The secret of the 'Wonder Hamster'... What Moneyball was really about – from the horse's mouth... Stop buying the stocks everyone wants... The mistakes investors make – and how not to make them...
Editor's note: As we mentioned yesterday, our Dr. David "Doc" Eifrig has something to say... At 10 a.m. Eastern time tomorrow, he's going to say it in a free presentation about a new, dynamic stock-predicting system that he wants everyone to know about.
He'll demo this new tool during the broadcast... explain the details behind how it finds recurring patterns in the market – like delivering 1,600%-plus gains on Nvidia (NVDA) in back testing... and share the next stock the system is targeting right now.
So, be sure to check it out. Sign up for free here. (And, for Doc's existing Retirement Trader and Stansberry Alliance members, you are welcome to watch but also know that you have complete access to this system already. Your access went live this evening here.)
In the meantime, ahead of the big public reveal tomorrow, I (Corey McLaughlin) want to share a guest essay today from Doc. As longtime readers know, Doc is a lifelong learner, which is what led to the unlikely trading breakthrough he's going to talk about.
This essay, excerpted from the November 2024 issue of Doc's Retirement Millionaire newsletter, is a prime example. It demonstrates why not everything in baseball, business, and the markets might be what it seems. Enjoy...
They called him the Wonder Hamster...
To look at him, no one would figure Matt Stairs for an athlete.
As ESPN described the ballplayer, "Stairs looks like somebody you know, whether it's the guy who's dating your cousin or one in a group of buddies at the bar."
Others were more direct...
Sportswriter David Zingler wrote in 2002...
Matt Stairs may have the most unathletic physique in all of baseball. He generously is listed at 5-9, his arms, while powerful, appear flabby, and the size of his stomach suggests that he favors "tastes great" over "less filling."
Even an article on MLB.com said he had the "body and swing of a grizzled prospector."
But Stairs was good. Besides "Wonder Hamster," his other nickname was "The Professional Hitter."
Stairs knocked out 265 homers over a 19-year career across a dozen different MLB teams. He had a career on-base percentage of 0.356, better than hitting stars like Jose Canseco and Sammy Sosa.
And that "grizzled prospector" description? It came from an article making the case Stairs should be admitted to the Hall of Fame.
He's already in the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame – and considered by many to be the third-best Canadian hitter of all time.
We heard about Stairs from his old boss, Billy Beane...
Beane was the general manager of the Oakland A's in the early 2000s. At the time, Beane and his assistant general manager, Paul DePodesta, had a problem to solve. And Stairs was a big part of the solution.
When Beane took over, the A's were lousy. That was in large part because the team's budget was much smaller than its rivals'. For instance, in 2001, during Beane's tenure, the A's player payroll totaled $41 million. That same year, the juggernaut Yankees signed just one player – shortstop Derek Jeter – to a $189 million, 10-year contract.
What Beane and DePodesta realized is they needed a different way to evaluate players... a way that uncovered value that traditional scouting missed. They weren't going to rely on the instincts of road-weary scouts. And they weren't going to trust traditional statistics like stolen bases, runs batted in ("RBI"), and batting averages.
They were going to let statistics prove what skills matter most for winning ballgames... and go get players who had those skills, regardless of what anyone else saw...
What Stairs could do was get on base... a lot. And the data said that getting on base was the most valuable thing a ballplayer can do.
Beane spoke last month [October 2024] at Stansberry Research's annual conference, where he told us...
A lot of the guys that had that skill didn't pass the eye test. It was a skill. It wasn't necessarily athletic. And it didn't pass the eye test, because a lot of guys that have that skill didn't look particularly great in baseball uniforms. Do you remember Matt Stairs? He's one of my all-time favorite hitters.
Matt was about 5'9", 240 pounds. He didn't look good in a baseball uniform.
But when you stopped looking at Matt and looked at his data, you realized he does the most important thing a baseball player could do. He gets on base, and he hits homers. And we could afford him.
Most old-school baseball people dismissed Stairs because he didn't look like a ballplayer. Stairs bounced around the minor leagues. He even played in Canada and Japan until he finally caught on in Oakland under Beane.
Those old-school scouts and coaches then got to watch as Stairs became a star... on a team that was an unlikely perennial playoff contender.
Back in 2000, Stairs signed a one-year deal with Oakland for $3 million. Billy Beane told us that a player with Matt Stairs' stats today earns about $20 million a year.
The story of Beane and DePodesta is memorialized in the best-selling book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis. And baseball entirely changed.
Every team now has advanced analytics departments. Everyone knows what stats matter and how much each one is worth.
The story of Moneyball can be taken in several ways...
Maybe it was about the skill of investing in undervalued assets... or perhaps the power of intelligence and careful thought.
Michael Lewis thought it was something else. He was also with us at the Stansberry conference. And he says...
Forget it's baseball. Think of it as just a business, and these are the employees. They've been doing the same job for a hundred years. They have millions of people watching them on the job. They have statistics attached to what they do on the job unlike most corporate employees.
And if these people can be misvalued because of the way they look... who can't be?
The beating heart of that book was how people get valued.
We'd say... who or what can't be misvalued?
We look at all these different ways to interpret Moneyball and distill it into a single insight...
People don't think very hard about what they actually want. They take shortcuts, like judging a ballplayer based on his appearance. And they end up worse because of it.
