Paul Vs The Market

The entries are in, the calendar has flipped to the month too good to have 30+ days, and most importantly: Fantasy Investing 2023 has officially kicked off!

After a record-breaking twelve entrants last year, we’re back with a leaner group of 6 brave souls who saw how things went last year and said, “Please, sir, can I have some more?”

You can check out the participants and their portfolios by clicking here. Good luck to all of our participants. I hope you all will follow along and check-in throughout the year. Thanks, as always, for participating.

The new one-month-later start to the 2023 Fantasy Investing season is right around the corner! Last year was rough, but this year can’t be much worse….

Right?

If you’re new to Fantasy Investing, then the game is simple: Choose 5 different investments (ideally individual companies, but we’ve had players think outside of the box and go with ETFs or crypto or other vehicles just to make my life exciting) that you think will outperform the market over the next 12 months and your fantasy portfolio will be pitted against not only other players, but also against “the market” (ie, the S&P 500). We play for nothing but pride and the time commitment can be as little as a few minutes. If you’re interested in seeing how some past seasons have went, you can check out my horribly ugly spreadsheet with previous years by clicking here.

If you want to play, get your picks in as soon as possible. The plan is to start tracking performance as of February 1st, but I’ll take portfolio submissions all of this week since I was so late getting this post out. You can leave a comment with your name and 5 picks (please leave as much info as possible, including ticker and company name to avoid any misunderstandings) and hopefully the game is a lot more fun this year.

Thanks all!

Fantasy investing was inspired by fantasy football: a game I have enjoyed playing with my friends for decades now. In 2009, I started up a keeper league which is still ongoing. We even got a trophy with the winner of each year engraved on it. Even though I usually participate in half a dozen NFL related fantasy games a year, that keeper league is by far the most important to me. This past week was the semi-finals, and I was fielding a strong team with the #2 overall seed. I was even facing the exact same team I had beaten the previous week. This past weekend was a roller coaster of emotions as I jumped out to an early lead, saw it all evaporate to a wicked Burrow+Higgins stack, then saw hope spring anew courtesy of a lackluster Tyreek Hill performance. All I needed was 2.5 points from Davante Parker, a player who hadn’t score less than 6 points in any game he has played this year.

Parker ended up with 0, which means that trophy that I so covet will spend another year in the possession of another. Last night, I briefly considered tweeting out: “Lessons from 2021: I suck at fantasy football and I suck at investing”. It felt like an appropriately rueful joke about my performance in both this year, but I ultimately decided against it because I was a little worried people might take it too seriously.

Because while I don’t shy away at all about how much my fantasy investing performance has sucked this year (losing to the S&P by around 41 percentage points and not even top 10 among 17 players), I’m also a big believer in keeping perspective and looking and the long term.

So what do my long term results look like?

• Played 6 seasons of Fantasy Investing in one form or another and beat the market 5 out of 6 of those seasons
• Averaged a 46% return over those 6 seasons
• Won my 10 team fantasy football keeper league in 2 out of the 13 seasons it has been going, including making the playoffs most years

So clearly not utter dominance (especially with fantasy football), but certainly respectable.

Anyway, thanks for filling in as therapists for me and letting me vent about my bad fantasy football break last night.

If I had to sum up the story of the 2021 fantasy investing season (current results can be found here) in one poorly made movie reference, it would be: “Revenge of the Market”. We had 17 participants choosing individual stocks to try to beat the market and, if the results hold, the S&P500 is set to trounce all of them. If you fancy yourself a stock picker, it looks like there’s a decent chance 2021 wasn’t a good year for you.

Even in a year where the market reigned supreme, there is still a winner in fantasy investing. There are still a few more days for things to change, but if the results hold, a hearty congratulations goes to Adrian, who is on track to win with a very respectable +18% return thanks largely to his unorthodox picks of URA (+61%) and UPRO (+102%). Congrats on the win!

And now it’s time to look ahead to 2022. Like a tardy Santa, I’m making a list (of stocks) and checking it twice in anticipation for the kick-off next week. This post is coming out a little later than I was hoping, so if you’re interested in participating, please don’t delay! The new season kicks off next Monday, January 3rd, which leaves you around 5 days to get your portfolio in. Let me know what your picks are in the comments below, and hopefully we all have better luck in 2022!

Welcome to the Fantasy Investing 2021 kickoff! Before we touch on the new season, I wanted to offer a hearty congratulations to David for winning the 2020 Fantasy Investing season with an incredible 185% return for the year. Tesla (TSLA) was the main engine of his success with a 731% gain, but the rest of his portfolio was no slouch either. I came in a distant second with a (still respectable) 156% gain powered by a trio of stocks which had over 200% gains (RDFN, SQ, MGNI). Joe got the bronze medal with a still impressive 125% return largely thanks to Jumia (JMIA). Most importantly? Everybody except for the two indexers (Daniel and Matt) beat the S&P for the year. Great job everybody! I would have liked to have won, but I can’t complain too much about a 156% return. Maybe 2021 will be my year?

Speaking of which, let’s talk about the 2021 season.

