How BuzzFeed (Yes, BuzzFeed) Beats The Market

They post stuff like this…

….and yet they're probably better stock pickers than 95 percent of professional fund managers.

BuzzFeed is one of the most visited news outlets in the world precisely because they understand what makes people click.  Literally.  They know trends better than anyone on the planet.

LikeFolio analysts don't really care what people are saying about the stock…they care what they're saying about the brands and products the company makes.  

Here's the 10 companies behind the products that BuzzFeed has talked about the most (The BuzzFeed Top 10) over the past 12 months:

For those of us in the market, that's quite a list:  Facebook Inc FB, Twitter Inc TWTR, Walt Disney Co DIS, Yahoo! Inc. YHOO, Netflix, Inc. NFLX, Apple Inc. AAPL, Google Inc GOOG, Time Warner Inc TWX, Starbucks Corporation SBUX and Amazon.com, Inc.AMZN.

That basket of 10 stocks has nine winners and one loser (sorry Twitter) over the past 12 months.

Even better, the BuzzFeed Top 10 returned a profit of over 17 percent for the past year, easily beating the S&P 500 (10.65 percent) and a vast majority of well-paid fund managers.  

(Don't get too cocky, BuzzFeed— Warren Buffett beat you out by 1 percent.)

Investing doesn't have to be hard. In fact, it's best when it's kept simple.  

Invest in the things you understand and like. Find trends in social volume and ride them.  

Have fun with it.  You're good at this!

— Andy Swan is the founder of LikeFolio, which searches all of Twitter for important shifts in consumer behavior around the brands owned by publicly-traded companies.

Image credit: Mark Wilkie, Flickr