Two months in and a textbook correction of 10% across the board for US stocks. The S&P 500 snapped its four-week losing streak, posting a 0.51% gain from the previous Friday. The index finished at 5,667.56 and is now 7.76% below its record close from February 19th,of 6,147.43 and is down 3.42% year to date [at time of writing].
The total average return of the portfolio is at +45.91% and when compared to the US S&P 500 index performance end of September 2023 4,514.87 to 5,667.56 March 2025 is up +25.53% (all data March 21st, 2025).
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Since we started the column in September 2023, it has gone to show that stock picking using fundamental research and analysis can pay off – and you can beat the market with some picks – now six out of 15 picks have beaten the market, but when equally weighted the six outperformers almost doubled the average return to +45.91% easily beating the S&P 500 index performance of +25.53%.
(Full portfolio details are available for Armchair Trader Plus+ members)
Analyzing the final portfolio
Mega Caps
As we analyze my holdings in the final portfolio I will go down the list of my picks from the largest market cap to smallest and how I think they should perform.
Starting with Nvidia [NASDAQ:NVDA] (155%) my first pick and one of my serious outperformer stocks. I believe the current AI boom strongly continues with these next three stocks and it works especially well in this market going forward. NVDA had a market cap of $3.49 trillion (bypassing Apple [NasdaqGS:AAPL] in January to become the highest market cap company in the USA until DeepSeek happened), so the returns going forward will be hard to maintain against the market overall, but we should still enjoy the ride, as I wrote in my first column in September, 2023.
I believe that NVDA (currently MC at $2.9 trillion) is a strong buy at these levels of $100-130. My target market cap for this stock is that it will be first one to break $4 trillion.
Microsoft [NasdaqGS:MSFT] and AAPL are not growing anymore and the great future is behind them both. NVDA and Meta [NASDAQ:META] are the only MAG 7 stocks I like going forward. META (35%) is my third stock pick in the AI race: NVDA (hardware), PLTR (Software) and META (the end user market). META is the world’s largest ad agency (market cap of $1.7 billion) and it has long used AI in its ad models.
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