Dylan Jovine’s track record has two halves. The marketing materials show the wins: a 39.96% compound annual growth rate, ChemoCentryx at +336%, a crash warning that was right. The other half — the calls that were early, the television appearance that fell flat, the 19 losers inside the closed portfolio, the sub-product picks that never got acquired — lives in the same archives, documented by Jovine himself on his own blog and in his own biography pages. Both halves are the record. The full distribution is what tells you what kind of investor you are reading.

The Market Timing Calls

Jovine has made three major directional calls on the U.S. stock market across a 20-year span. All three were correct on direction. The timing varied, and the timing is the variable that determines whether a directional call makes or costs you money.

April 2006: The Crash Warning

On June 9, 2006, Jovine published a post on his personal blog at dylanjovine.com titled “Inside the Markets Recent Drop.” The Dow had pulled back roughly 1,000 points from its highs. The front page of Barron’s that week quoted fund managers predicting the index would hit 12,000. Everyone was bullish.

Jovine republished an excerpt from his April 2006 issue of Fallen Angel Stocks titled “Why the Stock Market is Overvalued.” The argument was structural: the economy sat at the peak of a cyclical expansion, interest rates were rising, gas prices were climbing, and consumer spending — two-thirds of the economy — was about to slow. “Yes, I think the market as a whole has no place else to go but down,” he wrote. “It is not a question of ‘if.’ It is a question of ‘when.’”

The Dow was around 11,000 when he wrote that. It ran to 14,164 before the October 2007 peak — a 3,000-point rally after the call. By March 2009 the market sat at 6,547, down 54% from the peak. Jovine was correct on direction, early by roughly 16 months. Followers who went defensive in 2006 sat out that final leg of the bull run before the thesis validated. Being early and being wrong look the same until the turn arrives.

On December 19, 2006, he made the warning official in The Tycoon Report, his free newsletter with over 500,000 subscribers. That date appears on every biography page as the first of several public warnings.

Early 2009: The Bottom Call

When the market was at its darkest point, Jovine flipped. He told his Tycoon Report readers this would be “the greatest opportunity since the Great Depression.” He went on Fox Business to make the case on national television.

The call was correct. The market bottomed in March 2009 and produced the longest bull run in American history — roughly 400% from the low to the February 2020 peak. The Fox Business appearance was a delivery failure. Jovine has acknowledged in his own biography that he was “terrible in front of the news camera” and was never invited back. The substance was correct. The execution fell short. A former Wall Street broker who had sold a company to Agora and served half a million readers went on national television, delivered the call of a lifetime, and was bad enough at it that the network lost interest.

March 12, 2020: The COVID Call

During the COVID crash, Jovine published “4 Steps to Profit from this Market Panic” on his blog — the exact week of the bottom. He told readers to write a shopping list of stocks they had always wanted to own but missed. He mentioned Starbucks specifically, a stock he had bought at $13.75 during the 2008-2009 crash that later traded above $100.

The S&P 500 bottomed on March 23, 2020. The call landed within weeks of the turn.

Three directional calls, three correct outcomes, three timing profiles. The 2006 call was early by over a year, the 2009 call sat on the bottom, and the 2020 call landed within weeks of the turn. The pattern is a framework for reading cycles and acting on the evidence, and the framework has held across two decades and three dislocations.

The Takeover Picks

Jovine’s early career was built on a specific skill: picking stocks shortly before they were acquired. The most documented example is Paramount Communications, which Viacom acquired in a hostile deal in 1994. Jovine has stated in promotional materials that he recommended Paramount roughly three months before the buyout was announced, booking a 100% gain. The Paramount-Viacom deal closed in 1994, placing the call during his early brokerage years.

The value calls from this period appear consistently across his marketing materials:

  • American Express, purchased at $14.24 per share, returned roughly 624-646% over approximately four years.
  • Starbucks, purchased at $13.75 during the 2008-2009 crash, later traded above $100.
  • FactSet Research returned approximately 235% over a multi-year hold.
  • AutoNation and US Reinsurance are cited as additional winners.

These are value investments: blue-chip companies and recognized brands trading at post-crash discounts, held for years. The methodology is consistent with what Jovine teaches at Behind the Markets — durable franchises trading below their long-term value, the same instinct that made him effective at takeover targets applied to a longer horizon.

The Behind the Markets Portfolio

In 2018, Jovine founded Behind the Markets and began publishing a model portfolio with a dedicated closed-trade ledger on the company website. That kind of transparency is unusual in the newsletter industry, where most publishers cite selected winners while Jovine publishes the full distribution.

