Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Apple of My Eye?

Those who have read my blog in the past know I have owned Apple off and on. I sold a few months ago at $420 (with a nice gain). But as everyone knows, they have shot north of $455 with their recent blow-out quarter.

Are they a buy?

Interestingly, if you plug in their figures from the quarter, not only do they crack my top 200 but they are # 132.

Think about it.

Saturday, January 28, 2012

January 27th 2011 Tracking Portfolio

I have locked and loaded the January 27th 2011 tracking portfolio. We will see if it continues the positive trend we have seen recently. I have listed "new" stocks and "dividend" stocks below:

New

Stock Mkt Cap New
NEMFF.PK 986.45 1
AVEO 574.79 1

Dividend

Stock Mkt Cap Dividend Flag Yield
UNTD 502 1 7.0%
USMO 314 1 7.0%
RTN 17,257 1 3.5%
PDLI 897 1 9.4%
NOC 15,752 1 14.2%
GNI 181 1 12.6%
EXPE 4,185 1 49.3%
DLX 1,252 1 3.9%
HRB 4,956 1 3.9%

note - I try to stay pretty mechanical and just use whatever Yahoo says is a dividend stock. Clearly the EXPE is a one time payment. I will remove them from the dividend portfolio.

Past 12 Portfolios

I thought it might be interesting to see how the past 12 portfolios would have performed if I only used more established economies as I did in this post (MFI Diary: Analysis of Stocks from 1 Year Ago). Here is a list of economies I will use (ignore the counts):

Row Labels Count of Country
Canada 135
France 9
Germany 5
Italy 5
Japan 15
Luxembourg 4
Netherlands 17
Norway 1
Portugal 1
Spain 3
Sweden 2
Switzerland 13
United Kingdom 21
USA 2,588
Grand Total 2,819

On average, the past twelve portfolios are up 3%. If we remove stocks not from the countries above, the results improve to 3.6%. So I think we can clearly state that the underperformance of the tracking portfolios (past 12) is not related to Chinese reverse mergers.

Friday, January 27, 2012

MFI Monthly Tracking Portfolio Jan 28 2011

Another Loser

The January 28th 2011 monthly tracking portfolio (top 50 stocks over 100m) came of age on Friday. It was another loser. The portfolio in total was down 7.6% whilst the Russell 3000 was up 4.9%. All-in-all a stomping. That makes it the 13th straight portfolio to lose. The next 6 are losing as well, but then the final 5 are ahead.

Listing of 50 Stocks

Stock Initial Price End Price Percent Change Mkt Cap
VPHM 16.50 29.85 80.9% 1,335
AGX 9.00 14.41 60.1% 131
CNU 4.00 6.38 59.5% 262
LO 70.89 107.48 51.6% 11,364
PDLI 4.46 6.40 43.5% 706
RIGL 6.82 9.71 42.4% 363
HRB 11.96 16.77 40.2% 4,000
APOL 41.02 54.46 32.8% 6,054
MRX 24.76 32.20 30.0% 1,526
DELL 13.15 16.74 27.3% 25,941
CNXT 2.05 2.40 17.1% 170
TSRA 17.11 19.90 16.3% 1,070
GME 20.98 24.32 15.9% 3,189
CMTL 27.13 30.89 13.9% 829
PPD 60.26 66.50 10.4% 609
DLX 23.23 25.45 9.6% 1,310
MFW 23.96 26.00 8.5% 483
MSFT 27.03 29.23 8.1% 242,595
PRSC 14.24 15.18 6.6% 192
TER 16.23 16.95 4.4% 2,965
RTN 47.71 48.64 1.9% 18,635
SNDK 46.80 46.70 -0.2% 12,035
STRA 114.77 110.15 -4.0% 1,631
VALU 12.26 11.42 -6.9% 132
USMO 15.74 14.27 -9.3% 387
ELNK 8.28 7.20 -13.0% 935
TNAV 8.95 7.77 -13.2% 311
UNTD 6.62 5.74 -13.3% 629
CSGS 19.26 16.31 -15.3% 666
PETS 14.29 12.08 -15.5% 350
IPXL 23.39 19.05 -18.6% 1,504
IDCC 46.87 38.05 -18.8% 2,145
GTAT 10.88 8.75 -19.6% 1,686
UIS 27.65 20.42 -26.1% 1,222
OSK 37.39 25.41 -32.0% 3,393
ARO 24.34 16.48 -32.3% 2,218
AOL 23.82 16.07 -32.5% 2,579
LINC 14.55 8.70 -40.2% 351
CHKE 17.22 10.28 -40.3% 164
VECO 43.24 24.37 -43.6% 1,786
COCO 5.44 2.95 -45.8% 500
LHCG 27.56 14.85 -46.1% 522
LPS 31.17 16.78 -46.2% 2,925
AFAM 34.81 18.70 -46.3% 329
CECO 22.62 10.66 -52.9% 1,897
NEP 5.32 2.33 -56.2% 161
PWER 10.39 4.53 -56.4% 1,105
CRME 6.64 2.35 -64.6% 420
AMED 35.35 10.04 -71.6% 1,026
SCEI 6.59 1.30 -80.3% 112

