In December 2016 I started a stock-picking contest on this forum, and we’ve been doing it annually ever since. Here are the rules.
Before market open on Monday, January 4, each contestant picks twenty stocks, each with an average daily total over the last three months greater than $50,000 and a price greater than $1, and publishes the list of those stocks in this forum thread. Contestants will set up a public live strategy in their account with the words “2021” and “Contest” in the name; those live strategies will hold those twenty stocks until market close on December 31. (This is a buy-and-hold contest; there is no further stock-picking after New Year’s.) There are no prizes, but there is conversation! Contestants can submit more than one group of stocks. We also like to track Eddy Elfenbein’s picks for comparison, and in 2020 Kumar did us the favor of adding Kiplinger’s picks to the contest too.
We’ll have the final results of the 2020 contest pretty soon. At the moment, Kiplinger’s is in the lead, though Kumar’s mid-cap growth strategy could easily overtake it.
Please list your picks on this thread or else provide a link to the live strategy so that we can see it. And please respond before January 4.
Go to https://www.portfolio123.com/app/opener/PTF/search and put in “2020” in model name. X out the author field and make sure Model Type is “Live Strategy.” You’ll see 17 live strategies and their annualized returns; you can see each one’s picks by clicking on it.
Is there some reason why ETFs cannot be used in this contest? Perhaps the organizer and contestants recognize that the ground is not even and that ETFs would have a significant, unfair advantage over stock-based portfolios?
Is there any interest in an annual ETF-based contest with different criteria? Please let me know and I’ll organize it!
I don’t see why we shouldn’t open the contest to ETFs too, or a combination of stocks and ETFs in a book. But not leveraged ETFs. That would not make for a level playing field.
Yuval - I don’t plan on participating, it’s not my thing. But I do have a suggestion and that is to limit entries to one per person. I think it is better all around if everyone has to commit to one set of 20 stocks.
I agree with Steve that there should be only one list per contestant - and that can be either stocks or ETFs.
As Juval mentioned in the initial post, the participation in this contest should spur discussion. So it would be great to have at least a two-liner from each participant to describe what is behind his/her strategy. For my strategy I selected stocks with low to no debt, and I tried to get some exposure to gold and crypto.
Florian makes a good point here. There should be some rational for the picks.
My list comes from tracking the holdings of a number of hedge funds. They are the consensus new buys from the 13F filings for Q2 and Q3-2020. So we will see how that works out.
Ticker … Name
AMD … Advanced Micro Devices Inc
CCXI … ChemoCentryx Inc
CRSP … CRISPR Therapeutics AG
DKNG … DraftKings Inc
DOCU … DocuSign Inc.
FLEX … Flex Ltd
FND … Floor & Decor Holdings Inc
GDDY … GoDaddy Inc
IOVA … Iovance Biotherapeutics Inc
MTCH … Match Group Inc
NPO … EnPro Industries Inc.
PENN … Penn National Gaming Inc
PINS … Pinterest Inc
RPTX … Repare Therapeutics Inc
SHOP … Shopify Inc
SMAR … Smartsheet Inc
SNOW … Snowflake Inc
TEAM … Atlassian Corp Plc
TWLO … Twilio Inc
UBER … Uber Technologies Inc
My selections are based on a couple of ranking systems I backtested quite a bit this year. Most of these companies have high gross margins compared to the industry average, low share turnover, strong value ratios (looking mostly at sales, r&d spending, # of employees, and net income), middling TTM sales growth, and, in terms of their size, low total assets. In addition, I’m currently heavily invested in eight of these companies. In other words, these are relatively safe microcaps and small caps, in my opinion, and are likely to weather unforeseen circumstances.
My Picks:
FIZZ,GHC,IMKTA,JBSS,KMB,MLR,MRK,MUSA,OBCI,ODC,PETS,REGN,SFM,UTMD (Value Universe)
MDLZ,TSN,FE,T (Dividend Stocks)
BRK.B, AMZN (Discretionary Holdings)
Same mixed strategy as '17,'18,'19 (which did very well); '20 I went pure value, which got crushed.
I’ll throw my hat in the ring this year. These are the top 20 from my January 2021 research cycle. I rarely hold a stock for more than six months, let alone a year. However my top 20 from January last year, had I held them, did very well, so…
I built this research process back in 1995. Went live in 1997. Hasn’t changed much since. I spent years coding it onto P123 since the site capability took a long time to evolve into handling it.
Basically a dynamic factor weighting foundation with added risk/reward computations and a little MPT.
