The Rule Breaker portfolio is the center of the ruckus. Part of the problem was that TMF borrowed the mutual fund's trick of boasting high performance over statistically insignificant time periods. boards.fool.com
It reminds me of gang mentality of picking on somebody that's down and out at the moment. Spitting. Kicking. Punching. Ruthless. Plenty of that going on at the moment throughout the Internet. Pick a technology message board from Cisco to Network Appliance to Qualcomm. Plenty of jabs at long term investing. Plenty of people letting others know how 'stupid' they were to hold through it all - at least in the case of technology stocks. I guess there's plenty of Christmas spirit to go around.
Where were we 2 years ago and where will be two years from today? At the moment, we're simply at the midpoint between those two points.
In spite of that, David Gardner is using a longer term strategy which has the Rule Breaker portfolio up on an annualized basis of 40% per year since 1994. Compare that annual rate to the annual rates of the S&P being up 18% (19% with dividends) and the Nasdaq about 22% since 1994. In terms of returns to date since each were purchased they have 4 winners: AOL, Amazon, Amgen and Starbucks along with 3 losers (the most recent additions to the portfolio with losses of 5% to 35%): Applera-Celera, Human Genome and eBay. Regardless, it is simply a public exercise which one can view as it unfolds or one can choose to ignore.
I'm sure we could all agree on a different portfolio of companies if each of us were in charge of a public portfolio exercise such as the Rule Breaker. If so, it would require we do all the research, announce a purchase plan or a sale plan for each equity, review the quarterly reports, have periodic updates and newsworthy items relating to the companies in the portfolio and track and monitor the performance of each equity. All of this would be displayed in public and each decision would be open to public discussion. In theory, it's a nice seminar type of exercise for investors to learn how to find the companies, research them, track them and see what goes into building and maintaining a portfolio. Hey, isn't that what we do here.......
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