I buy and share baskets of stocks called Coffee Cans. You can see the most up to date list of stocks and their performance here on my Scorecard.

Planning not to sell a stock for at least 3-5 years after purchase is a great mental hack because it forces one to focus, and limit investments to strong companies with good competitive advantages. 

To encourage similar thinking, in April earlier this year, I launched a stock picking contest. If you recall, April was a time of great uncertainty in the world. The markets were not far off the year’s lows and it was unclear whether the late March lows would be retested. A volatile time to be picking stocks for sure.

I think it will be quite telling to observe how the selected stocks perform over the coming years. If you pay close attention, you will get a much better sense of how things like earnings, news, the macro environment, and the Wall Street narrative move stock prices in the short term. 

Thanks to those who signed up!

A Reminder of the Rules:

• Everyone Picked 5 stocks

• Starting price = Stock Opening Price on Monday May 4, 2020.

• Winner will be the 5-stock portfolio with the best total return based on closing stock prices on May 3, 2023.

• I will send a $50 Amazon Gift Card to the winner. If there is a tie, the gift card will go to the person who submitted their stocks first.

Stock Picks:

• All stock picks can be found here

• Note: There have been some data glitches with Google Finance. If your stock picks are incorrect, or if you see any incorrect data on the spreadsheet, please do let me know!

Who’s Flying High?

Who’s Crashing & Burning?

Most/Least Popular Stocks

Market Performance

Best/Worst Picks

Some Quick Observations

• It’s quite unbelievable to see that a spectacular return of 32% over ~4 months is ranked a measly 100 out of 133! It goes to show how strong the market has been since May 4, the first day of the contest.

• The Top 5 portfolios all seem to have at least one stock that has done exceptionally well.

• The Top 5 Stocks:

  • NIO has benefited from the market’s recent hunger for electric vehicles.

  • NVAX has seemingly benefited from progress on the vaccine.

  • FSLY has benefited from serving up core internet edge-functionality, which has come into focus lately.

  • VAL - I have no clue what this company does.

  • LVGO has been a massive winner in the remote monitoring market that they have legitimized. They were acquired by Teladoc, a company I have written about here and here.

It will be interesting to see which of these stocks remain in the Top 5 three years from now.

New World Order

Per the Scorecard, below are the stocks I had selected for the contest. As of today, September 9, 2020, the results are shown below.

As I mentioned above, April was a time of great uncertainty in the world. Since the goal of the contest was to buy stocks and hold them for the next 3 years (although I’ll likely continue to hold them longer), I thought of two ways to pick my stocks: 

Approach 1: Buy companies that had been badly hurt by the pandemic, but had, in my opinion, the durability to weather this storm. Companies like Mastercard, Visa or Disney, whose stock prices were well below their all-time highs.

OR 

Approach 2: Buy companies that I thought were bringing the world forward, despite the challenges of the pandemic.  

I chose Approach 2, hence the name New World Order. Each of my 5 stocks are Mavericks, companies that I think are becoming more and more relevant in the world, and exhibit significant upside optionality over time.

We’ll see how they perform from here.

Wrapping Up

Despite high valuations, “online” companies have continued to outpace their “offline counterparts” after the pandemic. I see lots of chatter online about how we are currently experiencing a massive divergence in valuations between so-called growth and value. It will be interesting to see whether this phenomenon continues between now and the end of the contest.

I wonder how many of you actually bought the stocks you selected. If you did, I hope you are still holding them. Either way, Good Luck!