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“Make 66% On This Biotech By May 1” Steve Christ

By Travis Johnson, Stock Gumshoe, November 6, 2009


Today for our Friday file we’re going to look at another teaser, this one for a biotech that’s got a performance “guarantee” from one newsletter, but I did want to share a couple thoughts first:

I was just checking the performance figures of the “Idea of the Month” stocks I’ve written about so far, as part of some  navel gazing that I do every now and then, and I was encouraged to see that the picks I’ve made and written about for you in 2009 have done far better, on average, than the ones I wrote about in 2008.  They’re still trailing the market, but I made several very poorly timed picks in 2008 and those 2008 picks, on average, are being beaten by the S&P by almost 20 percentage points, which is pretty bad.  2009, however, even with some picks that have been clobbered like FTI Consulting and the bonds I wrote about (not counting their coupons), has been much better — the S&P is beating my picks by only three percentage points this year, so I’m slightly encouraged.  Those returns are not annualized, it’s just the average overall performance of buying each stock on the day after I write about it.

That’s not to say, however, that I manage these picks like a portfolio — I have changed my opinions about several of the stocks in the months after I’ve picked them, and noted that in comments to the Irregulars from time to time, just as I’ve gone back in Friday File comments from time to time to suggest that you take another look at older picks (as I did in reiterating my interest in Sprott Resource a while back, and in re-presenting FTI Consulting for your consideration a couple weeks ago — I do currently own both of those stocks in my personal accounts, by the way).  But I don’t change the tracking spreadsheet, in part because I’m trying to track the performance of what I always intend to be long-term investments and I think that including the bad ones that many traders would have stopped out of gives a more honest picture.  Now that I’ve chosen a good number of income-focused investments I should probably figure out how to adjust for dividends and coupons, but I haven’t done so yet, and I don’t know whether that would help or hurt my cause when it ...

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