We’ve now crossed the halfway mark in 2023… and what a year it’s been. We came into the year with almost every pundit worried about the rapid rise in interest rates but also hot-and-bothered about artificial intelligence, following the blockbuster release of ChatGPT in November, and by energy stocks, promising another year of great returns from a crop of companies that looked like “value” stocks after their strong 2022 performance (driven, if we can remember back that far, by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the resulting upheaval in the oil and natural gas markets).

And has has all that turned out so far? Well… pretty typically, I’d have to say. I was just perusing the 2023 teaser tracking spreadsheet, which includes every “secret” teaser stocks we’ve unveiled so far this year (with usually about a two-month lag — the teaser picks added since mid-April aren’t in there yet), along with links to the article and some benchmarks, and as of today, if you had bought each company teased in the first four months of the year, at about the time we wrote about it, and held on, you’d be sitting on a loss of about one half of one percent. If you had, instead, bought an S&P 500 index on each of those same days, and similarly held it, you’d be sitting on a gain of about 9.7% today.

There have been a few standout winners so far, as you might imagine — NVIDIA (NVDA) and C3.ai (AI) picks from earlier in the year look nice and shiny right now, as they and other technology stocks got caught up in the artificial intelligence mania… and the top performer at the moment is the quantum computing hopeful IonQ (IONQ), with a few other “AI” stories scattered among the top picks. About 15 of the 50 stocks on the spreadsheet have beaten the S&P 500, which is pretty close to average (for all of 2022, at current prices, about 40 out of 160 teased stocks last year have now beaten the market, and the average teaser stock from 2022 is down about 11% to date, compared with a loss of about 5% for the S&P 500). Looking at even shorter time periods doesn’t change much, roughly a third of teased stocks were higher a month after we covered the ad (though they’re not the same 15-20 stocks that are higher ...