Being a writer in the financial industry means that your words often come back to haunt you.

No matter how strongly you feel that a stock is going to go up, the minute you put the words to paper, your performance as a stock-picker is there for the entire world to see.

Over the last few months, this has been painfully obvious. The market has gone down the toilet, and our picks and recommendations that we all made a few months ago have likely taken it on the chin, unless it was a bearish recommendation.

I wrote a piece for our sister publication Early to Rise back in early December that suggested it was time to buy shares in some household names that were at the time trading at very low prices. With the absolute carnage in the markets since then, I was sure that the picks I gave were probably down at least as much as the market over that time, maybe a little worse, given some of the names on the list (such as AIG, which took a third government handout on Monday).

Sure enough, there are some ugly numbers on the list. Alcoa (NYSE:AA) is down 32 percent since I made the list, Citigroup (NYSE:C) is down 68 percent, and AIG is down 71%. By comparison, the Dow is down 14.98 percent over this same time period.

Happily, some names on the list have made large jumps since then. Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) is up 34 percent, Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ:JAVA) is up a little over 47 percent, and the big mover is Sprint (NYSE:S), which is up almost 90 percent since then.

To get an overall idea of how you would have done had you invested in the picks, I totaled the share prices for all 16 picks that day and compared them to prices on March 2. You would have spent $84.03 to buy one share of all 16 picks (excluding commissions). Had you sold them this past Monday, you would have gotten roughly $84.54. That’s a small profit, but remember the overall market is down 14.98 percent in the mean time.

Not only would you have beaten the market, but you would have managed to make a small gain. Not too bad in this market.

Looking back at the list, I wouldn’t really change anything. I mentioned that they were speculative plays, and with that, large losses can occur. I would still encourage buying these names, as almost all are still viable companies (AIG is questionable) and still have tremendous upside. Those that have dropped further have even less downside assuming they manage to survive (AIG).

As I mentioned in the original piece, I don’t suggest buying huge amounts of shares, but perhaps picking 10 of the companies and investing $500 into each one. You will only have $5000 invested, and the upside could be huge.

Source: Looking Back