Bruce Pile

Stock analysis is a serious hobby for me. I compete at Ken Kam's Marketocracy, where they do capital management using the best member mutual fund track records with extensive tabulations of alpha, beta, R-squared, and many other fund management evaluations. I've been running 4 funds there for about 8 years now using various versions of my basic method and a 5th experimental fund where I try new things.

Marketocracy publishes a Forbes newsletter, Marketscope, for which I've written; and provides input to forbes.com via the buy/sell activity of the M100, the top 100 ranked fund managers on the site. You can check their reports on the M100 at forbes.com - go to "Markets" and "Equities" and ...More "Inside Equities" and "guru picks".

My model fund has typically run a since-inception alpha return over 12% annualized over the years. Its performance has been running even with the top 3 diversified general funds (nonsector and noncountry funds) as ranked by Morningstar. Marketocracy also tabulates how consistent your alpha is over the long term with a chart showing the likelihood that an investor in your fund will out-pace the S&P 500 over any random time frame up to 24 months (my 24 month figure runs around 80% or higher).

In addition to offering managed accounts run by top ranked members, Marketocracy reviews the record of about 30,000 or more members monthly and takes the top 100, the M100, to make up their Masters 100 Fund (along with some considerations of current market conditions and members' ability in those conditions). I've been in the M100 a big part of my membership there.

My fund methodology is high diversification, usually running over 25 stocks about equally weighted, and low risk, usually running a beta of around 0.80 (80% the risk of a S&P 500 index fund).