Which honestly feels like a reasonable position. Though the untrusting, conspiracy-minded part of my brain wonders if I did review 130 different research papers and found 1 that worked if I'd keep it a secret and just tell the world that they were all crap.

Maybe he could work with someone else to get it to a publication stage? It's super interesting, and combats a well-known problem that you get a lot more out of publishing positive cases (we found a correlation) vs negative cases (we found no correlation), although they're both valuable knowledge.

Look, I know writing stuff up sucks. But it could be a great opportunity to learn a lot of things from a very knowledgable person. With the right prof, it could be a great undergrad project.

>Nothing useful came up,

Except plenty useful came up. "Literally every single paper was either p-hacked, overfit, or a subsample of favourable data was selected" out of 130+ is a significant result. The media would jump on this, and they just might even without any proof of work.

Which is mildly interesting, but not something other people should use for investment decisions.

I use the "everything is at least 10x greater on the internet" rule.