Members' Top Picks

One of the fun things I've integrated into the members' only website is the members' top picks screen/contest that I started last year. Many of you are very good stock pickers and this provides an opportunity to share and show of your own prowess. In addition, I believe my stock screen machine is helped by your participation.

Before I discuss the most recent update, I thought it would be good to review some performance stats that you'll find of interest.

In tracking the performance using the entry date of the screen and closing price of December 31, 2007 (in which the S&P 500 was up +3.5% for the full year) for performance, here's how these picks have done (click on the screens below for more tracking information):

• Members' Top Picks (January 9, 2007): +18.6% (52 gainers & 47 losers)

• Members' Top Picks (June 7, 2007): +7.9% (53 gainers & 45 losers)

• Members' Top Picks (September 7, 2007): +11.1% (34 gainers & 16 losers)

As many of you may recall, back in June I decided that to make this feature more useful (and integrated into the new stock screen machine) that I needed to eliminate some of the picks received and to filter them objectively so that we would have a higher quality list to work from.

To do that I started awarding prizes for those who selected the top picks and back in September I even reduced the number of picks I received to a list of 50 stocks. To trim hundreds of stocks received as picks to a list of 50 required me using an objective stock filter to hopefully come up with the highest quality opportunities......[READ]