A Newsletter Named 23 Stocks — Its Biggest Model-Portfolio Winner No Longer Trades

Do you know survivorship bias? During the Second World War, the U.S. Air Force wanted to know where to add armor to its bombers, so it studied the bullet holes on the planes that made it home. A statistician named Abraham Wald flipped the question around: precisely where the returning planes were untouched is where the shot-down ones must have been hit hardest. Count only the survivors, and you get a distorted picture. Stock newsletters run on the same mechanism: a model portfolio loves to show you the winners that are still there. But what happens when the biggest winner itself disappears — not through a price crash, but because the stock simply stops existing? That is exactly what happened with a reader tip that landed issue No. 24 of the newsletter "HOT STOCKS EUROPE," dated November 28, 2025, on our desk: 23 European stocks, carefully presented, complete with price targets, model-portfolio positions, and a year-end review of the "top performers of the past year." We wrote our own deep dive on 21 of them — every figure checked against annual and quarterly reports, not against the newsletter. This article is the wrap-up: what became of the expectations from back then? And what does an eight-month check do to a portfolio whose best-performing position no longer exists?

What "HOT STOCKS EUROPE" Is and How the Publisher Makes Money

According to its own imprint, "HOT STOCKS EUROPE" is a "twice-monthly information service for investments in Europe's growth-market segments," published by B-Inside International Media GmbH, Christaweg 42, 79114 Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany (managing director Tom Jordi Ruesch, commercial register HRB 270560). The editor responsible under German press law (V.i.S.d.P.) is Arno Ruesch; the author of issue No. 24 is Michael Calivas. Issue No. 24 was published on November 28, 2025, in the newsletter's 23rd year, running eight pages. The publisher makes its money the classic way, through subscriptions: €29.50 including German VAT and shipping per month, according to the page-8 imprint.

That same page 8 also discloses the conflict of interest that is worth reading in almost any stock newsletter, translated from the German original:

"The publisher, author, or related third parties may also have entered into long positions in the investments discussed. In that case, a conflict of interest exists within the meaning of EU Market Abuse Regulation No. 596/2014, which we disclose below. […] The publisher, author, or related third parties hold long positions in the following securities named in this newsletter: – . The named persons intend to sell the shares as prices rise."

— "HOT STOCKS EUROPE" issue No. 24, page 8, imprint & disclaimer (translated from German)

Two things are worth noting here, without turning either into an accusation. First, the mechanism itself is transparent and anchored at a fixed spot in every issue — more than many free investment newsletters offer. Second, the field for specifically named long positions was left blank in issue No. 24, as was the field for paid placements. Whether, or to what extent, the publisher, author, or related parties actually held positions in the 23 stocks discussed cannot be read from the issue itself — only that the possibility exists and is disclosed. Now to the substance: what became of the 23 stocks?

All 23 Stocks at a Glance: Expectation vs. Reality

The table below lists all 23 stocks that appear in issue No. 24 — individual write-ups, model-portfolio positions, the year-end review of the "top performers of the past year," and the one stock that appeared only as a chart. The middle column quotes the newsletter as a third party's expectation from November 28, 2025, never as a source for company figures; the right column summarizes what the latest audited report actually shows — every single figure already documented in our linked deep dive.

Nearly all the stocks in the issue can still be found under their original name — but the three exceptions are instructive enough to earn two sections of their own.

What Became of SolGold

On November 28, 2025, SolGold plc was the biggest winner in the newsletter's model portfolio: bought on September 5, 2025, at €0.175, quoted in the newsletter at €0.300, a gain of 71.4 percent. The model portfolio is denominated in euros, but the stock traded in London in pence: for the same date the newsletter cites GBp 26, alongside a Canaccord price target of GBp 46 for its Cascabel copper-gold project in Ecuador. Keeping those two units apart is what makes the later cash offer of 28 pence per share readable. Search for "SolGold" today and you will not find the stock — and that is not a snapshot of our own research, it is a closed matter with its own paper trail.

On March 2, 2026, the High Court of Justice of England and Wales sanctioned the Scheme of Arrangement under which Jiangxi Copper (Hong Kong) Investment Company Limited (JCHK) — the overseas arm of the Chinese copper group Jiangxi Copper — acquired SolGold outright. The relevant Regulatory News Service announcement describes the final steps this way:

"The Scheme Record Time for the Scheme will be 6:00 p.m. on Tuesday 3 March 2026 […] It is anticipated that the Effective Date of the Scheme will be Wednesday 4 March 2026 […] Applications have been made to the FCA and the London Stock Exchange in relation to the cancellation of the listing of SolGold Shares on the Official List […] which are each expected to take place at 7:00 a.m. on 5 March 2026."

