Five Stocks to Sell Now: Chaikin’s Other Report

The 401(ai), Marc Chaikin’s new five-stock AI retirement portfolio, is only half the product. The other half is a companion report titled “Five Stocks to Sell Now,” five companies where “the power gauge is currently flashing warning signs,” and the pairing is the most coherent design we have seen in an AI promo this cycle: one system, applied to both arms of the K. We read the presentation end to end. Our full 401(ai) teardown covers it in detail.

The Sell Side, In the Pitch’s Own Words

The report’s five names are membership content, but the presentation describes the profiles with unusual specificity. Some of the five are “businesses being pressured by this transition,” companies whose models are being disrupted. Some “have weak financials hiding underneath exciting AI stories,” and the pitch has a line for that trap: “a company can have artificial intelligence in its name and exciting technology, Wall Street attention, and still have poor financials and poor earnings trends.” Others show “deteriorating earnings trends,” “signs of institutional money moving the wrong way,” or are “simply stocks where expectations have gotten far ahead of what the underlying business can support.”

That last profile is the quiet one: the pitch is not only warning about broken companies, it is warning about popular AI names with stretched valuations. Each report entry comes with the same discipline as the portfolio: “why it concerns me, what the power gauge is seeing and what would have to change before I’d reconsider.”

The Templates From History

The presentation’s bearish examples, offered as pattern demonstrations, are real companies with real underperformance: WPP, the advertising incumbent that sagged while AppLovin (APP) ran; Gartner, the research incumbent paired against Palantir’s (PLTR) rise; Tillys, the specialty retailer paired against Abercrombie & Fitch’s data-driven turnaround; and Fidelity National Information Services. None of these are confirmed as report names, but they show the falling arm is not hypothetical: the divergences the K-frame describes actually happened, in both directions.

The Philosophy of Selling

The most quotable line in the presentation belongs to the sell side: “the most expensive four words in investing can be, I’ll just hold on, especially when the reason you bought the stock no longer exists.” And the pitch is careful about what it is not asking for: “that doesn’t mean that they blindly sell because Marc Chaikin says so. That’s not how I want anybody to make investment decisions. But they should see what the data says.”

That restraint is worth noting, because unhedged sell advice is where AI promos usually go wrong. The presentation’s other candor markers hold here too: the one volunteered losing example on the buy side, Braze, down about 25% from its rating, and the crystal-ball disclaimer: “The Power Gauge is not a crystal ball. It never has been.” For the system’s mechanics, our Power Gauge explainer covers the 20 factors.

Why a Retirement Pitch Needs a Sell Report

The design logic, in the pitch’s own diagnosis, is paralysis. The target reader is “afraid to buy and then also afraid not to buy,” and the answer is a process for both decisions: “They don’t need another prediction about where the market is going. They need something they can actually follow.” A framework that only says “buy these five” leaves the other half of the portfolio, the part holding yesterday’s winners, untouched. The sell report closes the loop.

The K-frame context: the same forces that lift the rising arm press on the falling one, and the pitch’s own history for that arm, the index-fund lateness argument, cuts both ways, an index holds the losers just as structurally as it misses the winners. Our K-shaped economy explainer covers the full frame.

What You Get

The complete package: the 401(ai) five-stock portfolio report, the Five Stocks to Sell Now report, the eight-company waiting room, and updates “when the evidence materially changes.” Value anchored over $2,000, actual price behind the order-page click, and a 30-day full refund: “for any reason or for no reason at all.” The details are in the presentation.

The Honest Read

Five Stocks to Sell Now is the half of the 401(ai) that most pitches omit, and it is the half that makes the other half credible: a system willing to name its own falling arm is claiming symmetry, not just upside. The honest caveats are the usual ones, the demonstration set is curated toward winners on the buy side and toward famous stumbles on the sell side, and the report names are behind the paywall. But the discipline is real, and for the near-retirement audience this pitch targets, discipline is the product.

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