Four Stocks for 2013

Wait… the guy that write a free eBook on why picking stocks is a ridiculous way to invest is jumping into a stock picking contest?  Yes, I admit that I like to pretend I’m Warren Buffett from time to time – as long as there is no actual money on the line.  Last year Nelson Smith from Financial Uproar started a stock picking contest for a bunch of the only people that would talk to him friends.  I agreed, and as of the third quarter of the contest I’m happy to report that I was crushing the S&P 500 by about 6% over 2012.  That’s much better than most mutual funds out there, so I figure that I probably owe myself a solid 2.5% MER, or more realistically I should probably start up my own hedge fund so that I can bank “2 and 20”.

I did lose a little shine off of my APPL in the 4^th quarter, but I believe I shall remain in the middle of the pack overall.  Not bad for a guy that doesn’t pick his own stocks!  Anyway, head on over to Nelson’s site to check out the final standings for our ego-measuring contest that we weren’t brave enough to bet any money on, and then check out my brilliant stock picks for 2013.

1) Cannabis Science, Inc. (CBIS.OB)

When your teacher told you that copying off of the smart kid would get you nowhere in life they were lying.  The investing phenom over at Sustainable Personal Finance made a killing off of his marijuana-related stock last year.  I’ll let others smoke that blueberry yum yum and watch my stock get higher and higher!  I won’t pretend to be an expert on the company since I didn’t even know it existed until a few days ago.  From what I was able to quickly read, it is a pharmaceutical company that specializes in using cannabis to treat numerous medical conditions.  The more socially acceptable the herb becomes, the better my stock will do.  I can’t see how I lose on the stock, but I also get to tell my students that I invested in a weed company which will get an invaluable amount of street-cred (in additional to stunned head tilts).

2) Stryker (SYK)

Newflash – People are getting older.  Guess what happens when we don’t die as young as we used to?  Our bodies wear out!  Stryker is a market-leader in medical devices, in addition to hip and knee replacements.  The company appears to be making a ton of cash relative to what it is selling for and last time I checked we weren’t getting any younger!

3) Cardinal Financial (CFNL)

I wanted a sexy bank stock so I could feel like a high-roller (I’m that guy who gets his jollies off of handling the coloured money in Monopoly).  While the Canadian banks are fine if you just want to make a decent amount of money for the next billion years, I need something that has homerun-potential so that I can win this little contest.  How did I settle on one that is named after a bird?  Well you simply need to ask yourself where all the money (both clean and dirty) is flowing to in the USA?  The answer is Washington, D.C. and because of all the government jobs and lobbyists the city is basically recession proof.  Cardinal Financial is more or less based exclusively in that geographical area, so it should be good to go.  Also an interesting play on the improvement of the USA housing market.

4) Apple (APPL)

I know tsk tsk, cliché… I picked this stock last year and it soared to new heights before coming back to Earth a little late in 2012 – just in time for me to pick it up again in 2013.  Apple’s days of ultra-explosive growth are numbered (how many products can these guys flood the market with?) but they are still a great value at the current prices.  Just their cash hoard alone makes me salivate (and glad that I own in the stock in many of my ETFs.  If the investing fundamentals alone didn’t convince me, I figured I couldn’t really call myself a student personal finance blogger if I didn’t pay homage to the great fruit company in the sky…