Do Financial TV & Podcast Stock Picks Beat the S&P 500? Testing 36,782 Stock Picks Across 14 Major Shows¶
Why a stock pick can rise in price over 6 months and still trail the S&P 500 — an overview of 36,782 kept picks across 14 financial TV shows and investing podcasts.
In a rising stock market, almost every financial TV host and investing podcaster looks right. If a guest goes on air, recommends a stock, and that stock is up six months later, both the host and the viewer walk away feeling like the tip worked.
To find out whether following financial TV and podcast stock picks actually beats buying a simple S&P 500 index fund, we tested 36,782 completed 6-month kept picks at finfluencers.trade, across 14 shows, 119 speakers, and 3,477 securities.
Read the Full Research Paper
This article is the plain-English overview of our multi-show study, "Do Financial TV and Podcast Stock Picks Beat the S&P 500? Evidence from 36,782 Picks Across 14 Shows." Counts and returns below are the October 25, 2026 production extract. A kept pick is the first call in a speaker-and-ticker cluster, so a daily host cannot pad a score by repeating the same stock. Download the working paper (PDF).
How We Test Every Stock Pick¶
Whenever a host or guest makes a stock recommendation on a tracked show, we record the speaker, the show, the stock ticker, the air date, and whether they said to buy or sell. If a daily host repeats the exact same stock several days in a row, we keep the first call in that speaker-and-ticker cluster and do not treat every later repeat as a new pick.
Because some shows trade short-term momentum while others invest for the long run, we measure every pick across five holding periods—meaning how long an investor holds the stock after the recommendation airs:
- 1 Week (
5trading days) - 1 Month (
21trading days) - 3 Months (
63trading days) - 6 Months (
126trading days — our default benchmark window) - 1 Year (
252trading days)
At the end of each holding period, we measure two numbers:
- Absolute Return: How much the stock's price went up or down on its own. If you bought a stock at $100 and it rose to $108 six months later, your absolute return is +8.0%.
- Relative Return (Alpha vs. the S&P 500): How much the stock beat or trailed the S&P 500 (
SPY) over those exact same dates:
$$\text{Relative Return (Alpha)} = \text{Stock Absolute Return} - \text{S\&P 500 Return}$$
If your stock returned +8.0% over 6 months, but the S&P 500 rose +10.0% over those exact same 6 months, your relative return is -2.0%. You made money in dollar terms, but you trailed the market by 2 percentage points.
The Bull-Market Illusion: Only 43.4% Beat the S&P 500¶
Why do viewers keep trusting stock-picking shows that trail an index fund? Because investors experience their brokerage account in absolute return (dollars won or lost), not relative return against the S&P 500.
The table uses kept picks. Hit rate and pick counts cover all 14 shows. Average stock return and average relative return cover the 12 shows whose returns the extract publishes. Hedge Fund Tips and The Morning Filter are masked there, so they are in the hit rate and not in the averages. The median is the pick-level median relative return from the same extract.
| Holding Period | Kept Picks (14 Shows) | Beat the S&P 500 | Average Stock Return (12 Shows) | Average Relative Return (12 Shows) | Median Relative Return |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 Week | 42,223 | 49.0% | +0.40% | +0.07% | -0.02% |
| 1 Month | 41,453 | 47.6% | +1.37% | +0.01% | -0.31% |
| 3 Months | 39,727 | 45.4% | +3.88% | -0.09% | -1.25% |
| 6 Months | 36,782 | 43.4% | +7.69% | -0.43% | -2.74% |
| 1 Year | 31,621 | 41.2% | +15.38% | -0.94% | -5.74% |
Over a 6-month holding period, the average kept pick on those 12 shows gained +7.69%. Over 1 year, the average gain is +15.38%. One-year averages leave out one corrupted price row (GMIN on Market Call). The 1-year hit rate and the median do not depend on that row.
The extract does not report how often the full 14-show sample simply rose in price, or the average S&P 500 return for that full sample. On the free-tier subset — Jim Cramer, Josh Brown, and Karen Finerman, 12,408 kept 6-month picks — 57.43% of picks rose. Over those same windows the average stock gained +7.77% and the S&P 500 gained +7.88%. 43.41% of that free-tier subset beat the S&P 500, 14.02 percentage points below the share that merely rose.
Across all 14 shows, only 43.4% of kept 6-month picks beat the S&P 500 (41.2% at 1 year). The average relative return is -0.43%. The typical (median) pick trails the index by -2.74% at 6 months (-5.74% at 1 year).
