Publisher and Author Results for 2009-2010 – Highlights, Surprises

As a LikeAssets user you can track the performance of your own investments and ideas, but you are also provided with a valuable service – the ability to track the most famous investing websites, magazines and blogs. Investing ideas from these sources always sound good when you read them, but which ones actually work over time? Are there any investment sites that consistently outperform the market?

When examining the picks from 2009-2010, there are some surprising results.

The top four performing publishers contain only one of the largest financial media sites – Barron’s. However, it is the picks from the print version that are beating the LikeAssets Benchmark by 13%, while those from Barron’s website are up only 4%. The other three top publishers are Stockerblog (24%), Ockham Research (20%) and Value Expectations (+15%).

Another interesting note is the performance of the most prolific authors that work for these publishers. In this case I looked at authors that have published over 100 articles with investment recommendations since January 2009. Efficient markets theory caused me to assume that the performance of many investment picks would closely track the market return.

However, there are three authors that are outperforming the market by more than 10%! With this knowledge, maybe investors could follow these investment pickers with more confidence.

These three are:

(1) Value Expectations blog with 105 portfolios and a score of +15%,
(2) Jack Hough from Smart Money with 153 portfolios and a score of +14,
(3) and Rich Duprey of Motley Fool with 118 portfolios and a score of +11%.

These performance numbers get my interest. I am now more inclined to follow these authors and will check out their new portfolios whenever they are added to LikeAssets.