I was curious how good you guys are at picking stocks, so I checked. My basically methodology (just using Yahoo Finance, nothing fancy) was to make a list of every ticker mentioned in a "potential buy" capacity. On the date of the initial mention, I "bought" $1,000 of the stock. Then I looked at the portfolio value today.
Please note that this is done from the perspective of a value investor, albeit on a pretty short time horizon. If your recommendations were made on a technical basis, your results in this comparison do not reflect the success of your strategy.
The Texags Bio Braintrust Fund (TBBF) invested $59,000 spread out over the last 8 months. Today, that money is worth $69,500 dollars, an EXCELLENT return by any metric. The best CAGRs in the portfolio are well over 500%. Of course, there were plenty of busts, too.
I also looked at it by poster. To avoid embarrassing anyone I'm not posting any rankings, although if anyone requests their individual results I will post them.
However, I will mention a few posters. Ranger222 had 24 of the 59 recommendations, the only poster with enough to be statistically significant. His portfolio is worth $31,000 dollars today. In terms of the volume of advice, depth of research, and return, he's ahead of the field for value provided. redsox34 only had 3 recommendations that came with minimal commentary, but all three were in the top 10, giving him an outstanding overall return but lower confidence that he can repeat it. Last, IrishTxAggie only made one initial mention and it was an utter flop, but he has provided substantial positive commentary on other stocks with a wide range of returns. I think that if we made a list of "buy ratings" by poster, he would vault into second after Ranger222.