Welcome to the Fantasy Investing 2020 kickoff! I’m happy to announce we’ve increased our number of participants from 5 to 7… an almost 50% increase year-over-year! While I didn’t win the inaugural 2019 Fantasy Investing season (despite leading for 11 of the 12 months), I was very happy with my portfolio’s amazing 52% performance versus an impressive 29% performance for the S&P 500. I’m looking forward to trying to top those numbers this year and hopefully taking home first place this time around.

One minor change that I made for this season is that I set up a shared google spreadsheet listing all of the portfolios competing this season along with up-to-date returns using the Google Finance API. You can check it out here (please let me know if you have issues accessing it). Because everybody should be able to check on the standings at will now, I am planning to do updates a little less often and will probably switch a a schedule of posting updates every four months or so.

I’m looking forward to an exciting season. Matt and Daniel return and once again serve as proxies for an index fund focused approach. Newcomer Joe has exploded out of the gates courtesy of his pick of Beyond Meat (BYND) which is up a mind-boggling 40% already. I’m hot on his heels thanks to Telaria (TLRA), Redfin (RDFN), and Square (SQ) and newcomer David is right behind me thanks to the twin “T”s: Tesla (TSLA) and Teladoc (TDOC). Gurkie’s 6% return so far is a bit further back but is still crushing the market thanks to Pinterest (PINS) while 2019 champ Adrian is off to a rough start with Target (TGT) down 10% already.

I can’t wait to see how our portfolios shake out over the coming months. Thanks to all our players for participating and thanks to everybody for following along.