burned and paralysed from their experience. These people need education and encouragement to keep going. If they give up then it is simply game set and match……..over to the government and the 401K! that’s a disaster in my opinion.
Anyway, this led to me asking some questions of you Brian:
What do you do to invest Brian?
What do you recommend to invest in?
How long have you been an investor?
Where do you get your investment advice from?
How much passive income do you make from investing? (Mine is about USD200,000 per annum from a mix of real estate, shares and options-and I’m 35 years old this November)
The main problem here is the lack of personal responsibility from us as individuals. Why put ALL the blame entirely on Porter’s shoulders. We are all adults and if you can’t handle investing because you don’t understand it, then you should not be investing until you know what you are doing.
Why not tell your readers to get some education. Learn how to mange their finances and their risk so that they can see how the Vaxgen trade may have been extremely speculative. A true gamble requiring 1%-4% of an individual’s portfolio NOT 50%-100% as some of the posts have implied.
In those circumstances I place more blame on the individual for their lack of personal responsibility and accountability for their actions. Everyone seems to want to blame others for their personal misfortune.
It would be great to see you encourage these readers to pick themselves up, dust themselves off and get some education from an advisor or mentor who can truly educate them so they can recognise an investment that is appropriate for them. Simply presenting one negative after another just destroys everyone. Something journo’s around the world are notoriously guilty of doing.
Sensationalism Brian. That’s what this appears to be. Porter may have made a mistake and if he is indeed the criminal some suggest him to be, then that will be proven in due course. Innocent until “proven” guilty is how we live in our country. What about you?
Sincerely,
Julian Thornton, Tasmania, Australia
PS: Interesting to see Vaxgen currently trading at close to USD9.00 as of Friday this week.
PORTER STANSBERRY: 24 October 2003
Dear Brian,
Perhaps you didn’t receive this email originally as your address seems to have changed.
Please answer my questions of you Brian. Porter Stansberry certainly has and he is the one you are attacking. I will not hesitate to take this further so please respond to my questions.
Thank-you.
Julian Thornton
PORTER STANSBERRY: 17 December 2003
I was just in reciept of a P.Stansberry newsletter promo. After reading your discussion with him I think I’ll wait and watch a bit longer.
Do you periodically investigate some of these newsletter hawkers? It seems to me my mail contains more and more of these”unbelievably,outrageously undervalued stocks of mega proportions waiting to explode onto the market and I now have the opportunity to get in before everyone discovers”….blah..blah ..blah.
I will continue to visit your site. Thankyou.
Jeff
AGORA INC: 20 December 2003
Dear Brian,
Thank you for what I consider very sound journalism and timely exposure of allegedly dangerous mass internet marketing solicitation practices such as those used by Agora Inc. I have been receiving emails from this group for a long time (not as a subscriber), and once or twice, in the haze of Monday morning depression, I have asked myself “What could be so bad about subscribing to this newsletter”.
Well here is one answer staring me bang smack in the face.
Bravo
Kind regards,
Paul
PS If his investment advice is as good as he claims, why wouldn’t he provide proof. He could put up twelve months of investment advice he has given over the last year, along with the actual outcomes of the stock recommendations and their respective gains or losses and then we could evaluate him.
If this is a one off mistake, against a brilliant track record of amazing stock returns, I would happily pay the guy some money for his advice, but not until then!!!!
PORTER STANSBERRY: 20 December 2003
Mr. Deer,
I am writing for two reasons. First, to thank you for your investigation into Porter Stansbury. I am currently begining my own research into Mr. Stansbury and related entities. The information I obtained on your website was a tremendous breakthrough. Thanks for doing what you do.
Second, I am writing to ask if you might direct me to additional resources for continuing my research. I am trying to figure out if there are some clearinghouses / consolidating resources where I can quickly determine if a given individual or company has (or has had in the past) been a defendant in a securities lawsuit.
The driver for me is that my mother is perpetually being courted by these people and I am trying to prevent her from bacnkrupting herself!
Thanks for any assistance you can provide,
Mark H.
AGORA INC: 30 December 2003
Congratulations on the wealth of information provided about Agora and all of its subsidiaries by your website (because aside from your site the only other information available is the SEC filing against them)…
I recently moved back to Baltimore after spending some time in Southern Maryland, to find that my deceased father had been receiving the junk mail from about 4×10*14 of these “Sure fire double and triple percentage point profit generating proprietary systems of super investment using super computers and secret methods” people, ALL of which were coming from a single P.O. Box in Frederick, Maryland. I began doing some light research by simply punching in each of their names into Google, Yahoo!, etc. and found that the only reference to them whatsoever was contained in their own websites. Not a shocker there. Furthermore, I come to find that all of their websites (as contained in their legal disclaimers) are owned by Agora. Ok, fine. So then, I come to find via another very simple search – your site, as well as the SEC filing against Agora etc. Three words: tears of anger.
Personally, I feel that the people who have sent you email who have invested the majority of their money in these scams were “investing with emotion” as all of us who have read their slop can agree is wrong. That’s all I can say about that for the moment. In addition, I feel that as investors, it is up to US to rate these “financial advisors” – legitimate and otherwise – so that when one such as myself, Bryan K., Louise P, and John Q Public put in a web search for their names, we find legitimate information about their services, their track record, feedback… and whether or not they actually exist.
Currently, or rather most recently, I (my dead father) received the “Penny Stock Fortunes” ad pamphlet, which makes the same 64 point font exclamations as all the other ad pamphlets, has the same format, and comes from the same P.O. Box. Different guy, but same everything else. My question at this point is: Given the knowledge that Agora is the governing publisher for all of these financial super demi-wizards, is it even remotely safe to assume that ANY of them are legitimate? Or has the “marketing device” used by one of them simply backfired and cast a shadow over the whole lot? I don’t know, and I’d like to find out.
So here’s what I’M going to do about it. Since it’s virtually impossible to get feedback from enough people to get the truth, I’s going to do it myself. I have subscribed to the “Penny Stock Fortunes” newsletter, and I’m going to start a paper trail (as was suggested by a previous email). Granted, this is costing me 61.95 to do, but “if you don’t double your money in 6 months or less, every cent of your subscription cost will be refunded, no questions asked.” Please, I encourage everyone to REALLY do some research on these people, in order to protect each other and our hard-earned money!
My email is UnicronIII@yahoo.com for anyone who’s curious. I should be starting in the next 3-4 weeks or so.
You have done a great job here, Brian Deer. I salute you. Keep the site up for more people like me, if for nothing else. I’m 24 and I have a tremendous interest in investment, and I can’t STAND the idea of people like this taking advantage of those who aren’t educated in these matters, regardless of whether they protect themselves legally from the ramifications of such a thing.
-C. Evan S.
PIRATE INVESTOR: 16 May 2004
Dear Brian, I recently accidently came upon your pirate investor fraud site and was shocked to read about Pirate investor. and Agora considering the fact that I was suckered into subsribing to several of their newsletters and subsequently have lost thousand of dollars with their lousy advise (oh, excuse me, )”opinions”. I am going to cancel my subsriptions and ask for my money back. Wish I had known about this sooner
Jacqueline M.