All Portfolios Back to January 2006

Average of Percent Change
Date Total IWV
1/6/2006 16.0% 10.9%
2/17/2006 21.2% 14.6%
3/29/2006 13.0% 9.6%
4/7/2006 10.3% 12.1%
5/12/2006 20.4% 18.6%
5/31/2006 29.2% 23.3%
6/30/2006 22.4% 20.0%
7/31/2006 19.7% 17.3%
8/31/2006 13.0% 13.3%
9/28/2006 12.7% 14.6%
10/27/2006 10.3% 12.0%
11/29/2006 -0.3% 4.8%
12/28/2006 -6.9% 3.4%
1/26/2007 -10.2% -6.6%
2/27/2007 -3.7% -1.0%
3/26/2007 -9.8% -5.5%
4/27/2007 -10.9% -5.0%
5/29/2007 -11.5% -6.3%
7/3/2007 -30.0% -15.6%
7/30/2007 -19.9% -11.5%
8/30/2007 -12.5% -8.7%
9/27/2007 -19.0% -18.2%
11/2/2007 -40.4% -34.3%
11/28/2007 -40.1% -38.3%
12/28/2007 -36.3% -40.0%
1/25/2008 -36.4% -35.9%
2/26/2008 -51.7% -41.5%
3/24/2008 -40.9% -36.8%
4/25/2008 -25.6% -31.0%
5/28/2008 -22.2% -33.6%
7/2/2008 -11.7% -25.3%
7/29/2008 -10.5% -20.9%
8/29/2008 -13.8% -17.9%
9/26/2008 -4.3% -10.0%
10/31/2008 18.7% 13.9%
11/26/2008 50.9% 27.7%
12/26/2008 48.9% 32.3%
1/23/2009 59.3% 36.4%
2/27/2009 92.8% 55.6%
3/27/2009 85.8% 48.1%
4/24/2009 69.7% 45.8%
5/29/2009 31.8% 22.8%
6/29/2009 21.3% 24.0%
7/29/2009 19.5% 15.9%
8/28/2009 7.4% 8.8%
9/25/2009 12.6% 12.4%
10/30/2009 22.7% 18.3%
11/27/2009 24.3% 13.6%
12/31/2009 23.7% 18.1%
1/22/2010 19.0% 20.6%
2/26/2010 18.6% 23.6%
3/25/2010 10.0% 15.4%
4/23/2010 7.1% 11.4%
5/28/2010 19.3% 25.4%
6/29/2010 16.7% 25.7%
7/29/2010 5.4% 20.1%
9/2/2010 7.3% 10.1%
9/24/2010 -4.3% 0.3%
10/29/2010 -2.9% 10.4%
11/26/2010 -8.5% 1.4%
1/3/2011 -11.4% 0.1%
1/28/2011 -7.6% 4.9%
2/25/2011 -7.9% 1.0%
3/24/2011 -6.5% 1.6%
4/21/2011 -9.5% -0.9%
5/27/2011 -3.7% -0.7%
6/24/2011 -1.8% 4.1%
7/29/2011 0.2% 2.7%
8/26/2011 14.1% 13.3%
9/30/2011 23.8% 17.9%
10/28/2011 5.1% 3.3%
11/25/2011 19.9% 14.7%
12/29/2011 10.0% 5.0%
Grand Total 5.6% 4.6%
Closed 6.3% 4.7%
Open 3.0% 5.6%

The Way I Keep Score

I track results by looking at dollars as percentages can be misleading. So I track where you would be today if you invested $100,000 equally over 1st 12 months.

Category Value
Total 116,309
Total New 110,594
Total Dividend 229,048
Total Russell 3K 116,548

So the Russell 3k and the MFI are at a deadheat, both up about 16%. I also show two other "sub" portfolios of the tracking portfolios. The first is "new", which only includes stocks not in the past 12 monthly portfolios. Then "dividend" is all stocks with a 2.6% dividend (per Yahoo) or better at the start. As you can see, the dividend approach has been quite good. Here is how the dividend sub portfolio did (up 3.7%):

Stock Initial Price End Price Percent Change
LO 70.89 107.48 51.6%
PDLI 4.46 6.40 43.5%
HRB 11.96 16.77 40.2%
DLX 23.23 25.45 9.6%
RTN 47.71 48.64 1.9%
STRA 114.77 110.15 -4.0%
VALU 12.26 11.42 -6.9%
USMO 15.74 14.27 -9.3%
ELNK 8.28 7.20 -13.0%
UNTD 6.62 5.74 -13.3%
PETS 14.29 12.08 -15.5%
CHKE 17.22 10.28 -40.3%