Recovering slowly, I’m still in first place, only down 4.52% on the year. The current status:

Berkshire Hatha Class B Ord Shs	-9.82%
Mindray Medical International Ltd	-18.97%
PowerShares Water Resource Portfolio	-2.29%
Buffalo Wild Wings Inc	12.19%
Mueller Water Products Series A Ord Shs	-15.13%
Central European Distribution Corp	6.06%
Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp	-8.10%
Grant Prideco Inc	3.39%

Overall, the combined portfolio is still down 10.87% on the year. For most of the first three months of the year, only a couple of stocks in the 39 combined family picks were up; today six are. The three above, plus RIMM, CVS Caremark and Costco Wholesale.

The brutal first quarter, worst in the stock market in five years, comes to a close and I retain my lead in the family stock picking contest, only down 10.38%. The combined portfolio of all participants is now down 15.8% for the year. The only saving grace is that I’m beating the NASDAQ as well as all the European and Asian indices.

Berkshire Hatha Class B Ord Shs	-5.56%
Mindray Medical International Ltd	-32.65%
PowerShares Water Resource Portfolio	-10.09%
Buffalo Wild Wings Inc	5.51%
Mueller Water Products Series A Ord Shs	-14.08%
Central European Distribution Corp	0.19%
Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp	-15.06%
Grant Prideco Inc	-11.33%

Interestingly, one of the most popular searches leading to my site is people searching for info on Berkshire Hathaway. My contention has always been that historically, BRK.B trails in a bull market and does better than the averages in a bear market, and therefore is a relatively safe place in stormy weather; BRK.B is essentially an index fund with no recurring expense fees chipping away at the return.

Best stocks in the cumulative family picks: Buffalo Wild Wings (BWLD), up 5.51%, CVS Caremark (CVS), up 1.91% and Intuitive Surgical, Inc, () up 0.42%.

Worst pick YTD? Suntech Power Holdings ADR, off 50.73%.

I’ve managed to pull into the lead in the family contest, being down only 5.42% on the year. Buffalo Wild Wings (BWLD) is pulling me through.

Berkshire Hatha Class B Ord Shs	0.70%
Mindray Medical International Ltd	-19.66%
PowerShares Water Resource Portfolio	-8.18%
Buffalo Wild Wings Inc	10.90%
Mueller Water Products Series A Ord Shs	-9.66%
Central European Distribution Corp	-5.42%

One Asian and European mini-crash, a monster fed cut, and one stimulus package later, here’s the carnage for my 2008 contest picks: down -11.05%, and in second place. Of the collective picks in the contest, only one stock—that blue chip of widows and orphans, PetMed Express Inc (PETS)—is up a stunning 3.14%. On my own picks, my best two—Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B) and Buffalo Wild Wings (BWLD)—are down just a couple of percent.

Here were my 2008 stock picks for this year’s family stock contest. We take the closing price on 12/31/2007, so the current streak of eight straight losing days for the NASDAQ put us all in a big hole.

Stock	Starting Price	YTD
Berkshire Hatha Class B Ord Shs	4736.00	-6.78%
Mindray Medical International Ltd	42.97	-8.03%
PowerShares Water Resource Portfolio	21.40	-6.45%
Buffalo Wild Wings Inc	23.22	-7.97%
Mueller Water Products Series A Ord Shs	9.52	-10.82%
Central European Distribution Corp	58.08	-5.35%
Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp	33.94	-9.81%
Grant Prideco Inc	55.51	-1.44%

YTD: down 7.08%, and the family pickers are down 6.18%.

I picked these with a little less analysis than I normally do before making a trade, and perhaps relied a little too much on the Motley Fool community recommendations as a screening tool to find eight I liked. I had briefly considered ISRG, but passed on it as too pricey (turns out it is in fact down almost 16% YTD). I picked PHO based on Paul Kedrosky’s love of water (and predictions that “blue is the new green” for 2008, meaning that environmental talk will turn from global warming to the implications for water.

BRK.B appears to be a safe port in down years. The rest are just small to midcap stocks that I think have the potential to appreciate significantly if the market does turn around.

In 2007 my extended family had a stock picking contest. Seven of us picked eight stocks over the New Year’s weekend and invested a hypothetical $100,000 per person evenly distributed, with $12,500 split among the stocks.

Collectively, this represented a starting universe of 53 stocks, funds and ETFs (three stocks were picked twice). The complete list of stocks and performance can be found here.

