Disclaimer: I own shares in some of the companies mentioned in this article and stand to benefit if they rise in price. I may decide to purchase or sell shares at any time without prior notice. Do your own research and size positions appropriately if you invest. Nothing here is meant to be understood as investment or financial advice. AI tools assist my research and writing process, enhancing analytical efficiency and clarity. Past performance is no indication of future returns.
Introduction
This article uses Datawrapper to track the Investment Opportunities that I write about and Google Sheets to allow up-to-date tracking. For all calculations, I use the ideas’ “native” stock exchange prices and currencies as provided by Google Finance.
Aggregate Statistics: Including and Excluding Junior E&P
The following table provides:
The current count of ideas per type to provide context to the above and the below, i.e., how many junior ideas are excluded from the age cohorts’ performance statistics, for example.
The share of total ideas that, since initial publication, exceeded 80% (i.e. “almost a multi-bagger”) or 100% total return.
Next, the aggregate statistics for all published investment opportunities from first publication to when I stop following the idea (none stopped so far).
As junior resource exploration is risky and time-consuming, it affects the overall performance statistics. If I exclude those, the statistics look as follows. Make no mistake, I am still convinced of each of these juniors I picked. But they are naturally more risky and their prices are more volatile due to being exposed to the whims of Mr Market.
Age Cohorts
As I am not necessarily interested in very short-term performance (although I don’t mind good, fast performance), I am interested in the distribution of performance over time. I stratified into four age cohorts: based on the initial articles’ ages, I created four quartiles. This may not be the best way to do it - please feel free to provide suggestions for improvements. Because the number of ideas is still small, the aggregate statistics per cohort are less expressive at the time I introduce these first. As more ideas get added, the statistics’ expressiveness should grow1.
Age Distribution
The following plot shows the age of the initial articles of each of the ideas in chronological order:
Excluding the junior E&P ideas from the analysis, I get the following age quartile limits.
Cohort Performances
From youngest to oldest.
To scorecard my performance, I focus on the Median Current Return. If positive, 50% of my ideas in that cohort to have a positive current return. In addition, if the Current Return third quartile + first quartile value > 0, then all the better. The winners certainly more than offset the detractors. As I aspire to write about ideas that I expect to generate compounding value over time, I expect (at the time of writing this) that older cohorts have higher median values and interquartile performance for Current Return.
Again, I would expect the statistics to become more meaningful as I publish more ideas over time. But so far, my scorecard seems to be going in the right direction: for businesses that are not junior resource E&P, the median return is positive except for the youngest cohort, and the median seems to increase over time. As the number of ideas in each cohort is still limited, expect swings even for the median (which is more robust to strong outliers than the mean) - this should reduce as more ideas make it into my corner of the internet.
Other Interesting Statistics
The following is a visualization of the current % and the high % return since the first publication on the opportunity.2
The next chart visualizes the spread of high % and the low % relative to the first date of publication on the opportunity. In case you wonder why a low % can be above 0: to track total return, I include dividends collected since publication…
And finally, a graph and a table of the raw data for you to peruse, e.g. annualized CAGR, days since publication, links to latest updates, etc.
Please provide feedback in case there are some metrics that I should add to the visualization.
Disclaimer
I own shares in some of the companies mentioned and stand to benefit if they rise in price. I may decide to purchase or sell shares at any time without prior notice. Do your own research and size positions appropriately if you invest. Nothing here is meant to be understood as investment or financial advice or as a solicitation to purchase or sell securities. Historical performance is not a predictor of future performance.
Appendix: EDIT History
September 2025
I noticed that the chart “current % and the high %” was actually showing CAGR vs current. I corrected the figure as CAGRs distort the graph too much for young ideas.
July 2025:
Added a Datawrapper way to provide the numbers discerning between the “normal ideas” and the “juniors”.
Added statistics about how many of the total ideas touched a high of 80% and 100%, i.e. that were close to multi-bagging, or even multi-bagged.
June 2025:
I just realized that Datawrapper stops updating charts after 30 days, then one needs to ‘republish’ the charts. Possibly, the data shown in the past was sometimes stale. I will now regularly republish charts to keep this page up to date.
May 2025:
Added a distinction of aggregate performance statistics to separate out speculative junior E&P vs conventional businesses.
Structured more clearly via Headlines
New subtitle
December 2024: Fixed a Type-O
October 2024: I now manually track dividends collected. I do so by simply adding dividends back to the share price High, Low and Current.
Added Aggregate Statistics Mean, Median, and first and third quartile
As of May 13, 2025, there are 20 ideas. Thus, a quartile of article ages will contain five articles. Analyzing, e.g., the median of any quartile will result in two articles above and two below the median. That is what I mean by “less expressive”.
I skipped Alibaba, as really I only provided news on data vailability (the buybacks) and do not feel I should take any credit for Chinese stimuli induced returns.