Everything I Learned from My Hot Chart Summer, and How My 21 Stocks Picks Have Performed.

If you had told me at the beginning of May that I would spend part of my summer scanning thousands of stock charts every morning, writing daily stock analysis, and putting my technical reputation on the line across 21 individual picks, I would have been very skeptical.

As a veteran portfolio manager, my career has been defined by viewing the investing world from 30,000 feet. I've spent decades focused on asset allocation, macro risk defense, and helping self-directed investors navigate volatile markets.

I am, at my core, a portfolio constructor. In fact, when people ask me what I do for a living, I occasionally respond "I'm in construction." If they follow up and ask what type of construction, I take off my proverbial hard hat and explain: I construct investment portfolios.

Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) are the lead players in that work, which is why the majority of my writing for Barchart relates to that type of analysis, truth-telling and myth-busting. With me, stock picking is a side dish, not the main course.

Writing a daily column in a specific layout, as straightforward and consistent as that is, tends to be seen as binary. That is, you're either right or wrong.

That's not how I have rolled in the decades I managed other people's money. In real-world portfolio construction, single-ticker decisions are all just one piece of a bigger puzzle… referred to as a portfolio. That's why constructing, not picking, is the world I'm more accustomed to.

I've learned over time that the former is both a lost art and distant concept for many DIY investors. I hope to change that, one investor at a time, perhaps.

Yet when I agreed to step in for Jim Van Meerten as the guest columnist behind Barchart's "Chart of the Day " newsletter for two separate stints, I treated it as a logistical challenge and an exercise to really hone in on applying my technical analysis chops to individual securities. And by doing so, try to help anyone who reads those articles.

Now that the dust has settled on those 21 guest columns I authored, I could not help but look back at the performance of my picks through Wednesday, Aug. 19. I intentionally waited a couple of months to write this, and only started tracking the numbers a few days ago. And, while I don't expect everyone to believe this, I was prepared to present this table, regardless of what it showed.