Here are our stock picks for 2011:

APKT – Acme Packet. It is our stock pick for cloud-computing. We believe that cloud computing is the future and Acme Packet is a strong play in this area. Their technologies enable service providers to deliver real-time multimedia sessions across IP network.

LVS – Las Vegas Sands. This company operates a couple of big casinos around the world, including Las Vegas, Macao and recently Singapore.

MELI – MercadoLibre. It is the e-bay of Latin America. We pick this stock as a play for Latin American market.

YONG – Yongye International. It is a Chinese biotechnology company that research liquid and powder nutrient compounds for plant and animal products. We pick this stock because we are bullish on agriculture sector.

You can follow live-performance of our stock picks in this link. You can see how our stock picks compared to S&P 500 and Nasdaq. We are going to include stock picks from other bloggers once they have revealed theirs.

It’s time to update our stock picks. So far, we are behind S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite Index. It’s been proven that it’s not easy to beat the index.

• ASIA: –28.87%
• CAGC: –23.12%
• ITC: +0.5%
• PEGA: –8.68%
• Total: –15.04%

Here is the return of our benchmark:

• S&P 500: –8.30%
• Nasdaq: –7.82%

There have been also a stock picks competition among Canadian bloggers. Here is the result for first half of 2010.

• Dividend Growth Investor: +3.62%
• The Wild Investor: –8.61%
• My Trader’s Journal: –11.41%
• 1stmilliondollar.net: –15.05%
• Four Pillars: –16.69%
• Zach Stocks: –17.08%
• Million Dollar Journey: –17.08%
• WhereDoesAllMyMoneyGo.com: –17.20%
• TheFinancialBlogger.com: –19.41%
• Intelligent Speculator: –19.76%

You can learn more about CAN SLIM from William O’Neil book, How to Make Money in Stocks: A Winning System in Good Times and Bad, Fourth Edition.

Today, we would like to run stocks screener on the first two letters of CAN SLIM, i.e.:

• C: Current Earnings. Current earnings should be up at least 25%.
• A: Annual Earnings. Annual earnings should be at least 25% in each of the last three years. Annual return on equity should be at least 16%.

Due to limitation of Yahoo Finance’s stocks screener as well as to keep the number of stocks below 100, we have to modify the criteria a little bit, i.e.:

• Instead of using the last 3 years annual earnings, we use the last 5 years.
• Market capitalization should be $500 million or more because we don’t want to speculate on micro-cap stocks.
• Profit margin should be at least 10%.
• Average daily volume should be at least 100k because we don’t want any illiquid stocks.

We have created a Google Docs that contains the complete result of this stock filter. Click here to view the complete result.

Here are the return of our stock picks year to date:

• ASIA: –13.04%
• CAGC: +77.89%
• ITC: +5.59%
• PEGA: +8.82%
• Average return: +19.82%

For comparison, here are the return of popular benchmark, S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100.

• S&P 500: +4.87%
• Nasdaq 100: +5.68%

PS: You can follow the performance of our stock picks live on this page; and the live result of the competition on this page. Alternatively, you can click the links at the top of the page.

• ASIA: –19.80% YTD
• CAGC: +78.89% YTD
• ITC: +2.48% YTD
• PEGA: +5.88% YTD

On average, our stock picks return year to date is 16.86%.

Meanwhile, the return of our benchmark indexes are:

• S&P 500: –0.95% YTD
• Nasdaq Composite Index: –1.36% YTD

Our stock picks are still beating the indexes up until today. Let’s see how March performance is going to look like.

It’s the end of the month; and we’re going to give an update of our Motley Fools’s CAPS performance. For those who don’t know, we’re setting up a Motley Fool’s CAPS account to track our stock picks. It’s different from our stock picks for the contest because we can pick as many stocks as we can in CAPS (no limitation to 4 stocks).

Note that we don’t necessarily invest our real money in all of these stocks at this time. We do invest in some of them.

We just read a news from The Globe And Mail about performance of Canadian equity funds. Many actively managed mutual funds in Canada cannot beat the index, i.e. S&P/TSX composite index. Here is the result:

• Year 2009: 39.2% of actively managed funds beat the index
• Over 3 years: 12.5% of actively managed funds beat the index
• Over 5 years: 7.7% of actively managed funds beat the index

That’s why; we recommend to invest in the index. As you can also see from our portfolio, most of our money is currently parked in the index as well. Only small amount of money that is used for speculation, including stock picking and timing the market. That’s why; we still have stock picks and participate in the Canadian blogger’s stock picks contest.

If you’ve been reading a couple of our last postings; you might be wondering: are we stock picker? We’ve been talking about stock picks, see here, here and here. In fact, we have never talked about ETF or mutual funds.

The answer to this question is: yes and no. We have a diversified portfolio; a large amount of them are invested, surprisingly, in ETFs and index mutual funds. We allocated only about 10% are invested in individual stocks. We’ll discuss more about our assets allocation in future posting.

Why don’t we just invest in index funds and do nothing? Isn’t investing in individual stocks very risky? There are a couple of reasons. One reason is because we want to find ten-bagger. We don’t normally find ten-bagger in index funds, do we? Another reason is because we want to improve our investment skills. We’re still beginner in the investment world; there are a lot of things we need to learn. That’s why; we don’t want to risk too much capital in individual stocks (for now).

(Picture is from stock.xchng.)

For those who don’t know, Motley Fool (fool.com) is web site for for long-term investor. It features news, commentary, stocks rating, community and many more. One of their services is called CAPS; where we can pick stocks for compared our performance with other CAPS members as well as S&P 500.

We have been using CAPS to track our stock picks for quite a while now. Our CAPS address is:

http://caps.fool.com/player/1stmilliondollar.aspx

Unlike the our stock picks at the Canadian bloggers contest that has limitation of 4 stocks; we list all stocks that we think is a good investment in CAPS. Our current stock picks are:

• PEGA
• CAGC
• BIDU
• ITC
• EW
• CTRP
• ARD
• ASIA
• CHK
• POT
• DAR

If you look at our picks as of today (February 13, 2010); 9 out of our 11 picks have beaten S&P 500.

Links

• Our Stock Picks for 2010
• Our Motley Fool’s CAPS account

There have been annual stock picks contest among Canadian bloggers. You can check the result of last year’s contest here. The winner was Intelligent Speculator with 81.56% return, mostly because of Baidu.

Just like previous years, there is a stock picks contest this year. As a new Canadian blogger, we try to participate in the contest. Our stock picks for 2010 is: ASIA, CAGC, ITC and PEGA (see also our posting here). We don’t expect too much since this is our first contest.

In order to monitor the result of this contest, we have setup a Google Docs spreadsheet and embed in this page (you can also click “Contest” link at the top of this page). It has live stock prices; so you can see live performance of each blogger. As of today, the top 3 positions are:

• Four-Pillars.ca: +3.48%
• 1stmilliondollar.net: +0.63%
• WhereDoesAllMyMoneyGo.com: –0.10%

Links

• Live result of Canadian stock picks contest 2010