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As a long time investor, I realized this year that I often had tens if not hundreds of strong calls or at least "hunches" throughout a year. I also realized that I tended to only strongly remember the biggest winners and the occasional loser that I would tend to "rationalize" away.
So this year, I decided to record and publish every "buy" in my mind throughout the year, along with my thesis and numbers behind the decision (and timestamp the day of the call). In order to systematize the process, I followed a strict set of rules to interpret the results fairly.
Winners would be categorized as up more than 5% throughout the period.
Neutral picks are within 5% up or down (dead money, or recent calls mainly).
Losers were tagged as greater than a 5% loss.
All picks (regardless of June or December timestamp) would be equally weighted.
An Equal Weight return would be calculated from the aggregate of all performances.
**The Results:**
I ended up writing 35 "calls" between April and December 2025. Price on the day I published vs today. No edits. No pretending I sold the top. No “would’ve sized this differently.” Just the equal weight returns.
Over this period the 35 theses returned roughly **42%**.
**Winners/Neutral/Losers**
* **Up more than 5%:** **18 / 35 (51%)**
* **Neutral (±5%):** **5 / 35 (14%)**
* **Down more than 5%:** **12 / 35 (34%)**
Here are a couple of notes that completely changed how I view my personal investing strategy:
Diversification among convicted buys is not optional for stock pickers. Yes, a lot of my highest conviction stocks worked out, but some flat out did not and were anchors to the portfolio.
Even if you are "right" over the long term, you might lose for years and waste a tremendous amount of opportunity cost, timing matters.
Asymmetric setups and winners are everything to market outperformance. One high conviction investment at the right time can buy you market beating performance for several years to come. (even at a 1/35th allocation)
**A handful of names did almost all the work.**
JMIA (+478%)
RKLB (+288%)
HOOD (+167%)
AMD (+143%)
SOFI (+142%).
**A handful of names also did the majority of damage to equal weight returns:**
HNST (-52%)
BMNR (-49%)
COIN (-21%)
HIMS (-21%)
MELI (-17%)
PYPL (-16%)
**Another important point of discovery:** Going against the common sentiment in a stock, is right a heck of a lot more than it's wrong. My biggest winners as well as convictions came during capitulations this year (AMD selling off under 100 despite massive pipelines and insatiable AI demand), Estee Lauder Stock trading as if it's going to file bankruptcy, the death of Google by chatgpt, so on and so forth.
**Lastly,** although not being able "to sell" certainly cost me real performance over this experiment, it also helped immensely with discipline. Not panic selling long-term convictions over a headline and inversely not selling the first 15% pop in a long term hold due to frustration also turned small winners into monsters at times.
**Yes,** there are undoubtedly times to sell high performers when they surpass long term targets in a hurry, but it's often much later than you think.
Overall, it was an awesome exercise and I highly recommend trying it for yourself in 2026. Regardless of the returns or bull market luck, I became an immensely better investor throughout the process.
Let me know if you have any questions about the process, results, or in general.