There has been much consternation recently by investors who find themselves trailing equity benchmarks. I will say this until I am blue in the face, but as fiduciaries of our clients capital we have an obligation to do what is best for clients and that is the management of risks. When you have an alternative, bond and cash allocation to go along with an equity allocation, an all stock index is not the best fit to measure performance.

The apology zone of having to call clients to tell them they are down 40% is not an area where I want to spend much time. I would gladly defend our positioning in this type of Fed-induced, liquidity-driven event any day. To that end and on the heels of 2010 being a year in which the average stock was held for 22 seconds, I want to present a list of characteristics of the Top 10 performing stocks so far in 2011.

As I wrote in my newsletter, this has and continues to be a rally of lower-quality, higher beta, cyclical stocks. As you will see below, these are not necesarily the companies that as a private investor, you would be pouring money into based on the fundamentals. Here is the list of characteristics of The Top Performing 10 Stocks in 2011, from ZorTrades. Stay tuned! {TJM}

• 9 out of the 10 stocks still have a market cap of less than 1 billion dollars, that puts them in the small cap category.


• All 10 stocks still trade under 30 dollars a share


• 7 out of the 10 still trade under 15 dollars a share


• 9 out of the 10 started the year under 15 dollars a share


• 8 out of the 10 are U.S based companies


• 6 out of the 10 are technology stocks


• 5 out of the 10 according to FINVIZ had negative EPS this year


• 7 out 10 have a negative RETURN ON EQUITY


• 8 out of the 10 have NEGATIVE PROFIT MARGINS


• None of them pay a dividend