2. The Longer You Hold, the Harder It Gets (1 Week to 1 Year)¶
Across all 14 shows combined (36,782 kept 6-month picks), the percentage of stock picks that beat the S&P 500 falls at every single holding period:
- 1 Week:
49.0%beat the S&P 500 (+3.40%annualized relative return) - 1 Month:
47.6%beat the S&P 500 (+0.09%annualized relative return) - 3 Months:
45.4%beat the S&P 500 (-0.35%annualized relative return) - 6 Months:
43.4%beat the S&P 500 (-0.85%annualized relative return) - 1 Year:
41.2%beat the S&P 500 (-0.94%annualized relative return)
Why do picks fade after the first week? When we compare each stock pick to its own industry sector ETF (VGT for Tech, VHT for Healthcare, VFH for Financials, and the other Vanguard sector ETFs), speakers' stocks are slightly ahead of their own sector at 6 months (+0.33% annualized stock selection). They lose -0.78% annualized on sector timing — the sector ETF versus the S&P 500 — which lines up with media segments featuring hot sectors after those sectors have already had a big run. At 1 year, stock selection is +0.45% annualized and sector timing is -0.98% annualized.
3. Show-by-Show Leaderboard (6-Month Holding Period)¶
At the 6-month horizon, 0 of 14 shows beat the S&P 500 on more than half of their kept picks. The highest hit rate is 48.02% (The 7investing Podcast). Among the 12 shows with a published average, 5 still have a positive average annualized relative return, because a minority of large winners pull the average up. The pick-level 90th percentile of 6-month relative return is +28.63%, and the 10th percentile is -29.58%.
Return columns are masked in the extract for Hedge Fund Tips and The Morning Filter. Those two shows stay in the hit-rate count and are listed under the ranked table.
| Show | Kept 6M Picks | 6M Hit Rate vs. S&P 500 | 6M Annualized Relative Return | Stock Selection vs. Sector (Ann.) | Sector Timing vs. S&P 500 (Ann.) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Compound and Friends | 642 | 45.33% | +2.55% | +2.43% | +0.85% |
| Chit Chat Stocks | 347 | 44.67% | +2.48% | +4.02% | +0.84% |
| The Intrinsic Value Podcast | 74 | 37.84% | +2.10% | +4.41% | -2.38% |
| CNBC Halftime Report | 8,713 | 45.84% | +1.67% | +2.62% | -0.45% |
| Mad Money w/ Jim Cramer | 10,392 | 43.60% | +0.10% | +1.21% | -0.68% |
| Market Call (BNN) | 3,266 | 44.70% | -0.24% | +2.31% | -2.31% |
| Investing Unscripted | 273 | 42.49% | -1.38% | -1.98% | +1.70% |
| The 7investing Podcast | 177 | 48.02% | -2.31% | -2.85% | +0.72% |
| CNBC's "Fast Money" | 8,122 | 41.94% | -2.50% | -0.94% | -1.24% |
| Motley Fool Hidden Gems | 3,148 | 40.88% | -4.50% | -3.67% | -0.81% |
| The Acquirers Podcast | 284 | 40.85% | -7.40% | -11.62% | +1.30% |
| Hedgeye | 646 | 32.04% | -17.08% | -18.37% | +0.28% |
| Show | Kept 6M Picks | 6M Hit Rate vs. S&P 500 | 6M Annualized Relative Return | Stock Selection vs. Sector (Ann.) | Sector Timing vs. S&P 500 (Ann.) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hedge Fund Tips (Tom Hayes) | 476 | 44.12% | not published | not published | not published |
| The Morning Filter | 222 | 38.74% | not published | not published | not published |
4. Three Practical Rules Before You Trade Any TV or Podcast Pick¶
- Match the Speaker to Your Holding Period: A speaker's track record depends heavily on the horizon you trade. Even among speakers who beat the S&P 500 on at least half of their kept 6-month picks, the 1-week and 1-year columns often tell a different story.
- Don't Treat On-Air Ownership Language as Its Own Score: The signed extract does not split picks into "I own it," keep-holding, and brand-new pitches, so this overview does not quote those percentages.
- Check the Individual Speaker, Not Just the Show: Out of 115 speakers with at least 30 kept 6-month picks, 17 beat the S&P 500 on at least half their calls — led by Gene Munster (
58.5%), Nick Sciple (57.1%), Gordon Reid (55.9%), Mark Tepper (55.8%), and Jamie Murray (54.8%). Across those 115 speakers, the top quarter averages a 51.29% hit rate and the bottom quarter averages 33.69%.
Check Any Show or Speaker's Track Record Free: Browse all 14 shows across
1W,1M,3M,6M, and1Yholding periods on finfluencers.trade/shows and rank 119 speakers on finfluencers.trade/leaderboard.
The ledger behind this extract also holds 71,266 tracked signals. That larger count includes calls that have not finished a 6-month window and repeat mentions that are not kept picks. The study headline is the 36,782 completed 6-month kept picks.