Every year we highlight the “Turkey of the Year” at Thanksgiving time, calling attention to the worst performing teaser stock picks of the previous twelve months… so it only seems fair to highlight the best picks, too, and that’s what this time of year is all about… between Christmas and New Year’s Day, when Stock Gumshoe is otherwise closed and we should all be hunkered down with family and friends, we’ll take a moment to share the best teaser stocks of the year.

So while we prep for that piece, which you’ll see next week, I thought I’d make myself feel better at the end of the year, too, by checking to see which of my investments worked out best over the past year or so. Don’t worry, I try to remember to point out my personal Turkey at Thanksgiving time, too, (this year it was Stem (STEM), for example, though it could as easily have been Perimeter Holdings (PRM), both were stocks that I got quite wrong).

I do really enjoy stroking my ego, of course, and it’s nice when things work out really well. Everybody likes to feel smart. But, like the mistakes, the best picks also serve as reminders and learning opportunities — some were mostly luck, some were the result of good decisions, but there’s often a lesson or two hiding in there.

So what were my best buy decisions over the past year? It’s not often clear or obvious from the Real Money Portfolio page, since many of my positions have been built through dozens of relatively small buys over more than a decade, and sometimes it’s the decision about selling that makes the difference… or the decision to avoid buying something. But you need to put some parameters around this if we want to get a good measurement, so I went through the data to see what stocks I bought this year, and which of those purchases have (so far) worked out best.

And to be fair, just like I do with the teaser tracking spreadsheets, I ranked them relative to the performance of our benchmark, the S&P 500, for that same time period. Some of those purchases certainly benefited from fortuitous timing, coming when the market was unusually low, but some of them also beat the market nicely. I pulled this data in the middle of the week, so that’s why ...