Closed Portfolio (2018-2025):

  • 70 closed trades
  • 72.9% win rate (51 winners out of 70)
  • +1,207% total return
  • 39.96% compound annual growth rate
  • Average return per trade: +39.8%

The S&P 500 returned roughly 150-180% over the same seven-year period, the Nasdaq returned about 250-280%, and a 39.96% CAGR over seven years places the portfolio in rare company. A 70-trade sample over that span means each position carries meaningful weight, and past performance does not guarantee future results — the win rate tells you the frequency of success, and the average return tells you the magnitude.

The Misses

The wins are half the record. The misses are the other half, and Jovine has documented them in his own writing across his blog, his biography pages, and his marketing materials.

The closed portfolio’s 72.9% win rate means 19 of 70 trades lost money. The specific losers are not itemized on the track record page, and the average loss on losing trades is not published there. The full distribution of losses is documented through third-party tracking and subscriber reports rather than a publisher-hosted ledger. What the published record tells you is the shape: roughly three out of four trades win, and the average return across all trades is +39.8%, which means the winners carry the losers comfortably.

The 2006 warning carried a timing cost. Followers who went defensive in April 2006 sat out a 3,000-point rally from Dow 11,000 to 14,164 before the crash validated the thesis in October 2007. Sixteen months early on a directional call is being right in a way that costs money if you act on it immediately and the market keeps climbing.

The Fox Business appearance in early 2009 was a delivery failure on a correct call. Jovine went on national television to argue the bottom was in, performed poorly enough that the network never invited him back, and has acknowledged this in his own biography. The call was right. The medium was wrong for the messenger.

Takeover Targets, Jovine’s $1,497-per-year merger arbitrage service, cites a 97.5% success rate across 36 trades. Third-party tracking and subscriber reports note that several of the most heavily promoted takeover candidates did not receive buyout offers within the expected timeframe. The service’s own marketing acknowledges that not every teased target gets acquired, and the gap between the headline success rate and the tracked outcomes is where the risk in merger arbitrage lives.

Breakthrough Wealth, the $1,997-per-year micro-cap service, carries a 2.3 out of 5 rating across 28 subscriber reviews on third-party tracking sites, with investment performance rated 2.1 and value for price rated 1.9. One tracked teaser pitched a $3 online tutoring stock as the “Amazon of On-Demand Learning.” Another pitched Clovis Oncology, which filed for bankruptcy. The service does not publish a dedicated closed-portfolio ledger the way the flagship Behind the Markets product does.

Biotech Insider, the $2,997-per-year biotech service, carries a stated 30% expected loss rate. Jovine wrote on his own blog in July 2020 that the service expects 30% of investments to lose money. The venture capital framing is his own analogy — biotech investing is concentrated bets on clinical outcomes, and a meaningful percentage will fail by design. The honesty about the loss rate is stronger than any disclaimer language. It sets honest expectations before you read a single pick.

The geothermal call from February 2026, made at the AI Fuel Summit, included a private geothermal company that IPO’d in May 2026 at a $1.9 billion valuation. That company is trading around $24, down roughly 45% from a post-IPO high near $42. The directional call was correct — the company exists, the IPO happened, the geothermal thesis is real. The public-market reality has been harsher than the private-market thesis. The same pattern shows up in the gap between the $500 trillion headline claim on the seabed mining promo and the $16-30 trillion independent estimate from Arthur D. Little: the thesis is sound, the headline framing runs ahead of the economics.

The Shape of the Distribution

The track record has a structure. Jovine identifies a structural trend — a market cycle, a takeover target, a thematic shift — and commits with conviction. When the thesis arrives on his timeline, the magnitude is large. When it arrives late or not at all, the cost is real and documented.

The 2006 warning and the 2009 bottom call are the same skill applied in opposite directions. The Paramount takeover pick and the Takeover Targets misses are the same methodology producing different outcomes. The 39.96% CAGR and the 19 unitemized losers sit inside the same portfolio. The honesty about the misses is what makes the track record usable, because you know the shape of the outcome range before you read a single current recommendation.

Jovine publishes the full distribution on the flagship product. He has written about the Fox Business failure on his own biography page. He has stated the 30% expected loss rate for biotech investing in his own words. He has acknowledged the early timing on the 2006 call. The wins are documented with dates and returns. The misses appear in the same blog archive, the same biography pages, and the same marketing materials.

The magnitude of the winners carries the average across the full cycle. The frequency of the losers is what tests the patience of anyone following along. Both are part of the same method, and the full record is the only honest way to read what comes next from this desk. For the broader biography, see Dylan Jovine: Wall Street’s Takeover Kid, and for the earlier market-timing calls this record builds on, see Dylan Jovine 2006–2009 Market Calls: Track Record. For his net worth and business background, see Dylan Jovine Net Worth. For the full gurus index, see Guru Dossiers.