C’mon Christmas Miracle for the 2014 Buy List

Eddy Elfenbein of Crossing Wall Street is widely regarded as one of the best buy-and-hold bloggers on the Internets. Every year in mid-December, he selects (20) stocks to hold for the next calendar year in a tracking portfolio known as his Buy List.

He has outperformed the S&P 500 for the last seven years.

As of 12/17/2014, the 2014 Buy List lags the S&P 500 during 2014 by a little bit … but we’re hopeful for a Christmas miracle. Anybody around here have Carl Icahn on speed dial so we can get some M&A rumors swirling on some of Eddy’s 2014 collection?

Context: You will find that Eddy thinks a lot like “us”. His weekly updates on the Buy List stocks are a worthy addition to the reading list for stock watchers and shareholders. Even if his 2014 Buy List doesn’t break the tape in a photo finish this year, we know better than to gauge anything based on a single year — and it’s here that we see the all-time performance of the Buy List (8 years) is an annualized rate of return of 10.7% vs. 7.3% for the S&P 500 — for a rarified +3.4% relative return.

Here’s a snapshot of the standings going into the stretch:

Crossing Wall Street Challenge

We play along with a couple of dashboards alongside Eddy’s 2014 Buy List with our own entries.

The 2014 Walking Main Street dashboard is quite simply drawn from our (40) most widely-followed stocks (MANIFEST 40), selecting the (20) with the best combination of PAR and quality back on 1/1/2014.

The Expecting Alpha 20 entry is sourced from the universe of ~2400 stocks that we cover — and seeks the (20) with the best combination of Value Line low total return forecast, suitable quality and better-than-average sentiment. It needs a dash of Christmas miracle, too … as 2014 winds down.

2015 Shopping … Auditing … Deciding

Eddy shared a couple of weeks ago that he’s making a list and checking it twice. His usual practice is to drop five of the (20) 2014 Buy List and to select five replacements for them.

We’ll use the dashboard-based sandbox “what if” portfolio design feature to take a look at the five that Eddy has singled out and the (10) replacement candidates that he’s kicking around.

The top 3-4 are pretty much slam dunks and we hope Eddy chooses them. SEIC is a formidable company, a long-time community favorite and has better-than-average potential. The release of IBM (IBM) can’t be easy but there’s not enough dividend there to offset the low growth prospects. Not a cardinal sin, simply a symptom of maturity facing the same global economic challenges as most of the consulting stocks.

We’ll do our 2015 shopping during the final days of 2014, but for now… let’s hope for a strong close for Eddy’s 2014 Buy List and our own Expecting Alpha 20.