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Not MONEY, of course. but a slew of flashy new investing magazines may be hazardous to your wealth. A good example is MoneyWorld. In its December 1995 cover story "Black Gold," it laid out the prospects for Delta Petroleum, a small Denver oil company that was set to participate in an "oil bonanza" from which investors might reap "1,000% gains." The catch, buried in the fine print: MoneyWorld's parent, Corporate Relations Group, has a marketing deal with Delta. Indeed, MoneyWorld is one of a growing breed of glossy promotional magazines that hype small companies in return for big bucks--and sometimes a chunk of the company's stock. Says John Markese, president of the American Association of Individual Investors: "Some of these magazines can be deceptive and could create great danger for individual investors."

To understand how these magazines operate, consider that over the past year Delta paid Corporate Relations Group some $705,000 in cash and stock as well as options on an additional 350,000 shares of Delta, according to Delta's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Some $250,000 of that money went to buy the space for the glowing four-page cover story. And all of the information in the article came straight from Delta, according to Roberto Veitia, publisher of the monthly MoneyWorld (circulation: 150,000). Says Veitia unapologetically: "Everything we publish is approved by a corporate officer of the company profiled." That would include a statement in a more recent issue saying that Delta Petroleum is the "oil play of the decade." True journalists would have had objective outside sources confirm that statement; MoneyWorld did not.

Since the story appeared, the stock has skidded from $7.50 to $6.50. So if you had bought Delta stock, you would be down almost 15%. The Corporate Relations Group, on the other hand, bought 231,000 shares directly from Delta in August of 1995 for $3.25 a share, when the stock was selling for $6.75 a share. Today those shares would be worth double what Veitia's company paid for them. MoneyWorld is far from the only so-called magazine for investors out there. According to an estimate by a lawyer at the North American Securities Administrators Association, dozens of these magazines now exist. They buy readers' names from diverse sources; stockbrokers, credit-card companies and publishing houses (not MONEY) will sell them mailing lists. They typically send the magazines out free to the names on these lists, and the magazines are not usually available on the newsstand.

The potential danger for small investors is that these magazines generally look and read like legitimate financial journalism. MoneyWorld, in fact, does such a good copycatting job that 30,000 readers pay $29.95 to subscribe for a year. (You get three copies free if your name is on one of their mailing lists.) Profit Investor Portfolio, a one-year-old bimonthly magazine (also $29.95 a year) that goes out to 55,000 wealthy investors, offers colorful bonus stories about resorts in Telluride and Palm Springs. Another publication, Opportunist, tantalizes its 250,000 readers with cover shots of business moguls such as Michael Eisner and Ted Turner.

A different type of pseudomoney magazine is the kind published by financial services companies to bring in more clients. For example, Real Money (circulation: 5,000) is a fledgling quarterly magazine advertised on CNN that promotes commodity investments. You might not know, however, that the commodities dealer Monex Deposit Co. publishes the magazine and writes some of the articles. The logo for Real Money looked so much like MONEY's that Time Inc., parent of MONEY, asked them to change it, which they did.

In some of these magazines, it can be awfully hard--if not impossible--to determine that the "articles" are actually advertorials. For example, while the words "special advertorial feature" ran at the bottom of MoneyWorld's story on Delta, no such disclaimer appears on its piece about Tracker Corp. of America, a maker of bar-code labels, with whom Corporate Relations Group has a marketing contract and in which it once held a stake. In tiny type, Profit Investor Portfolio notifies any readers who bother to read a short paragraph on the contents page that the editor and family members might own stock in or be consultants to companies reviewed in the magazine. "Those types of disclosures can make it difficult to take regulatory action against this type of publication," says Joan McKown, chief counsel for the division of enforcement at the SEC.

The lesson for investors: Beware of false profits. Jayne Lanza, the publisher of Profit Investor Portfolio, admits that her magazine tries to portray its featured companies "in a really attractive light." For instance, in its March/April issue, Profit praised the "phenomenal success" of Xecom, a small OTC telecommunications firm. In reality, Xecom lost more than $1 million last year. But the article lays out Xecom's potential for a phenomenal increase in earnings over the next five years. What isn't disclosed is that in return for running the Xecom article, Profit received nearly $35,000 in cash. On top of that, Profit also bought nearly $100,000 of Xecom stock--most of it for a more than 50% discount--before publication of the March/April issue. If you had bought Xecom when Profit profiled it, you'd be out more than 50%: The stock has dropped from slightly above $2 a share in mid-March to just $1.

To avoid getting snookered, always look to see if there are words saying the investments touted will enrich the publishers; usually such disclosures appear along with the masthead or at the end of a particular feature story. In addition, be wary of the "too good to be true" stories, which include unrealistic predictions for the companies and lack independent sources in the article to verify such optimism. "Anytime anyone is making glowing recommendations about a particular type of investment, we would suggest consumer caution," says Lesley Fair, an attorney in the division of advertising practices at the Federal Trade Commission. In other words, you should view these publications for what they really are: advertisements.