Barron's Roundtable Review

Each year Barron's magazine publishes a three part round table series where they interview some of the "wise old men and women" of the investment business. It is usually recorded the first week of January (this year it was Jan 5th) and published serially later in the month. Along with their prognostications and picks for the coming year, Barron's also now gives the performance of the stocks recommended by the participants from last year. Here in aggregate is how they did:

-The 63 equity, bond or ETF or mutual fund recommendations the group collectively lost 41.42% (slightly worse than the overall market).

-Each manager's overall picks lost 39.98% (again slightly worse than the overall market).

-Pimco's Bill Gross whose picks were all fixed income related lost 24.3%, pointing to the fact that no asset class was safe last year.

-Gross also picked General Motors and Ford Corporate Bonds as recommendations. Each of these lost over 50% in value. As bankruptcy fears gripped the auto industry.

-Oscar Shafer had the best overall performance down slightly more than 12%. His picks were as far as I can tell mostly small cap European stocks.

-Art Samberg and Archie MaCallaster who have been round table participants for years picks in total lost 62.49% and 72.09%. MaCallaster's picks were heavily weighted in financials . Samberg's had more of an international flavor. Three of Samberg's picks lost over 80% of their value. MaCallaster had one in that category.

-Some of these managers had recommendations that involved certain esoteric items such as pairs currency trades or cotton. I left these out of these calculations as Barron's did not break out the percentage gains or losses for these ideas.

Again this just points to the fact that last year was a real tough year. These guys manage billions of dollars of client funds. Collectively they employ at least hundreds of people who do nothing each day but analyse securities and most can probably call companies up on the phone and speak to somebody pretty high in the chain of command about business. They still collectively did no better than the S&P 500 ETF. Something to think about going forward.