My Wife Picks Stocks better than You

Four years later and my wife’s stocks are still outperforming the major market indexes. She doesn’t even know it but her spending habits pick far better stocks than most folks I know, including me. My wife doesn’t watch the market, actively invest in the market or care to look at a stock chart but she sure can predict where the money will flow.

On August 5, 2014, I put a collection of stocks together that represent the products and services of companies used most often by not only my wife but our family as a whole. I called it “My Wife’s Mutual Fund” and decided to treat it as a personal ETF or mutual fund that we would just hold over time.

Original Post:
August 6, 2014: My Wife’s Personal Mutual Fund Outperforms the Pros

Follow-ups:
February 21, 2016: My Wife’s Personal Mutual Fund Crushes the Markets, AGAIN

August 7, 2016: My Wife’s Buy & Hold Strategy Still Crushing the Professionals

November 19, 2017: The Wife’s Stocks Outperforming 3 Years Later

Every one of these companies are a household name selling a product or service that we all use, so naturally, they will grow as a group.

As of November 11, 2018, the 22 stocks have performed as follows (for purposes of the exercise, no trades have been made):

  • Total gain of 108.26% (adjusted for dividends & splits)
  • 20 of the 22 stocks show a gain
  • 20 of the 22 stocks show a double digit gain
  • 13 of the 22 stocks show a gain of at least 50%
  • 8 of the 22 stocks show a gain greater than 100%
  • The leading gainer, also the 2nd highest initial priced stock, is up 448%: Amazon $AMZN
  • 2 stocks show a loss: $XOM and $KORS
  • A 91% success ratio

As a comparison, the return from the Nasdaq trails by 35%, the DJIA trails by 46% and the S&P 500 trails by 58.5%. In dollar terms, $5,000 invested per stock in the portfolio (or $110,000) would currently sit at $229,088 for a pre-tax profit of $119,088. Alternatively, $110,000 placed in the Nasdaq would result in a pretax profit of $77,178, $64,005 for the DJIA and $49,311 for the S&P 500.

What started as a playful review, became a serious pursuit of stocks that we decided to grab shares in. We don’t own every stock on the list but we do own and have owned many over the years.

I agree with my sentiment from last year, now nine years into a run from the bottom:

I’m not surprised to see, after years and years of gains (pre-2014), that these stocks continue to outperform the general market indexes. At this point in 2017, I believe that many of these stocks will continue to outperform in the years to come (and I’m making this statement deep into a multi-year up-trend).

Many folks and gurus on social media try to get fancy and make predictions to actively buy and sell the next great thing. Perhaps that works (not likely) so why not just accumulate shares in the best companies with the most useful products and services and call it a day. Predictions are fun and subscriptions must be sold so fintwit activity is needed but I bet this buy & hold portfolio has beaten the results of most strategies. And the best part, it’s free.

Howard Lindzon (@howardlindzon or howardlindzon.com) has a very similar list titled 8 for 80 which shares several of the names listed here. What he says about his list rings true for any list:

“No index or list is perfect…and mine will keep evolving. The secret sauce over time is not so much the list itself, but the ability to adjust, allocate and manage risk as you go.”

At the end of the August 2016 update, I suggested changing $KORS (an underperformer) for $MSFT. For purposes of the blog thread, we didn’t change a thing but that one adjustment would have resulted in a 98% gain for MSFT vs the 5% additional loss for KORS. To Howards’s point…”adjust”.

The portfolio of 22 stocks:
$AAPL – Apple
$SBUX – Starbucks
$GOOGL – Alphabet
$AMZN – Amazon
$FB – Facebook
$COST – Costco
$TGT – Target
$TPR – Tapestry (formerly Coach, COH)
$KORS – Michael Kors
$CVS – CVS Health Corp
$NFLX – Netflix
$DIS – Walt Disney Co
$JNJ – Johnson & Johnson
$PG – Procter & Gamble
$V – Visa
$MA – MasterCard
$PEP – Pepsico
$TJX – TJX Companies
$HD – Home Depot
$VZ – Verizon
$XOM – Exxon Mobil
$WFC – Wells Fargo

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