Tracking Three Recent Alpha Strategies

It's the time of the year when the carnival comes to town. There's always the game where the ducks float by and the kid picks one out of the water and gets a prize. Of course most of the ducks give you the plastic spider ring, a roll of smarties, or some other piece of junk - not the stuffed animal your kid wants. Makes me think of the armada of investment ideas floating by on Twitter, Seeking Alpha and all the media sites. How does the investor pick the right idea? How does the investor even know if they've picked well in the past? Below I summarize three recent alpha ideas to explore, and provide a link to track current and ongoing performance of the ideas. The alpha tracking portfolios are provided by LikeAssets.

1. DeliveringAlpha

The recent one day conference hosted by CNBC highlighted picks from many of the world's most famous investors. There was even a "Best of Delivering Alpha" picks where famous hedge fund managers provided their best picks for the year. Will these picks (CAT, QCOM, POAHF,HPQ,ESRX,EADSF,MZDAY,SD,TM) deliver alpha? View the portfolio and see how they are doing one week later. Come back anytime and check on performance.

2. Brazil

There was a recent quantitative analysis of Brazil's decimated market which determined that, historically, your odds of winning by buying Brazil after more than a 20% fall in 6 months is quite good. In fact, investors made money 21 out of 23 times that they held the Brazil market for the next 6 months after the drop. The average return has been +30.54%. I'm tracking this portfolio to see how it does this time. Note that LikeAssets will not only determine if the return is positive but also whether Brazil (EWZ,BRAZ,BRF,BRAQ) beats the emerging markets index in the form of an ETF (EEM). It's important to look at Brazil relative to all the other emerging market opportunities.

3. New and Better Dividend Stock Investing

I'm a big fan of Meb Faber's work. He recently published a new book that makes a case for enhanced dividend stock investing based on a more holistic analysis of how a company returns cash to shareholders. His firm has also come to market with the Cambria Shareholder Yield ETF (SYLD), that puts these principles into practice. I'm tracking SYLD in this portfolio here to see how it fares against the traditional equity indexes.

Disclosure: I am long SYLD.