January 2006 - December 2006: How did my picks perform?

If looking at a straight performance measure for stocks picked in January 2006 and sold at the end of December it was not a good year for my Fallondpicks.com stocks. However, the caveat here was that no stop prices were used.

So lets get the bad news out of the way with first. My Subscriber picks (yes - the ones which one pays for!) had an average return of -7% for the year with 28% of the 42 stocks profitable. Ugly. The free picks which are drawn from a Breakout scan (and are kept here) fared slightly better with a flat (0%) return, but a still measly 29% profitability off 41 stocks. Using my suggested target and stop prices to mark the exits - the average return of my Subscriber picks rose to 2% and for my Breakout picks it was 6%, but with a holding period of less than 7 months; if it one was to approximate the returns over the year it would be 3% for the Subscriber picks and 10% for Breakout picks. Better, but still not approaching the market returns.

It was a good year for the markets. The Qs were able to return 6% on the year, with the SPYs and DIAs posting a very decent 15% and 18% respectably. Small caps, as measured by the IWM, were not to be left out and returned 17% on the year.

The only shining beacon was the Trade Ideas picks. The 60 stocks picked over January had an impressive 70% profitability and an average return per trade of 20%. Very impressive, especially considering the returns of my own picks! The Trade Ideas widget in the sidebar features picks (less the volume parameters) with very similar parameters to the one used to mark these returns. Subscribe to my Feed if you would like to get these picks for free in 2007.

Here's to 2007!

fallond