Suck Is A Four Letter Work

Regular readers may recall that I published some data a couple weeks ago showing the MFI stocks with 4 letters in their ticker symbol have under-performed.  It is easy to laugh that off as meaningless as it doesn't seem to make any sense.

Interestingly, I looked at my own universe of MFI stocks since I rebooted in August of 2012.  Guess what?  Two and three letter tickers have come in at 45% and 48% for me.  Four letter tickers are at 15%.  Bad luck?  It is a head-scratcher. Let us look at open stocks in my MFI tracking portfolios:

Letters	Avg Pct Chg	Count
2	21.6%	40
3	13.4%	242
4	16.7%	318
Grand Total	15.7%	600

Well, that sort of randomness is a bit more like what I would expect.

MFI Difference Graph

Here is a graph showing the difference between R3K and MFI tracking portfolio for every portfolio I have created going back to January 2006:

For the sake of my MFI portfolio, I am watching this closely.  You can see it is not random.  If it was random, you would expect a scatter above and below the 0%.  But what you see here is many consecutive points below zero and then many consecutive points above zero.  Obviously, we are rooting for above zero, as that means you are out-performing the market.  Right now (the last few points on the right), it feels like a battle. Those are all open portfolios (they stay open for a year) - so it remains to be seen which side of the axis they will end up on.

Stay tuned.