A Professor’s Stock Picks

Does finance professor David Kass, who presents annual lists of stock picks on Seeking Alpha, make good selections? To investigate, we consider his picks of “10 Stocks for 2020”, “16 Stocks For 2021”, “12 Stocks For 2022”, “10 Stocks For 2023” and “10 Stocks For 2024”. For each year and each stock, we compute total (dividend-adjusted) return. For each year, we then compare the average (equal-weighted) total return for a David Kass portfolio to that of  SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY). Using dividend-adjusted returns from Yahoo!Finance for SPY and most stock picks and returns from Barchart.com and Investing.com for three picks during their selection years, we find that: (more…)