It's been three weeks since MSN Money's Jon Markman posted his latest StockScouter portfolio. I have not looked at it since, so I thought today would be a good time to check in and see how our hypothetical 10 stock portfolio is doing.

To recap, every six months Jon Markman, in his Supermodels column on MSN Money, screens the universe of stocks using his StockScouter stock trading system. He publishes a list of just ten stocks chosen by the StockScouter system for market beating returns in the coming 6 months. StockScouter's ten stock choices have consistently outperformed the S&P 500 for the six years. I've decided to track his system's latest stock picks to see how they do over the investment period.

In order to track StockScouter's picks I set up two hypothetical portfolios. One portfolio contains StockScouter's ten picks for the second half of 2007. The other portfolio contains only an investment in S&P 500 Depository Receipts, also known as Spiders. The symbol for this ETF is SPY. Both portfolios were funded with approximately $100,000 in hypothetical cash. This cash was divided up equally among all securites to be purchased. Only round lots were purchased. Commissions were set at $9.99 per trade.

As you can tell by the chart, our hypothetical returns are significantly varied. The strongest performer in our hypothetical portfolio to date is Penn Virginia GP Holdings, with a 3 week return of 16.8%. Our initial $9348.99 investment in PVG is now worth $11,055. The weakest performer to date is Cohu, with a 3 week loss totaling $265.99, or 2.9%. Our initial $9349.99 investment in COHU is now worth only $9084.

The real question, however, is how are we doing relative to the benchmark portfolio containing only a $100,000 investment in SPY. During the past 3 weeks our initial $106,647.99 investment in SPY has appreciated to a whopping $107,779 for a gain of $1131.01. This represents a compounded investment gain of 1.1%.

Our StockScouter portfolio's initial $104,293.90 investment (Remember, I bought round lots only.) has appreciated to $109,092. That's a compounded gain of 4.5%.

All-in-all, I'd say the StockScouter portfolio of 10 stock picks for the second half of 2007 is doing pretty well. 4.5% return on your money in just about 3 weeks' time is pretty good. But will these 10 stocks keep up the pace? Will the laggards pull themselves back up into positive returns? I'll check back in a few week's time to see.

Previous posts in this series:
Tracking the StockScouter stock picking system