How is this cheap lazy investing? First, there are lots of companies that will charge you from $5 – $5,000 to do what you can do for free. And if you have ever tried doing much of anything with a bad credit rating, you know it is hard. It is less work to maintain good credit than to re-establish it, and still less work to re-establish knowing what to do than guessing.

This particular tease really caught my eye, and the Gumshoe’s thinkolator came up with a stock I looked at a long time ago (Precision Castparts Corp. (PCP)) and should have bought then. Now, I will hold off for the drop that askStockGuru is looking for today, i.e., around $74.

So, today the numbers look good. I’m cheap (are you getting that?), so I am going to wait on a pullback from the current ~$23 to somewhere in the 20′s . Hopefully it will be shortly before an earnings announcement as I notice they are good about providing a positive surprise there.

Anyway, today’s junk mail was this offer for a special report of ten top picks. I would have bit, knowing full well it would increase the work of my spam filter. But then I noticed that they had eight links in the email to the same place to get the free report. Which tells me that they are either too dumb to hire a good web copy writer for their pitches or are only looking for people so dumb that they have to be shown eight times how to get something for free. I can understand two (top and bottom of the email), even three if it is a really long email. But eight links? Nah, that’s too many. I’ll pass.

If you want to get it anyway, those eight links point to http://www.newsletteradvisors.com. It actually came with a parameter, but that probably confirms my email address as a sucker, so I’m leaving it off.

I haven’t done the research on their recommendations yet. I will say, when it comes to consumer stocks, I always expect the run to be a fad, try to find it on the way up, and then figure a point where I can get out with a small profit and what I call “free stock”, which means that I managed to sell enough of the stock I bought within a year to profit 15% (to cover the taxes) and still have stock to hang on to. If the stock goes down, I’m not really out anything except the satisfaction of “I told you so”. This only failed once, with Washington Mutual. If I had dumped it all, I would have doubled my money in 14 hours. Instead, I had a one day high, and now own stock that would cost more in commission to sell than I could get for it. Maybe 20 years from now, people will collect loser stocks like cars that didn’t sell well.

There are some good tips on Dolans.com today with their article The 8 Biggest Lies That You Are Being Told About Your Money. There are ten pages to this one. The first is the intro, and the last is the pitch. Your call on where to stop. I noticed that some of the points are the selling points of their competition (brokers and retirement plans), which is all I have to say about that.