A special offer on the excellent Stansberry Venture Technology newsletter; Jumia Technologies; How tough short-selling has become; Mutual Funds' Embrace of High-Profile Unicorns Backfires; Training for World's Toughest Mudder

1) My corporate partner, Stansberry Research, is a big operation with around two dozen newsletters covering a wide range of sectors. Regular readers may recall that I've highlighted a few of them, such as Mike DiBiase’s Stansberry's Credit Opportunities and Tom Carroll’s Cannabis Capitalist.

Here's a new one I haven't mentioned before...

Stansberry Venture Technology editor Dave Lashmet was the first analyst Porter Stansberry hired two decades ago when he started Stansberry Research. His specialty is early stage biotech investing – an area I know nothing about, but one in which Dave is one of the world's foremost experts. Trust me, he has the track record to prove it.

You can make a lot of money quickly in this sector, but it's also super risky, so you must do two things:

• Size things small. This sector should only be worth a few percent of your portfolio, and 

• Either become an expert yourself or find someone whose advice you can trust. On that front, I don't know anyone better than Dave.

His subscribers get his latest thoughts every month in his Stansberry Venture Technology newsletter. He always has great ideas, but right now especially so, as he has identified four companies whose stocks he believes will soar as radioimmunotherapy eventually cures cancer.

Dave's research is expensive. It normally costs $5,500 a year. But right now, Stansberry is offering one year for just $2,500 – its lowest price ever. Better yet, for $5,000 you can get lifetime access to Stansberry Venture Technology, PLUS lifetime access to Bryan Beach's excellent Stansberry Venture Value newsletter. (Stansberry Venture Value, which is also normally $5,500 a year, focuses on high-growth, high-upside small- and micro-cap stocks.)

Again, you can get lifetime access to two products for less than the price of what either one normally costs for a single year by itself. If you're interested in putting a fraction of your portfolio into this type of investing, you're not going to find better research – or a better deal – anywhere. Get the full details here.

2) Sometimes I like to play a little game with myself where I guess the price of a stock I haven't looked at in a long while.

For some reason, e-commerce company Jumia Technologies (JMIA) popped into my mind recently. I hadn't looked at it since I wrote about it in my May 14 and May 30 e-mails, a month after its IPO, when famed short-seller Andrew Left of Citron Research bashed it in two reports: Not All IPOs are Created Equal. Jumia is a Fraud and Jumia – Indisputable Evidence of Fraud.

At the time, the stock was around $25, so I guessed that it had fallen to $15. I was wrong – in fact, it has crashed 70% to around $7 as of this morning.

A good lesson here: While you should always do your own work and think independently, it often pays to listen to smart short-sellers...

I e-mailed Andrew congratulations on this great call and he replied:

Thank you. It was more than just a call. I backed it up with research and interviews with former employees that I posted publicly for investors to hear. The real question is how does Morgan Stanley bring such a company public, without any diligence? This makes all of the unicorns seem responsible by comparison...

3) Don't let this example lead you to believe that short selling is easy. It's not. It's brutally difficult – so much so that I recommend that 99% of investors should never do it.

One way it's gotten harder is the difficulty and cost of getting the shares you must borrow before you can sell them to establish your short position.

For example, after I wrote again last week about Beyond Meat (BYND), I checked the cost of borrow and saw quotes that ranged from -126% to -159%. This means that if you short $100,000 of BYND, you'll have to pay your prime broker (or whoever is providing you the borrow) $10,500 to $13,250 per month. So if you're 100% right about the stock and it falls 50%, but it takes more than four or five months to do so, you'll end up losing money!

This is the miserable world of short-selling today. In contrast, during my early days as an investor in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I could borrow shares of just about anything (even huge frauds) and pay maybe 10%...

4) Today's news that SoftBank is taking control of The "Whee" Company in a huge down round highlights why the SEC should ban mutual funds from doing venture capital altogether.

Glenn Tongue and I ran one, the Tilson Focus Fund, for many years, and we never would have dreamed of investing in something in which there's zero liquidity with a fund that, by law, must offer investors daily liquidity.

In addition, as this Wall Street Journal article highlights, there's all sorts of room for mutual funds to engage in valuation shenanigans. These jokers were marking up The "Whee" Company to the moon, yet now that they're about to be diluted into oblivion, they're not nearly so eager to mark down their disastrous investment... Mutual Funds' Embrace of High-Profile Unicorns Backfires. Excerpt:

Mutual funds that invested billions in big technology startups are now suffering losses in newly public companies and are being forced to mark down their holdings of private companies that are no longer investor darlings.

The collapse of the initial public offering of WeWork parent We Co. and the steep decline of Uber Technologies shares and other recent IPOs have backfired on funds that hoped big stock gains would give them market-beating performances.

Mutual funds have stepped up their exposure to unicorns – private companies valued at more than $1 billion – and other stocks that don't trade in public markets. Funds owned $6.7 billion worth of shares in We, Uber, Lyft, image-search platform Pinterest and fitness startup Peloton Interactive as of April. That is an increase of $2.7 billion from two years earlier, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of valuation data.

Around six out of 10 mutual-fund companies hold private shares in their portfolios, up from about three in 10 five years ago, according to a survey this year by accounting firm Deloitte & Touche.

When private-market valuations were soaring, funds marked up their holdings, some more than others. We was valued at $102 a share in July 2018 by mutual fund giant Fidelity Investments, and $110 a share in November 2018 by Hartford Financial Services Group Inc., John Hancock Investment Management and Principal Financial Group.

That $110 price tag – 67% higher than the figure some other fund managers at that time valued the same type of We shares – matched the value put on the office-sharing company by its largest investor, SoftBank Group.

5) On Saturday, I was up at 5:30 a.m. to drive an hour to a Tough Mudder race in New Jersey.

It was really cold at the 7:45 a.m. start (about 32 degrees Fahrenheit), but that made it even better training for the 24-hour World's Toughest Mudder, where I'll be defending my title as the 50+ age group champion three weeks from Saturday in Atlanta. (Last year, the temperature in the middle of the night dropped to 26 degrees, resulting in 40% of the competitors dropping out, mostly due to hypothermia; here is my write-up of the race).

Thankfully, I had brought my shorty wetsuit and Arc'teryx ski jacket, so I wasn't too cold. I met up with my buddy with whom I'm going to run World's and we did two laps of a short course (only seven miles) before he had to go, and then I did one more lap on my own.

The good news: My partially torn (tennis) elbow held up well. The bad news: After five months of resting my elbow, my grip isn't what it once was, so I failed The Gauntlet two of the three times I did it (the picture below is the one time I made it). More bad news: Both my upper and lower body are crazy sore. World's is going to be a suffer-fest! Here are some pics...

Best regards,

Whitney