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.