Why you're getting stock promotion emails and texts

Stock promotion newsletters are an advertising business. A company, one of its shareholders or a marketing firm working for them pays the newsletter a fee to publish a ticker to its list for a set window, often a day or two, sometimes weeks. The bigger and more active the list, the more the placement is worth, so the lists are built aggressively.

Your address or number usually got onto a list in one of these ways:

• You signed up for a free alert, watchlist, report or webinar. Most promotional lists are built from exactly these offers, and the sign-up terms usually allow the list to be used for sponsored content.
• You entered your details on a landing page reached from a social ad promising a hot small cap pick.
• The list shares or rents subscribers with sister publications. One operator often runs several newsletter brands, which is why you can get near-identical messages from senders with different names.

That last point explains the pattern most readers notice first: the same ticker arriving from four or five senders within an hour. That usually isn't independent excitement. It's one paid campaign distributed across several lists at once, each disclosing its own slice of the budget.

A sender paid to promote a stock is required to disclose it. In the US the rule is Section 17(b) of the Securities Act, which requires anyone paid by an issuer, underwriter or dealer to describe a security to disclose the payment and its amount. In practice the disclosure is almost always on the sender's own website, linked in small type at the bottom of the email or text. Here is the quick version of the check:

1. 1
   Find the disclaimer link at the foot of the message. If there isn't one, take the sender's domain and try adding /disclaimer or /disclosure to it.
2. 2
   Search the page for the ticker. Recent compensation is usually listed newest first, one paragraph per campaign.
3. 3
   Read four things: the amount, who paid it (the company, a named third party, or an unnamed one), the dates of the campaign, and whether the sender or the payer may sell shares while it runs.
4. 4
   Look the ticker up on a tracker that has already collected the disclosures from many senders, so you can see the whole campaign and its history in one place rather than one newsletter's slice.

Our field-by-field guide to reading a disclaimer covers step three in detail, and every ticker with a disclosed promotion has a record in the promoted tickers index.

Not every unsolicited stock tip is a disclosed newsletter promotion. Regulators describe a second category that is outright fraud, and it tends to look different:

• No disclosure at all. A message that pushes a specific stock and names no sender, no website and no compensation is a much bigger warning sign than one that does.
• A personal tone from a stranger. FINRA warns about "wrong number" texts and invitations into investment clubs on encrypted chat apps, where a friendly stranger builds trust before naming a low-priced stock. Those usually involve no public promotion or disclosure at all (FINRA on low-priced stocks).
• Promises. Guaranteed returns, inside information, or pressure to buy before a deadline.

Watch for vague disclosures too. The SEC's tips for checking out newsletters single out lines like "from time to time we may receive compensation from companies we write about" as a red flag, because they name no payer and no amount.

Promotion disclaimers are written by lawyers to protect the sender, which makes them unusually candid. It's common to find statements that the content is paid advertising, that only favorable information is published, that the sender does no research on the company, and that the payer or its affiliates may sell shares during the campaign. Some go further and say the stock is likely to fall when the campaign ends.

None of that appears in the subject line. Reading it once for a sender you hear from often is a good way to calibrate how much weight its next message deserves.

Promotional email from a real sender almost always carries an unsubscribe link, and US marketing texts generally let you opt out by replying STOP. Both work for the lists you actually joined. Because lists are shared across brands, expect to unsubscribe from several senders before the volume drops.

• Use the unsubscribe link in emails from identifiable newsletters. Don't click links in messages from senders you can't identify; mark those as spam instead.
• Reply STOP to texts from a short code or a named sender. For texts from unknown numbers, most US carriers let you forward the message to 7726 to report it as spam.
• Give alert sign-up forms a separate email address if you want to keep receiving some of them without flooding your main inbox.

If a message looks like fraud rather than a disclosed promotion, you can report it to the SEC through its tips and complaints portal.

Some traders want these messages, not as advice but as information: a paid campaign is a known source of attention and volume on a small stock, and knowing one is running is useful context whether you trade it, avoid it, or already hold it. The problem is that the facts are scattered across hundreds of disclaimer pages and one campaign arrives as a dozen separate emails.

That's the gap we fill. We read the disclosures from the senders on our tracked list, collapse each campaign to one deal however many newsletters carried it, and record who paid, how much, the window and what the price did. The monthly and annual reports summarize the record, and the most promoted stocks leaderboard shows which tickers keep coming back.