2009 Best Stock Picks Contest
Last post of the year but not the least! This is the big announcement of the final results of our stock contest for 2009!
Quick reminder: on January 1st, each Blogger had to select 4 stocks (including ETFs) on Canadian or American markets. We have also decided to include dividend in the yield calculation. Each quarter, we followed the rankings and provided commentary on our picks. You can see my 3 quarters here:
Best stock picks 2009 1st quarter
Best stock picks 2009 2nd quarter
Best stock picks 2009 3rd quarter
2009 appeared to be a great year for the stock market but this is not what we were anticipating back in January. We all knew it was meant to come back but we didn’t know when and how strong the stock market would arise from its brutal crash of 2008. I am actually surprised they haven’t given a special name yet to the darkest period most investors have seen in their lifetimes, any suggestions?
In the end, most of bloggers finished with a positive return and some of them would have made a lot of money with their picks. While 4 stocks is not enough to have a balanced and diversified portfolio, you can build something solid if you use at least 10 stocks, feel free to use our picks as the foundation ;-)
So here are my results:
Google (Nasdaq: GOOG):
According to me, this was an easy pick. Google was already on the rise when I picked it in January. Some other techno stocks like Amazon did pretty well too. Google is a strong company and it is demonstrates continuous improvement and innovation. You don’t need any investment services to tell you it’s a good stock to pick!
Com Dev Intl (TSX: CDV):
This was my biggest disappointment of the year. While it was a very promising company with liquid assets and a track record of growth over the past 3 years, Com Dev still flew under the radar of most investors so the stock never picked up. I guess that people were so afraid of investing in 2009 that they would pick small stocks to compliment their portfolios. Make sure to put Com Dev in your track investment apps next year!
Johnson and Johnson (NYMEX: JNJ):
This was my defensive stock pick for 2009 in case we continue to go deeper and deeper. While it didn’t appreciate much, JNJ was more like a safety net in my portfolio than anything else. With its small dividend and its small stock price increase, I am still happy to have it in my 2009 picks 
Bank of Nova Scotia (TSX: BNS):
Here again, another easy pick. Canadians banks have always been solid and I knew that it would continue to be the case in 2009. I decided to pick Bank of Nova Scotia since it was the most international of all Canadian Banks. Therefore, I thought that if it was going to be better in another country than Canada in 2009, BNS was surely going to participate. It appeared that any Canadian bank was a good stock pick in 2009 . It also pays a great dividend too!
So overall it is good news since I have finished with at positive yield of 44% and none of my picks were negative! I have finished 4th in the competition. Here are the other results (links to other blogger will update as their post go onlin in the upcoming days):
| Blog | Best Stock Picks for 2009 | Ytd |
|---|---|---|
| Intelligent Speculator | GLD USO BIDU EBAY |
81.55% |
| Wild Investor | AKS SLB BAC NFLX |
70.15% |
| Where Does All My Money Go | TNA EDC ENA HOU |
56.14% |
| The Financial Blogger | CDV GOOG BNS JNJ |
44.62% |
| Four Pillars | BCF HOC TOG CLL |
35.26% |
| Dividend Growth Investor | O KMP ED PM |
26.48% |
| Million Dollar Journey | HF.to JNJ HSE.TO PWF.TO |
20.27% |
| My Traders Journal | DRYS NDAQ USO SSO |
0.18% |
| ZachStocks | JASO ACM TBSI CMED |
-8.80% |
Stay tuned to see our stock picks for 2010 late tonight and tomorrow morning!
see also:
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- Investing Ideas: 2010 Best Stock Picks Contest As I mentioned yesterday in my 2009 Best Stock…
- 4 Top Stock Picks For 2009 Contest Update At the very beginning of 2009, a bunch of…
- Hot Stock Picks for Q4 A fellow Blogger contacted me for a guest post….
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about 6 months ago
First, not all companies pay dividends. Some retain their earnings and reinvest in their business. Of the companies that pay dividends, most pay the dividend quarterly. Many of these companies have dividend reinvestment plans and to sign up for them you should talk to the company's investor relations department or their stock transfer agent. The stock transfer agents run most of these programs.
The way in which your investment in a company is recorded, determines how you receive your dividend. In the old days, you bought a stock through a stock broker and several weeks later, the company mailed a stock certificate to you. You became the "registered owner" and dividend checks were mailed directly to you. There are some people who still hold their stock certificates in "physical" form. However, in an effort to reduce paperwork and make the settlement of trades more efficient and less costly, the stock brokerage firms formed the Depository Trust Corporation or DTC. DTC has become the record holder for a majority of the shares traded today. When you buy a share of stock through a broker, the broker will no longer arrange to have a paper stock certificate sent to you and instead your shares will be reflected electronically in the records of the brokerage firm and on your account statement. All of the brokerage firm's account holders will be aggregated together on the books of DTC. In this way, we shares are traded between stock brokerage customers, DTC simply makes a bookkeeping entry on their system, showing the shares being traded from one stock brokerage firm to the other. The individual brokerage firms then make the notation on your account statement.
When dividends are paid by a corporation, the corporation usually sends the payment in two separate wire transfers. One is sent to the corporation's stock transfer agent who then sends paper checks to those owners who hold physical shares. The other wire transfer sent electronically by the corporation to ito the holder of record of the shares held in "street name" (who is DTC) and DTC deposits the money in each of the brokerage firms' accounts at DTC. The broker then allocates that portion of the dividend to your individual account. This happens almost immediately on the dividend payment date. This eliminates the need for paper checks and results in the faster receipt of dividend payments. Once the money hits your account, you can access it.
For dividend reinvestment plans, the stock transfer agent receives that portion of the dividend payment for those who elect to reinvest it. Depending on the program, the stock transfer agent can then either enter the market on a specified day and purchase shares in the market (usually at the close of trading or before the open, so that normal trading isn't affected), or it can use the average trading price of the company's stock over some period, like 10 days, and purchase the shares directly from the corporation (sometimes at a slight discount to the average trading price). In this case, the corporation would be issuing new shares. Sometimes investors can sell their shares held in the dividend reinvestment plan through the stock transfer agent, and the agent will purchase those shares for those who are reinvesting their dividends.
For investors who own their shares in a brokerage account in street name, you have to sign up through your brokerage firm. Sometimes there are fees to participate in these plans.
about 5 months ago
I totally watched MacGyver the other day lol it was really cheesey.
Maybe you could be the next MacGyver.
Go MacGaver!