The overall results were fairly impressive based on most vanilla benchmarks. The total return of the portfolio was 15.82%, beating the S&P 500 by 9.9%, the DJIA by 9.39% and the NASDAQ composite by about 6%, but trailing the NASDAQ 100 by 2.85%.

Edwin J. Elton and Martin J. Gruber’s “Modern Portfolio Theory and Investment Analysis” says that you can achieve optimal diversification with a portfolio containing 20 stocks, after which adding additional stocks reduces the risk only marginally. The seven of us each did a little diversification within our local universe of eight stocks, and at a higher level, the life situations and demographics of the seven of us—spanning six decades and half the country—appeared to create additional diversification. Although none of this was a rigorous application of modern portfolio theory, in most cases some amateur thought was applied to attempt to diversify.

One question is raised: could you base a fund on the premise of not only diversification of stocks, but diversification of stock pickers each attempting to act rationally? Or is that just the definition of an index fund?

Highlights

Best stock picks: Nintendo, (+145.6%), Amazon (+141.4%), Apple (+132.9%), Southern Copper Corp (+122%) and China Mobile ADR (+103.4%).

Worst picks: Compucredit, (-74.7%), Chicos FAS (-56.1%), Bear Stearns (-44.84%) (2 picks), Citigroup (-46.23%), (2 picks), and McGraw Hill (-33.2%).

Another interesting note is if all the picks that two people had in common—Johnson and Johnson, Citigroup and Bear Stearns—had been rejected based on groupthink, the overall return of the portfolio would have been 21.1%. This is probably just coincidental, but it also might indicate that popularity of a stock in such a contest can indicate a bubble. Or touts finally getting the word out to the typical retail investor.

Selected Returns

Individual Returns of Pickers

Mrs Firebones	+44.25%
The Sis-in-law	+39.76%
Yours Truly	+16.18%
Brother #1	+7.04%
Brother #2	+4.60%
Mom	+4.08%
The Nephew	-5.20%

My 2007 Picks

Berkshire Hathaway Class B	+32.36%
Devon Energy	+36.97%
eBay Inc	+7.83%
Emulex Corp	-17.45%
Vanguard Pacific ETF	+8.75%
Nice Systems Depository Receipt	+10.32%
Tele Norte Leste ADR Reptg 1 Pref Shs	+47.64%
Matsushita Electric Industrial ADR	+3.03%

I missed big-time on Japan and the Pacific, choices all based on punditry and a desire to go global to boost returns (since I thought domestic would only be up 4-5%).

Lessons Learned

Let your winners run. A couple of participants commented about their past common mistake of selling a winner after a small gain, say, selling Apple after a rise from $50 to $80 and missing out on the $80 to $200 run. Taking a look at the portfolio of the winner, you can see this in action:

Abercrombie & Fitch Co	+9.00%
Johnson & Johnson	+2.61%
Boston Scientific Corp	-31.99%
Medimmune Inc	+69.00%
Nintendo Co Ltd Depository Receipt	+145.61%
Apple Inc	+132.90%
Costco Wholesale Corp	+31.70%
Medtronic Inc	-4.85%

Nintendo and Apple more than compensated for the Boston Scientific loss. Had Nintendo and Apple been sold after 60% gains, the actual 44.25% winning return would have dropped to 24.43%. This is something that most investors learn eventually—sell your losers and let your winners run—but retrospectively reviewing a contest like this shows why.

Global matters. Again, hard to draw a conclusion from a single year, but the top 3 pickers had 29% portfolio exposure to international stocks and funds; the remaining 4 pickers had only around 9% exposure.

Eight stocks are not enough to consider yourself diversified. Two of the three poorest performers had significant subprime exposure, with 25% of their stock in financial services. Of the top 3 performers in the contest, the financial services exposure was only 4.17%, and that single stock (Goldman Sachs) was the only one in the collective portfolio to dodge the subprime bullet. This isn’t a hard and fast lesson—the contest rules which mandated equal investment in each pick magnified errors in diversification. For a stock picking contest, this is okay; for creating a real portfolio, it’s not.

In the upcoming year, we have five pickers so far: my, Mrs Firebones, Firebones Jr., The Nephew and The Nephew’s Bride-to-be. Later, I’ll post their 2008 picks (with December 31, 2007 closing price). Given the down market so far this year, this should make for an entertaining ride.