— Regulatory News Service, "Court Sanction of Scheme of Arrangement," SolGold plc, March 2, 2026 (investegate.co.uk)

The follow-up announcement from March 4, 2026, confirms completion and states the price: 28 pence in cash per share for every shareholder on the register at the Scheme Record Time.

"the Scheme has now become Effective in accordance with its terms and the entire issued and to be issued ordinary share capital of SolGold is now owned by JCHK."

— Regulatory News Service, "Scheme of Arrangement Becomes Effective," SolGold plc, March 4, 2026 (investegate.co.uk)

In numbers: with roughly 3.0 billion shares outstanding, that works out to a takeover value of about £840 million — publicly cited elsewhere at about £867 million (a figure attributed to the advising law firm Fasken). Since 7:00 a.m. on March 5, 2026, SolGold shares have not traded on the London Stock Exchange or anywhere else. The fundamental-data provider we use confirms this independently: the last quoted price, from March 4, 2026, was 27.95 pence — essentially the takeover price — and every price query since then returns "N/A," with the price history ending on that date. The charting database TradingView, too, no longer returns a stock match for the ticker SOLG.

For you as a reader, that means SolGold is the only stock from issue No. 24 with no deep dive of its own — not for lack of time, but because there is nothing left to analyze. There is no share price, no upcoming annual report, no shareholder meeting, and, in the traditional sense, no shareholders left for an analysis to address. The survivorship bias from the opening shows up here in its purest form: if you look eight months later only at the 20 unchanged names and their ongoing share prices, you might miss that the position with the largest reported gain is no longer part of the picture at all — not because it failed, but because it was bought out at a fixed price before anyone could see how the Cascabel story would have played out from here.

Three Names That No Longer Exist As Such

Besides SolGold, two more stocks from the issue now trade under a different name than the newsletter used — in both cases without any change in share price mechanics or a delisting, but with real potential for confusion if you search for the same name eight months later.

DPM Metals Inc. (Toronto Stock Exchange: DPM) was called Dundee Precious Metals Inc. until September 12, 2025 — exactly the name under which the newsletter introduced the stock. The company's own quarterly report documents the change:

"Effective September 12, 2025, DPM changed its name from Dundee Precious Metals Inc. to DPM Metals Inc., and as part of this transition, its subsidiary companies have also adopted corresponding name changes, where applicable, to align with its new brand identity."

— DPM Metals Inc., Fourth Quarter 2025 report (MD&A), section "Our Business," p. 3

The TSX: DPM ticker stayed the same; only the name over the door changed — a pure rebrand triggered by the $1.5 billion acquisition of Adriatic Metals plc completed on September 3, 2025. Adriatic itself, until then independently listed on the London Stock Exchange and the Australian ASX, has not existed as a standalone stock since: the UK High Court sanctioned the relevant Scheme of Arrangement, the deal closed on September 3, 2025 ($441.4 million cash plus 54,935,109 new DPM shares), and the data provider we use shows no ongoing prices for either the London listing (ADT1.LSE) or the Australian CDIs since. Details on that acquisition, including a purchase-price allocation with zero dollars of goodwill, are in our DPM Metals analysis.

Trekor Metals Limited, in turn, was called Taseko Mines Limited until June 25, 2026 — mentioned in the newsletter only in passing, as a chart on page 1, with no ticker or price in the editorial text. The change is documented by two independent sources: the SEC submissions record for the company (CIK 0000878518) lists "Trekor Metals Ltd" as the current name and "TASEKO MINES LTD" under `formerNames`; the company's own press release confirms the date and sequence in detail: shareholders approved the renaming at the annual general meeting; the new name, Trekor Metals Limited, became effective on June 25, 2026. Trading under the new name began on June 29, 2026, on the Toronto Stock Exchange and NYSE American, and on June 30, 2026, on the London Stock Exchange — the ticker symbols themselves (TSX: TKO, NYSE American: TGB, LSE: TKO) stayed the same, while the ISIN (new: CA89472Y1079) and CUSIP (new: 89472Y107) changed (source: "Taseko Annual General Meeting Voting Results and Change of Name," press release, trekormetals.com, June 24, 2026).

