In my relentless pursuit of the best possible conclusions I have always been willing to change my opinions and accept new data. Sometimes it's embarrassing but the ultimate goal is the right answer to make money. (It helps that I maintain some anonymity so as not to embarrass any of the corporations whose boards I have been on/am on now.)

It is with great pride that I announce the results of the last year of the Finance Wonk Stock Picks. As of now if you are following my picks you have made money on every single stock pick. The picks that were sold made money on average too, although one of them did lose money by itself (RRPIX, our inflation hedge).

The current Finance Wonk Portfolio with date and price entered and gain to date (close of market today). The picks here have blasted past the market returns.

The results are even more amazing when you consider that many of them were bought late in last year. If we leave the November buy (ASFI) out of the average then the average gain is 26% in an average of about 6 months! Stock Picks and follow up analysis is linked from the Finance Wonk Buy page, which is always accessible from the front page. You can go there to read the analysis on individual stocks.

Compare that to market returns of about 15% over the last 6 months and year periods and you will see that we here at the Finance wonk are beating the market by somewhere between 7 and 11% per year.

Obviously it would be hard to imagine such a success rate continuing indefinitely. Our goal here is to profit from hardcore analysis and information combined with zero ego and a willingness to accept correction from the community, and it is working great. I also want to thank the posters and people who have emailed me with thoughts and comments. The advertising revenue from this site is very small, but the investing returns based on the discipline imposed by having so many people review the ideas have been great.

In truth the returns have been even better than the 26% mentioned above because I advised getting out of Apple or selling calls just days before it started dropping from it's height, and similarly have advised such strategies at other times. I don't take credit for those returns though because I refrain from advising specific option trades. (Why: options can be tricky and dangerous for the neophyte and some options trade so few that I would ruin the very trades I advised if lots of people tried to do it.)