My Top 20 Stocks of All Time

At the end of the day, you do want your stocks to go up.   As people may know, I have a spreadsheet in which I have kept track of every security I have bought (not including college funds or 401k) since 2002. Looking at the data in totality, I have owned about 1,070 different securities in that time. My total gains (using my factor) on all those has been $831,000.  But I thought it might be interesting to see if the 80/20 rules holds. Have I had 80% of my gains within 20% of my holdings? Interestingly enough, the answer is an easy yes!  My 15 best stocks (recall out of over 1,000), represent 80% of my gains (of course some stocks can be negative).

I have listed below the top 20.

Stock	Gain	Cumulative Pct of Total Gain
GTAT	100,552	12.1%
IST	61,405	19.5%
GNW	55,942	26.2%
SBS	54,059	32.7%
HIMX	46,620	38.3%
VR	45,857	43.8%
TC	38,861	48.5%
PVD	37,277	53.0%
NUS	36,439	57.4%
CSQ	35,537	61.7%
RNR-C	33,480	65.7%
ENH-A	33,076	69.7%
PM	30,776	73.4%
KMF	27,528	76.7%
PRE	27,235	80.0%
JPM	26,589	83.2%
OMG	26,005	86.3%
HFC	25,350	89.3%
CSCO	25,276	92.4%
GA	25,108	95.4%

Definitely some names on the list current readers know.  HIMX is impressive on the list as I only owned them for 2 months.  That 50% gain was nice.  NUS still did pretty well, despite late fall from grace.  They were up 5% on indications the China scare was over-blown.

To put things into perspective, with my factor I have 21,000 GTAT shares and 9,000 GNW shares.  So that would give people some idea of what a $1.00 move in share price would do to the gains.  I also still own SBS, I am tempted to buy more as they dipped under $9 yesterday.  CSCO is on the list more as a function of size (I have a lot of shares).  The RNR-C and ENH-A were both preferred stocks that sold for about 50 cents on the dollar at the bottom of the scare in 2008 and early 2009.  I felt they were relatively risk-free and bought quite a few shares and made quite a bit of $.  VR was also a late 2008 buy that I got very cheap.  I look back at those deals now and wonder why I did not bet the entire house on those stocks.  All three of those were virtually guaranteed doubles.

Not too many MFI stocks here.  When I buy MFI tranches, my $ in individual stocks are lower (though I am ratcheting up). So it takes something great (like NUS going up 200%) for an MFI stock to crack the top 20.