Last year our number of participants increased to 7 from 5 two years ago. I’m thrilled to announce that for the 2021 season we have seen increased growth in participation and have hit 15 participants! A lot of the new participants were obtained through my posts on CommonStock, a new platform I have been increasingly using over the past few months. I encourage you to check it out if you have interest in investing and reading about what other smart people are investing in.

I tweaked the spreadsheet I used to track returns last year. The 2020 competition is now a separate tab and the 2021 competition is in a new tab. The spreadsheet can be found here. Please let me know if you notice any problems or mistakes, as this is still a very manual process. I also tweaked the 2020 tab so we can continue to track the portfolio returns past the December 31, 2020 cut-off in case that is interesting to anybody. As always, please let me know if you have any suggestions on improvements.

I’m really looking forward to this season. The competition should be intense. Good luck to all of the participants. Thanks for following along.

The 2019 Fantasy Investing season is over and the last month saw a flurry of activity that (unfortunately for me) lead to somebody else besides me leading the standings for the first time all season. That’s right, at the 11th hour Adrian’s portfolio (courtesy of the hard-charging AMD) zoomed past mine to snag a surprisingly comfortable margin of victory in the first ever fantasy investing season. Congratulations to Adrian on his victory!

But congratulations are also in store for everybody who participated. The S&P 500 returned around 28% for 2019, which means that every player who picked an individual stock (versus funds designed to match the market) managed to beat the market. In fact, all three portfolios consisting of individual companies beat the market by double digit percentage points. Two stocks that were picked (AMD and MELI) managed to double in 2019.

Here are the final standings:

Adrian (60%)

• AMD – 155%
• AMZN – 26%
• NFLX – 25%
• NVDA – 80%
• SQ – 16%

Paul (52%)

• AMZN – 26%
• IQ – 45%
• MELI – 100%
• SQ – 16%
• TDOC – 74%

Gurkie (38%)

• AMZN – 26%
• C – 58%
• DIS – 34%
• GE – 50%
• TCEHY – 24%

Matt (30%)

• FZROX – 29%
• TSLA – 37%
• VGSLX – 27%
• VTI – 30%
• VTSAX – 28%

Daniel (22%)

• VBTLX – 9%
• VFIAX – 29%
• VFWAX – 18%
• VIMAX – 29%
• VSMAX – 26%

Thanks again to everybody for playing. Submissions for the 2020 Fantasy Investing season have already been received and I’ll have post in a few days explaining how you can track the performance of the 2020 portfolios, so keep an eye out for that. Thanks again.

It’s the last monthly update before a champion is crowned for the 2019 (and first) Fantasy Investing season. It looks like this season will come down to the wire as the gap between first and second has narrowed to under a single percentage point. Can I hold on for one more month or will Adrian eventually overtake me? Also, the S&P 500 is up around 28% year-to-date, so our three portfolios which are entirely individual stocks (as opposed to ETFs or index funds) are all still beating the market. Will this continue for the last month? There are a lot of interesting races to watch.

Here are the updated standings:

Paul (51.8%)

Ticker	Company	Starting Price	Current Price	Percent Change
AMZN	Amazon	1465.2	1800.8	22.9
IQ	iQiyi	14.56	19.15	31.5
MELI	MercadoLibre	285.61	580.58	103.3
SQ	Square	54.1	69.12	27.8
TDOC	Teladoc	48.19	83.74	73.8

Adrian (51.1%)

Ticker	Company	Starting Price	Current Price	Percent Change
AMD	Advanced Micro Devices	18.01	39.15	117.4
AMZN	Amazon	1465.2	1800.8	22.9
NFLX	Netflix	259.28	314.66	21.4
NVDA	nVidia	130.64	216.74	66.2
SQ	Square	54.1	69.12	27.8

Gurkie (34.7%)

Ticker	Company	Starting Price	Current Price	Percent Change
AMZN	Amazon	1465.2	1800.8	22.9
C	Citigroup	50.68	75.12	50.1
DIS	Disney	108.1	151.58	40.2
GE	General Electric	7.46	11.27	51.3
TCEHY	Tencent	38.865	42.15	8.7

Matt (23.8%)

Ticker	Company	Starting Price	Current Price	Percent Change
FZROX	Fidelity ZERO Total Market	8.79	11.18	27.2
TSLA	Tesla	306.1	329.94	7.8
VGSLX	Vanguard Real Estate	103.48	131.92	29.3
VTI	Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF	125.75	160.02	28.4
VTSAX	Vanguard Total Stock Market	62.15	77.89	26.5

Daniel (20.2%)

Ticker	Company	Starting Price	Current Price	Percent Change
VBTLX	Vanguard Total Bond Market	10.46	11.09	6.5
VFIAX	Vanguard 500	231.73	290.82	26.7
VFWAX	Vanguard FTSE All-World ex-US	28.27	32.39	15.7
VIMAX	Vanguard Mid-Cap	170.59	216.65	27.8
VSMAX	Vanguard Small-Cap	63.17	78.09	24.3

The next Fantasy Investing season starts January 1st, 2020, so if you’re interested in playing please start submitting your portfolios now. You can leave a comment here with your name and 5 tickers, or you can email your submissions to: paulvsthemarket@gmail.com. Thanks, everyone. Looking forward to more participants for next year.