What This Series Taught Us About Expectations

A stock newsletter is a snapshot, not a permanent state — that sounds obvious until you run it against real numbers. That shows up clearly in the three stocks in the chart below – Pfisterer, SUSS MicroTec, and The Platform Group – for which the newsletter cited a specific analyst price target. (R&S Group, Thor Explorations, and Pharming Group also had a concrete price target in the newsletter, and all three are likewise still tradable and already listed with their target in the table above – this section just takes a closer look at the three stocks in the chart.)

The expectation that held up best was, of all things, the one that looked least like a bet: Nokia. The newsletter called the stock "one of the base positions in Europe's AI cycle" and pointed to a new 2028 target of €2.7 to 3.2 billion in comparable operating profit — a target that had barely been announced nine days before the issue went out. Our Nokia analysis shows that Nokia did, in fact, announce exactly that target at its Capital Markets Day on November 19, 2025, documented in its own SEC filing (Form 6-K) — the newsletter's claim was not exaggerated, it was accurately reported. What the newsletter could not show, because it was published eight months before our own reporting cutoff, is how expensive the path to that target already looks in the latest report: in the second quarter of 2026, Nokia's own filing showed both a reported operating loss of €50 million and a comparable profit of €434 million in the very same report. The cited figure was correct; whether it pays off by 2028 is a separate question.

The expectation that broke down most sharply was The Platform Group. The newsletter cited three price targets — €19.50 (MWB Research), €20 (First Berlin), and €21 (Nuways) — against a share price of €6.60, based on the company's own "Vision 2030" (at least €3 billion in revenue). Eight months later, the stock trades at €0.78 — about 88 percent below the newsletter's price and more than 96 percent below the average of the three cited targets. Our Platform Group analysis lays out what happened in between: a media report on cancelled bank loans and a tax claim, and a criminal complaint under review by the Chemnitz public prosecutor's office — allegations the company itself calls "distorted and false claims," with no court ruling yet. Importantly, neither the newsletter nor the analyst firms it cited could have known about this in November 2025. That does not make the price targets dishonest — it makes them exactly what any price target is: a snapshot based on the information known at the time, not a guarantee.

The lesson from both cases together: an eight-month-old price target is neither automatically worthless nor automatically reliable. It pays to read it for exactly what it is — one firm's opinion as of one specific date — and then check for yourself what has happened in the company's own filings since.

A Human Conclusion

Back to the survivorship bias from the opening. A model portfolio checked eight months later never automatically shows you the complete picture — not because anyone meant to deceive, but because reality itself removes some positions from the frame before anyone can look back at them. SolGold was the biggest winner in this issue, and it is nonetheless the only stock with no analysis of its own, because the stock simply no longer exists. Two more stocks now trade under new names, with nothing about the underlying business having changed. And among the three stocks in the price-target chart, eight months were sometimes enough to nearly confirm a target (Pfisterer), sometimes enough to beat it (SUSS MicroTec), and sometimes enough to miss it by more than 96 percent (The Platform Group) — often for reasons that simply were not knowable at the starting point. So the honest question is not "was the newsletter good or bad?" but: do you read a recommendation for what it is — a snapshot with a date stamped on it — or as a promise that automatically keeps applying? What you make of that is your decision. And that is exactly as it should be.

Sources

All original sources used in this overview — for your own reading:

• "HOT STOCKS EUROPE," issue No. 24, dated November 28, 2025, B-Inside International Media GmbH, Freiburg, Germany (author Michael Calivas, editor responsible Arno Ruesch) – a third party's opinion and expectation, not a source for company figures.
• Our 21 published individual analyses of the stocks discussed in issue No. 24 (each linked in the table above) – every figure there checked individually against annual and quarterly reports.
• Regulatory News Service (investegate.co.uk) – "Court Sanction of Scheme of Arrangement," SolGold plc, March 2, 2026 and "Scheme of Arrangement Becomes Effective," SolGold plc, March 4, 2026.
• DPM Metals Inc. – Fourth Quarter 2025 report (MD&A), section "Our Business," p. 3 (dpmmetals.com), already cited in our DPM Metals analysis.
• "Taseko Annual General Meeting Voting Results and Change of Name," press release, trekormetals.com, June 24, 2026; SEC submissions record for CIK 0000878518 (data.sec.gov), field "formerNames."
• Fundamental data (prices, as of July 24-27, 2026), reconciled with the respective annual and quarterly reports.

Transparency & disclaimer: This overview is a journalistic assessment of publicly available information and does not constitute investment advice, a regulated financial analysis, or a solicitation to buy or sell securities. Stock investments carry substantial risk, including total loss. All information is provided without guarantee; the date of each figure is noted in the text. As of publication, the author holds no position in the securities mentioned.