Zacks
The Bucket List Portfolio
Kip Robbins

Yesterday I watched Walk the Line, the movie about Johnny Cash starring Joaquin Phoenix, for the fourth time. Having seen Cash perform live, and having visited Sun Records' studio in Memphis, I'll watch that movie every chance I get. There's one scene that resonates with me each time. It's the one where Cash is auditioning for Sam Phillips at Sun Records, and Phillips, bored with the same old songs, stops Cash's trio a few verses in and requests something from the heart.

Phillips says 'If you was hit by a truck and you was lying out there in that gutter dying, and you had time to sing ONE song. One song that people would remember before you're dirt... Cause I'm telling you right now, that's the kind of song people want to hear. That's the kind of song that truly saves people.'

It got me thinking about my work offering stock picking strategies and the stocks identified by those strategies. So if I was hit by a truck and dying in a gutter, what strategies would I recommend people follow? What stocks would I highlight for someone to add to their portfolio? It's akin to creating a bucket list of strategies and stocks. You know, stocks that you should own now before you 'kicked the bucket.'

Give this premise to a hundred people and you'll probably get a hundred different answers. Most people are probably going to mention stocks like Apple (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT), and Wal-Mart (WMT). But I'm much less attracted to the glamorous, well-known stocks. And because my style involves providing something that you can't find anywhere else, I like to discover the underdogs and those with hidden, outstanding characteristics that reveal a beauty within. And, thankfully, those are often where the potential gains and rewards are the biggest.


'I Was Hit by a Truck' Strategies

I began this task by looking at a variety of strategies in the Zacks Research Wizard. The goal was to find strategies that have been performing well, have a solid economic rationale, and offer a diversity of solutions that any investor could implement. These are strategies that could be employed for a lifetime and would allow you to build a nice nest egg if followed through thick and thin.

Here's the list of my bucket strategies in the Research Wizard:

  • ROE2 in the Screen of the Week (SoW) folder (64.1% 2012 YTD)

  • Value Method1 in the Value Strategies folder (55.2% 2012 YTD)

  • Filtered Zacks Rank2 in the All-Style Strategies folder (69.5% 2012 YTD)

  • Growth and Income Winners in the Growth and Income Strategies folder (18.9% 2012 YTD)

  • Analyst Anomaly in the Anomalies folder (22.6% 2012 YTD)

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