Spooky Stocks Portfolio!

It's Halloween and time for this year's 2009 Spooky Stocks Portfolio!

Earlier this week, I asked members to submit the name of the stock that they think is "most likely to scare investors and blow away their returns” between today and next year's Halloween. I received 48 picks to be considered for the portfolio. However, I decided to do something a little different this time around.

Over the past couple of years, both members and I would create separate portfolios to be tracked independently of each other sort of as a stock competition between all of us. In 2007-2008, the members' portfolio lost -51% while my picks lost -44%. This past year, however, I fared far better in choosing spooky stocks. My portfolio posted a -10.22% loss (8 gainers & 20 losers) versus the +18.48% gain (19 gainers & 11 losers) in the portfolio created by members. Yet, I must say that I'm disappointed in both of our performance as we should have been able to find bigger losers over the past year. Since last year's Halloween, the S&P has gained +6.96.

So, to create a better portfolio this year as a joint effort, I decided to fire up my own screeners this morning and to trim the list down in order to create a spooky portfolio I think has the most potential to produce the scariest returns (i.e. losses) in the coming year. To read the rest of this post, please login.