by Archie M. Richards, Jr., CFP^®
April 10, 2006

This is a record of the predictions made in this column from 1999 to 2001. I've made predictions since, but it's too soon to rate those. You have to give investments time to season. Some of my recommendations seasoned so much they turned rancid.

8/23/99: I recommended Zi Corp (ZICA) at 7. Only 6 months later, it hit 42, when I failed to suggest selling. The stock is now 1.75. Overall, a bummer.

10/18/99: I predicted that Y2K wouldn't amount to a hill of beans. At midnight of the new millennium, computers were expected to go haywire. They didn't.

11/15/99: I suggested buying stocks of Japan and India. The Nikkei 225 was then 18,260. It's now 17,563, having fallen below 12,000 in the meantime - way premature. The India Fund, a closed-end fund of Indian stocks (IFN), was 14 in November 1999. It's now 51. That's more like it.

12/6/99: I said that small-cap stocks were cheap in relation to big stocks and suggested exchanging "part" of your big-cap money for a small-cap fund. Since then, the Vanguard Small Cap Fund has risen from 24 to 32, while the Vanguard 500 Index Fund, a big-cap fund, has fallen from 131 to 119. A nice call.

1/3/00: Recommended AutoNation (AN) at 9.25. It's now 22.5. Solid.

1/31/00: Advised buying Vanguard's REIT Index Fund, then at 9.91. The price is now 21.74. In addition, the fund threw off lots of cash all the way along (a small part of which was return of capital). In 2005, for example, Vanguard's REIT Fund paid out 1.39 - more than 7 percent of the year's average price. This recommendation was a beauty!

2/14/00: Suggested Phillip Morris (now called Altria - MO) at 19 1/16. The price is now 69.75, with a current dividend yield of 4.6 percent. Another good one.

4/24/00: Here come the bummers: I recommended five suppliers of clean, uninterrupted electric power for electronic equipment. International Rectifier has gone from 42.5 to 42; IXYS Corp from 29 to 10; Intersil from 34 to 29; Infineon from 62 to 10; and Dynex Semiconductor from 3 to zero. Yuk!

10/2/00: Suggested selling one-third of a portfolio's holding of EMC at the then-current price of 99, and sell half the remainder in 2001. In mid-2001, the price was 28. It's now 13.5. Right direction. Too timid.

10/16/00: With the Dow at 10,192, I suggested the purchase of stocks. Yikes! The Dow still had a long way to go on the downside.

12/4/00: Recommended five suppliers of bandwidth. Couldn't miss, right? Well, Broadcom has fallen from 104 to 46; Global Crossing from 13 to zero; JDS Uniphase from 56 to 4; Lucent from 16 to 3; and Qualcomm from 83 to 52. Did somebody say "rancid?" Buying several companies in the same industry can hardly be called diversification.

6/11/01: Recommended Coherent (COHR) at 37 - now 33.

8/13/01: Analog Devices (ADI) at 47 - now 38. Enough with the high-tech already!

9/3/01: I predicted that the Dow (then 9,950) "could easily be higher by 20 percent" by yearend. By the end of 2001, it rose only 3 percent, but fell by 15 percent a year later. The Dow now stands at 11,120. Not exactly sizzling. In the long run, stock prices go up.

12/24/01: Recommended Rockwell Automation (ROK) at 12. It's now 73 and pays a dividend of 1.2 percent. Good call to end on.

Except for the Robot Stocks (see below), I stopped recommending individual stocks in 2002. They're too risky.

Kathryn writes, "I just came across the columns in your website describing the Robot Portfolios. (The columns are dated 1/10/05 and 1/9/06.) I'd like to buy the ten Robot stocks. But the method calls for them to be acquired in January, and it's now March 20. Should I buy the stocks now? (You'll probably suggest I go to BigCharts.com, look up each company, and do an analysis.)"

Forget about the stock analyses, Kathryn. If you want to reduce the number of purchases, make an alphabetical list and acquire every second one. But the year is still young. Buy all ten Robot stocks and hope for the best.