That applies in investing as well.
We know that we want companies that make real money, enjoy a powerful competitive advantage, are reasonably valued, and present limited risk.
So, teams used to look for baseball players who look like baseball players... and they'd lose. Oakland would get above-average teams at rock-bottom prices.
What about another topic close to my heart... doctors?...
Nassim Taleb, former trader and philosopher who wrote The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness, covers this in his book Skin in the Game...
Suppose you must choose between two surgeons. The first has a refined appearance, silver-rimmed glasses, delicate hands, and eloquent speech. If you need a person to play a surgeon in a movie, this is who you'd pick.
The second looks like a butcher. He's overweight, with large hands, an untucked shirt, and a strong "New Yawk" accent.
Which do you pick?
Taleb says you should go for the butcher.
First, our rational mind knows that how somebody looks has nothing to do with their abilities.
But Taleb doesn't merely say this choice is a coin flip. He actively prefers the counterintuitive option. As he explains...
Why? Simply the one who doesn't look the part, conditional of having made a (sort of) successful career in his profession, had to have much to overcome in terms of perception. And if we are lucky enough to have people who do not look the part, it is thanks to the presence of some skin in the game, the contact with reality that filters out incompetence, as reality is blind to looks.
In other words, the handsome surgeon has ridden his advantages his whole career. If the butcher has seen similar success, he's probably earned it by being a much better surgeon.
(I'll leave it to my former patients to decide whether I belong in the camp of skilled doctors, or whether I'm just a handsome one.)
So what are you looking for when you try to find a stock to invest in?...
Well, we've spoken with likely thousands of individual investors at this point. We intimately know the behavior of individual investors... and have especially studied their mistakes.
And we believe we know what investors are looking for...
First, they want growth. If a company is growing top-line sales at 20%, that's better than 10%. If it's 30%, better still. And best of all is when sales are doubling or tripling.
Second, they want a story. They want to know the big thing that's going to happen in the next year that's going to send this company into the stratosphere.
And best yet... they love a visionary leader.
This desire spread through investors like a plague in the bull market of 2020 and 2021.
It wasn't good enough for Peloton Interactive (PTON) to make good exercise bikes... It promised to be the entire future of fitness.
Carvana (CVNA) didn't just need to sell used cars at a reasonable margin... It was supposed to upend the entire auto market.
Cathie Wood doesn't just buy promising technology stocks in her ARK funds... She promotes a wildly different future for her investments with prose like...
In a broad sense we have never been like this moment in history in terms of the amount of change, it's already started. We feel the ground, as you just said, shifting underneath us. It has already started.
The New York Times describes "a mash-up of in-the-weeds business analysis and an almost prophetic certainty about the future" as "classic Cathie Wood."
How can you not get excited about such vision?
Well, both of those stocks fell as much as 90% from their 2021 peaks. And the ARK Innovation Fund (ARKK) is still down 64%. (Editor's note: Almost two years later, this fund has bounced back slightly... It's down "only" 50% from its peak.)
Everyone wants the next Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos... but the reason everyone knows those names is because leaders like that are rare.
Don't be fooled by the pie-in-the-sky growth story or the charismatic CEO.
Don't invest in stocks that have the excitement and drama that we all crave.
Look for the next Wonder Hamster instead...
The insight of Moneyball was to use statistics and data to determine the skills critical to winning baseball games.
Remember, baseball has been collecting player stats for more than a century... But the traditional statistics – like RBI, batting average, and stolen bases – weren't identifying the right things.
Wall Street also uses statistics and data. That's nothing new. But, like baseball in the pre-Moneyball era, most investors are using it to look for the wrong things.
Editor's note: Tomorrow morning, at 10 a.m. Eastern time, Doc will reveal the numbers that he is looking at now... It's through a system that is akin to the technology that SpaceX uses to predict satellite paths in space.
Doc says this system pinpoints specific entry points to stocks and sectors and made more than 18,000 successful predictions over an extensive 10-year back test. This includes 100% win rates on major stocks like Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices, and Qualcomm...
Decades ago, Doc helped build trading algorithms for Goldman Sachs' billion-dollar corporate clients.
Then he left Wall Street, frustrated by the conflicts of interest. He went to medical school, then left that field, too, before bringing his experience and wisdom to Stansberry Research subscribers. This is another example...
Right now, Doc says you shouldn't invest a penny in AI stocks until you've seen the details about his new dynamic system. He's revealing everything tomorrow morning. Register now here – for free – to ensure you don't miss anything.
And again, Doc's existing Retirement Trader and Stansberry Alliance members can find more details here, or in your inbox.
New 52-week highs (as of 7/13/26): Arch Capital (ACGL), Alpha Architect 1-3 Month Box Fund (BOXX), Chemed (CHE), Canadian National Railway (CNI), W.W. Grainger (GWW), Coca-Cola (KO), Marathon Petroleum (MPC), Pembina Pipeline (PBA), Invesco High Yield Equity Dividend Achievers Fund (PEY), Starbucks (SBUX), Union Pacific (UNP), and Valero Energy (VLO).
A quiet mailbag today... Do you have a comment or question? As always, e-mail us at feedback@stansberryresearch.com.
Here's to our health, wealth, and a great retirement,
Dr. David Eifrig, MD, MBA
Baltimore, Maryland
July 14, 2026
