A Year Since I Started

What I Learned From Publishing Stock Picks

Author

Dakota Crisp, PhD
November 17, 2025

In partnership with

It’s been a year since I started my newsletter.

It’s gone through a lot of transformations — mostly because I have.

When I began, I was publishing monthly stock picks. I liked the research, and it felt like a clean way to help people invest better.

But I eventually stopped. Not because the picks were bad — they actually did well — but because I stopped enjoying the cadence.

Stock picks are weird.

I don’t invest every month. I invest when a deal is worth investing in. That might happen once a quarter… or not at all.

But when you commit to monthly picks, it stops being “Here’s an amazing opportunity” and becomes “Here’s the best I could find this month.”

And that’s not how I invest.

The other side of stock picking is the track record.

People want to know:

“Does this person actually know what they’re doing?”

But credibility takes two things:

  1. Doing your thinking in public

  2. Letting enough time pass to judge results

So even though I stopped doing monthly picks, it has been a year since I started — which means I can finally look back and evaluate what I recommended.

A Quick Note on Methodology

I don’t pick stocks by predicting where the price will be next month.

I look for companies whose intrinsic value is meaningfully higher than the price the market is currently offering — businesses with real cash flows, durability, and room to compound.

And for transparency: one year of performance doesn’t prove anything.

The real test is whether these ideas outperform over 3, 5, or 10 years.

But you can’t get to year five without doing year one in public. And a strong first year tells me the system is directionally sound.

So How Did the First Year Actually Perform?

Across all my picks:

My average pick return:

23.25%

S&P 500 return:

16.53%

My outperformance:

+6.72%

Put differently:

👉 If someone bought every stock I recommended, they would’ve beaten the market by ~40% on a relative basis.

No leverage.
No options.
No meme stocks.
Just businesses selling at a meaningful discount to their intrinsic value.

The Big Winners

A few names carried the portfolio:

  • Micron (MU): +170.5%

  • Newmont (NEM): +114.6%

  • Google (GOOGL): +89.8%

  • Oracle (ORCL): +73.7%

  • Microsoft (MSFT): +41.8%

These weren’t guesses. They were:

  • Quality compounders bought at real discounts,

  • Cyclicals at the bottom of the cycle, and

  • Unloved cash-flow machines hiding in plain sight.

The Misses

Some picks absolutely didn’t work:

  • Novo Nordisk (NVO): –46.7%

  • Constellation Brands (STZ): –26.4%

  • Kraft Heinz (KHC): –25.5%

  • Nike (NKE): –10.9%

But here’s what mattered:

👉 My worst losers were dwarfed by my biggest winners.

Which is the entire job of long-term investing — limiting downside and letting upside compound.

What I’m Doing Going Forward

I don’t plan to restart monthly picks.

My newsletter has evolved into something that feels much more aligned with who I am as an investor:

  • Understanding businesses

  • Building systems

  • Studying human behavior and decision-making

  • Helping people think better about money

But I am glad I published those picks. They gave me an early track record. They forced me to think in public. And a year later, they’re doing exactly what track records are supposed to do:

Building credibility that compounds.

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