Our subscription service is one year old. The results of our model portfolio are also one year old. We were up 14.2% versus the tech heavy NASDAQ, QQQs up about 5.4% in that same time. Here's the results and some thoughts.
 

We model the portfolio in a hedge fund fashion with longs and shorts. The longs are mostly our Strong Buys and the shorts are ETFs that help us hedge or go net short when we think there's risk in the market. We didn't short individual stocks.

Here's the results followed by some commentary.

When the QQQs dipped and bounced back we managed to keep performance steady with a gradual build.

Here's our performance by security. We included any security that impacted the portfolio by more than plus or minus 1%.
 

ETFs were our biggest loser which we're happy with because we mostly had our net exposure at around 20% or less. So when the ETFs lost the stocks (the longs) made money. And since the market was net-net higher in that time the shorts (the ETFs) by definition should lose.

Trade Desk, we caught right for earnings a couple of times and caught some big runs.

Tesla, we actually got small until we saw it stop dropping into the 260s last year and got big ahead of a big run to the 330s.

Arista we had several quarters of success.

Qualcomm we got big when the Apple deal was announced but actually stepped to the sidelines after we saw the just-reported quarter that disappointed us.

You also see our losers were smaller than our winners. We cut losers fast and tried to let winners run. That's why we only have one individual stock that hit the portfolio by greater than 1%.

That points to our risk averse approach by not accepting losses and cutting them soon. The market can be a good gauge to let us know if we might be right or wrong. We listen to the market.

Our big winners were mostly catching them after falling and getting big when we thought they were about to move up technically and/or ahead of earnings events where we felt our numbers were better than the Street.

We don't have a problem to get big for earnings events as long as we have conviction in our work, the story and our numbers.

The following is the overall performance.What I'm pretty proud of is the gradual build in performance just about every month while the QQQs were up and down (volatile).

Need To Work On

This year we constantly looked for ways to improve. One addition was adding stop losses to try to let winners run even longer. Frankly I think I left a lot of money on the table this past year.

Our Criteria

You see from the results that much of our gains came from the ideas. For a Strong Buy we need several things.

1. 45% 12 month upside potential. Because there can be 20% downside risk at any time we want at least 2-1 upside potential.

2. Our quarters not below the Street. Missed quarters hit stocks. If our numbers show risk, why take the risk.

3. Wow. We need to give an honest wow to the story. That means no snafus that sound like they can bite us. I don't want to be lazy to overlook things that can hurt our hit ratios.

Conclusion

This was one year out of the blocks. This was not an easy year. Our process is work intensive but I think we made it easy to understand and follow for subscribers.

We can't really know what the market's going to bring in the next year. That said, I think our philosophy of letting the earnings and the market direction dictate can allow us to win whatever the market decides.