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.

As you can see, our performance was not that good for last year. Our return was only –7.05%. We couldn’t even beat the benchmark, S&P 500, which returns more than 12%; and Nasdaq, which returns about 17%.

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.

As always, we remind you to consult your financial advisor before making any decision. Some of Bryan’s recommendations are actually closed-end funds. Note that stocks with high dividend yield do not guarantee that they cannot go down in price. They may also cut their dividends at any time.

• BlackRock Global Opportunities Equity Trust (NYSE: BOE)
• Otelco, Inc. (NYSE: OTT)
• Nuveen Multi-currency Short-term Government Income Fund (NYSE:JGT)
• ING Risk Managed Natural Resources Fund (NYSE:IRR)
• Linn Energy, LLC (NYSE:LINE)
• SPDR Barclays Capital High Yield Bond ETF (NYSE:JNK)
• The Blackstone Group L.P. (NYSE:BX)
• Chimera Investment Corporation (NYSE:CIM)
• American Capital Agency Corp. (NYSE:AGNC)
• Navios Maritime Partners L.P. (NYSE:NMM)

Links

• Favourite High Income Recommendations
• Highest Paying Dividend ETFs in NYSE
• Highest Paying Dividend ETFs in Canada

A couple of days ago, someone posted a question at Canadian Money Forum about Canadian ETF screener. The good news is that there are only four ETF issuers in Canada, i.e.:

• iShares Canada
• Claymore Canada
• Horizons BetaPro
• BMO

So, as mentioned by Canadian Capitalist, we can just visit the web site of those companies and see what they have.

Alternatively, GlobeInvestor.com also provides a stock filter that can be used to search for ETFs. Go to the following URL

http://www.globeinvestor.com/v5/content/filters

and then select “ETF” in the “Security” box. Also make sure that “Toronto Stock Exchange” is selected in the “Exchange” box.

Links

• High Paying Dividend ETFs in Canada
• High Paying Didend ETFs in NYSE

If you are interested running this filter yourself; go to Globe Investor’s stock filter. Select Security type as “ETF”. When you get the result, click on “$ Change” or “% Change”; and you’ll get Dividend Yield column.

Are we recommending those ETFs? Some of them, yes. In fact, we currently own iShares S&P/TSX REIT ETF. Do your own research and consult your financial advisor before buying any of these ETFs.

We don’t recommend iShares S&P/TSX Income Trust ETF for now since there’ll be a new regulation regarding income trusts starting next year (2011). They’ll be taxed in the same way as corporation. So, we can expect the dividend yield might go down significantly.

The yield of BMO Emerging Markets ETF looks suspicious. Emerging markets don’t normally pay high dividends. When we checked BMO web site about this ETF, the fact sheet says the dividend yield for this ETF is only 1.70%. It looks like Globe Investor has the wrong data here.

We don’t recommend buying any long-term bonds right now, such as iShares Canadian Long Bond ETF. There have been rumours that Bank of Canada will hike interest rates soon.

Also note that iShares has just released a couple of new ETFs recently. There is no dividend distribution history for them yet. I believe a few of them, such as iShares US High Yield Bond, has the potential to be in the list above.

Update (19-Feb-2010): The data are coming from GlobeInvestor.com web site as of the date of this posting. There might be differences as the stock prices move up/down or because of dividend raise/cut.