Performance Update (Live from New York)

I'm in New York this week, where I had the opportunity to attend the O'Reilly Money:Tech Conference, and while the conference content was excellent, I was left with mixed feelings about the market.

On the plus side, seeing and hearing so many market luminaries left me re-energized about investing, and excited to make my next round of picks (doing bi-weekly picks was problematic for two reasons: it was a lot of work; and the MFI site only updates with quarterly reports, so in some cases I was working off data nearly 3 months old).

One of the highlights from the conference was a conversation between conference program chair Paul Kedrosky and Mad Money's Jim Cramer. Not only is Jim as entertaining as you'd expect in person, he was very bullish on GOOG. (He said a lot of people were making "momentum" decisions: they open the drawer today, it says 'sell google'; after the market improves, they'll open the drawer again and it'll say 'buy google'.)

On the downside, there's a strong consensus among the Wall Street crowd that we're either in or heading toward a recession (an interesting data point here). While that does mean market opportunities, it also means a lot of people are looking at some lean times ahead.

Regardless, I'll be making a new round of MFI picks on Monday, this time five at a time (done every quarter to leave me with 20 at any given time). On that note (and because I'm tired of that Covestor widget to your right mocking me -- that precipitous decline you see in July coincides almost exactly with my Covestor signup), I thought I'd post my performance since inception, which now represents about 18 months of data. Still short-term, but I find the results encouraging: 25.32% against the S&P's 8.66% for the same period.

You can read about how this performance is calculated here. (There was actually someone from FolioFN at the conference, but unfortunately I didn't get a chance to connect.)