Investing & Dividends Misleading — the headline number is real but unrepresentativ

By the Income Reality Check Editorial Team · Updated 2026-05-09 · 7 min read

4 stocks to buy now: what Jeremy Lefebvre’s May 2026 picks leave out

Verdict: Misleading — the headline number is real but unrepresentative. The 95% and 749% gains the creator cites are real, but he booked them from entry prices a 2026 viewer can’t get, and the 30%+ annual returns he projects are far above what professional money managers actually deliver.

In “4 Stocks to Buy Now‼️ May 2026,” Jeremy Lefebvre — the creator behind the Financial Education channel and 1000xstocks.com — tells viewers his public account jumped from $3.3 million to $3.85 million in a month and walks through four growth stocks he’s buying: SoFi Technologies, ServiceNow, e.l.f. Beauty and Celsius Holdings. The implied promise is that following along will generate similar wealth. The companies are real. The math is the part worth a closer look.

What the video actually claims

Lefebvre frames the video around four “growth stocks at attractive valuations.” For SoFi (SOFI), he says he’s up 95% on his public-account position after first buying at $6.90; he calls anything under $15 a “great buy zone” with the stock at $16. For ServiceNow (NOW), he acknowledges the stock is down 52% year-over-year to roughly $91 but argues his “base case” projects a stock price of $237–$277 by 2030, “right around 30%” compound annual growth.

For e.l.f. Beauty (ELF), he says he’s up 749% from a $7.28 entry in February 2019 and tells viewers, “Anything under $100 is a buy until you cry.” His base case projects $206–$241 by the end of the decade, a 35–40% CAGR; his bull case implies a 50%+ CAGR. For Celsius Holdings (CELH), trading near $33 after the Alani Nu and Rockstar acquisitions, his base case targets a 25–30% CAGR through 2030.

The video also pitches his paid products several times: the “Become a Master Stock Market Millionaire” playbook, Stock Options Mastery, Dividend Investing Mastery, Valuations Mastery, 1000xstocks.com, a private Discord, exclusive weekly videos and physical “membership cards” for lifetime members. The pinned comment is the application form. None of this is hidden — but it’s the real business being run on top of the four-stock framing.

What the method actually requires

Strip away the screen-time on individual tickers and the implicit method is “pick four growth stocks per month and compound at 25–50% annually.” That’s the rate that would matter. Long-running data suggests it’s also the rate almost nobody hits.

S&P Dow Jones Indices’ SPIVA scorecard tracks how often active U.S. equity funds — run by full-time professionals with research budgets — beat their index benchmark. In 2024, 79% of large-cap active funds underperformed the S&P 500, and the long-run average underperformance rate since 2001 is roughly 64%. Morningstar’s year-end 2025 Active/Passive Barometer was even harsher over a longer window: only about 21% of active strategies survived and beat their average passive peer over the 10 years through June 2025, per CNBC’s reporting on the data. U.S. large-cap was the weakest category.

Those failure rates are for managers who pick dozens of stocks across a portfolio with formal risk controls. A retail investor following four tickers a month from a YouTube video is doing something far more concentrated and far less diversified. The S&P 500’s long-run total return is roughly 10% per year before inflation; Lefebvre’s “base case” assumes you’ll triple that with stocks he’s already public on.

The other pricing problem is hindsight. The 95% gain on SoFi was earned by buying at $6.90, not at $16. The 749% gain on ELF was earned by buying at $7.28 in 2019, not at $61 — a price that already sits 60% below ELF’s 52-week high of $150.99. Buying SoFi today means buying after a 13% drop on weak forward guidance following Q1 2026 earnings, per The Motley Fool. Buying ServiceNow today means buying a stock that, per Motley Fool reporting, has been decelerating from 30%-range growth into the low 20s as it scales and is down 39% year-to-date. Past CAGRs from earlier entry prices don’t transfer to today’s buyers; the video collapses the two.

Who actually wins this game

The honest answer is that the channel does. Bloomberg has reported on creator-economy deals where finance influencers can earn six figures or more from sponsorship and product sales — and Financial Education’s actual product line is membership and courses, not the stocks themselves. A subscriber who pays for a course or a 1000xstocks.com seat is a sure revenue line. A viewer who buys SoFi at $16 is not.

That isn’t an accusation of fraud. Lefebvre is generally upfront that he owns the stocks he discusses, and his public-account framing makes the conflict explicit. But it’s the structural reality: the income engine the video reliably produces flows to the creator. U.S. readers should also know that the SEC’s anti-touting rules under Section 17(b) of the Securities Act require paid promoters of a security to disclose compensation and the amount, and the SEC’s Office of Investor Education advises investors to “never make investment decisions based solely on information from social media platforms or apps.” UK readers should know the FCA has been running a coordinated international crackdown on unauthorised “finfluencers,” with arrests, cease-and-desist letters and over 650 social-media takedown requests in 2025. India’s SEBI, Australia’s ASIC and Canada’s OSC have run parallel actions.

What you’d realistically earn

The base rate is the S&P 500: roughly 10% nominal return per year over long periods, before fees and taxes. Beating that consistently is the rare outcome. Morningstar’s data implies a ballpark 1-in-5 chance of beating the index over a decade if you’re a paid professional running an active fund; the odds for a retail investor copying four picks a month aren’t published, but the academic literature on retail trading suggests they are worse, not better. Multiple long-term datasets (Dalbar, et al.) put the average retail equity investor several percentage points behind the S&P each year, mostly because of timing — buying after rallies, selling into drawdowns.

Lefebvre’s specific projections deserve to be sized against that. A 30% base-case CAGR over five years on a single stock would, if it occurred, be roughly triple the long-run market average. A 50%+ bull-case CAGR would put the stock among the top handful of names in the market over that period. Either is possible. Neither is the expected value. And concentrated bets that miss don’t fail gently: ServiceNow is currently a real-time example, down 39% YTD as the SaaS-and-AI rotation hit, despite genuinely strong revenue growth.

If a viewer commits, say, $10,000 across these four picks today, the realistic forward-looking range — covering most plausible scenarios over five years — is something like a low-single-digit annualized loss in a bear case to mid-teens annualized return in a bull case, with the median outcome probably tracking the broader market within a few points. That’s not nothing. It’s just nothing like the 25–50% headline figure the video implies.

Who this is (and isn’t) for

This kind of content is reasonable as entertainment or as a starting list for further research, especially for a viewer who already understands position sizing, valuation and concentration risk. It is not reasonable as a substitute for a plan. Anyone treating four monthly YouTube picks as a portfolio strategy — especially if those picks crowd out broad-market index exposure — is taking on risk the video doesn’t price. Beginners with no emergency fund, no diversified core holdings and no tolerance for a 50% drawdown on any single position should be especially cautious, regardless of how confident the on-screen narrator sounds.

For investing context on the dividend side of the same creator-driven retail-investing universe, see our review of a $750,000 dividend portfolio creator’s monthly numbers, and our broader sweep of supposedly easy ways to get rich in 2026.

What to remember

The four stocks in this video are real businesses, and the past gains the creator cites are real on the years he booked them. The misleading part is the implied transfer: a viewer who buys today is buying at a different price, in a different cycle, with a different probability distribution. None of the published evidence on active management or retail trading supports the 25–50% CAGR framing. The income that this video reliably produces flows to the channel and its course funnel — not, mechanically, to the audience.

Nothing here is individualized investment advice. It’s a reality check on a YouTube pitch.

View counts and stock prices may have changed since publication.