Best and Worst of MFI

I have been at MFI for pushing 4 years. And after 4 years I am pretty much even-steven. Over that time I have owned 152 unique stocks. It is pretty much a toss-up on which two were the worst.

IAR - This was a terrible mistake. I bought them around $17 a share. I had been doing some studies in the fall of 2007 that showed that larger MFI stocks (over $1b market cap) had thrashed smaller stocks and I had been weighted to smaller stocks. Barron's had just written a favorable article on IAR, George Soros had bought them and they paid a nice dividend, having dropped from $33 to $17 since the summer of 2007. They quickly dropped to $12 and I did what you should not do, I doubled my investment. Of course today they are about 2 cents a share as they had crushing debt.

CHCG is the second, I actually still own them and have done so for about three years, buying new shares each new year. But it has been a steady drop down, first shares were bought around $6, then $3 and then $1.50. So I do have a lot of shares, but at 80 cents a piece I am deeply underwater.

My best stock ever has been TC. I bought a ton of shares at around $3, and sold them steadily as they went to $11. However, had I simply followed the rules, I'd have an even much larger gain as they're around $13 now. Still, I like TC. My other two best stocks were not technically MFI: FSUMF and WILC. I sold FSUMF a bit early (and am having TC-ish regrets as they're up about 10% since the sale). I still hold WILC. Finally, SIMG and TGB were two other huge winners for me, along with current holding CKSW.

On another note, I did see where Barron's just profiled DLX (Check Out This High-Yielding Stock), a stock that has been on the lists as long as I have been in MFI. They were my first fire test. I bought them around $31 and they dropped to $13 my first year, but then came all the way back and closed after a year around $34.