You Thought We Were Joking? The YouTubers’ Portfolio and Everything You Need to Know
This is serious. No fundamental or technical analysis on anything here. We'll show you the portfolio, the YouTubers, and explain our selection process.
Yes, we are “randomly” picking stocks from YouTubers
Okay it’s only sort of random. We’ll explain the entire process in a separate piece but for now this our portfolio.
The Portfolio
Here it is in M1 Finance.
If you clicked that link you’ll notice that M1’s list of stocks can’t be fit into a single screenshot, so we created a separate list of those stocks and their weights in an excel table.
We might mess around with the weight we give each stock but, for now, this is it.
The YouTubers
Here are the YouTubers, whose portfolios were are selecting stocks from, and the specific videos where we found their selection of stocks.
We chose these YouTubers somewhat arbitrarily; they have good content, showed us portfolios with good returns, and seem like reasonable people. In all seriousness though, they have a great track record in terms of returns and investing advice, otherwise they wouldn’t have a following.
1. Jeremy Lefebvre
We selected the top 7 holdings of the portfolio he shows in the video below.
Channel: Finance Education 3
2. Graham Stephan
Here he shows us his top performers, largest holdings, and biggest losers. We picked his top performers and largest holdings.
Channel: Graham Stephan
3. Andrei Jikh
Andrei actually has a much larger portfolio consisting of 100 stocks, but luckily we were able to find what he think he’s calling his “top” stocks.
Channel: Andrei Jikh
4. Kevin Paffrath
Channel: Meet Kevin
5. DeadNSyde (can’t find his real name)
We only want the best of the best, so we chose his “hyper growth” portfolio.
Channel: DeadNSyde
As you might have noticed, not all of these videos include their entire portfolio of stocks. DeadNSyde, for example, doesn’t seem to have a video listing his entire portfolio of stocks and only seems to have uploaded videos about certain portions it. We chose his ‘Hypergrowth Portfolio’, which consists of companies that he thinks will grow “hyper” fast.
Their “top” stocks
Below are the stocks mentioned in each of the aforementioned videos.
As we’ll explain later in the piece, “randomly” picking the top stocks from their portfolios is actually a good way to beat the market as well as their portfolios, based on academic (as opposed to market) research.
How We Selected From Their “top” Stocks
To stay with the theme of not thinking too much, we made a list of all the stocks those YouTubers showed us and added most of them to our pie in M1 Finance.
1. First, we combined all their stocks
These are taken from the aforementioned YouTubers’ videos.
2. Next, we took out the bad ones
We crossed out stocks/companies that didn’t feel right to invest in, at least for now.
Why we actually removed those stocks
Our reasoning was pretty naïve, but nonetheless sincere:
TSLA - Not very union-friendly. We’d like to see better industrial labor relations practices.
AMZN - Same as Tesla (TSLA).
VTI - This is just a slow index fund.
VOO - Same as VTI.
KO - I don’t drink coke, nor do I use or consume any other Coca-Cola products. And yes, I DO check the labels on what I drink.
PTON - I just don’t see them making any moves that will make them grow a lot.
DBX - We’ve used Dropbox. We didn’t like it. We don’t want to invest in something which we’ve
JNJ - We might explain this in another piece, but Big Pharma just feels weird to invest in without a lot of research. There’s a big difference between JNJ and CPRX.
AAPL - We didn’t remove Apple, but they have many fishy Right To Repair lawsuits and have a rightfully-earned connotation of product-obsolescence. We use their products, so we don’t want to be hypocritical, but just a thought worth considering.
3. Then, we added MARA for no reason
Kidding — we have a good reason.
Marathon Digital Holdings (MARA) is a bitcoin miner and we’ve all seen institutional adoption of cryptocurrencies explode over the past several years.
To my knowledge Marathon is doing their best to mine under as much legal compliance as possible, and has at least promised for one of their large mining facilities to be “70% Carbon neutral”.
Although they’re partially owned by Beowulf Energy, who uses a coal-fired power plant to run Marathon’s existing infrastructure, the point of this experiment is make decisions somewhat oblivious to those complex details, like a new investor would.
4. Lastly, we added those stocks to M1, and made everything 3% except MARA
Lastly, we added each of those remaining stocks to the YouTubers’ pie in M1 finance.
To continue the theme of not thinking too much, we wanted to invest in all of these equally, but there are, annoyingly, 31 stocks. Consequently, we had to make a naïve decision: which of these stocks would we YOLO?
We chose MARA, and turned it up to 10%.
So, yeah. That’s it. Our portfolio and decision-making process.
Pretty bad right? Good, that’s what we’re going for.