In the spirit of full transparency and intellectual integrity, it is our goal to maintain a track record of our investment ideas on this page. We will attempt to measure ourselves on an absolute basis, relative to the most applicable benchmark (typically the S&P 500) and then with one final metric, which we call our “batting average”. The batting average attempts to represent the percentage of investment ideas that were correct (i.e. had positive returns).

Hopefully as fellow travelers in the investment arena, you hold yourselves to similar standards.

We will update our performance at the end of every week. Here are some of the highlights through 3/5/10:

• Thus far we have introduced 20 investment ideas
• Our batting average on those ideas is .600
• Our batting average on long ideas is .625
• Our batting average on short ideas is .714
• Our batting average on pair trades is .400
• Overall our average investment idea has returned 8.4% since the original date of recommendation compared to a 15.3% return for the S&P 500 on average
• We have introduced 8 long ideas which have returned 15.9% on average vs. a 18.5% return for the S&P 500
• We have introduced 7 short ideas which have returned 3.1% on average vs. a 13.7% return for the S&P 500
• We have recommended five pair trades which returned 3.8% on average vs. a 12.4% return for the S&P 500

Please click on this link to view the details of the performance of each of our investment ideas.