The 50 Best Stocks in the World

Despite chaos in the financial markets and murky economic trends, the market-beating gains from my 50 Best Stocks in the World portfolio show that you can still ignore all that stuff and just concentrate on buying and holding the best stocks.

At least that's the evidence from nine years of this long-term portfolio. Buy and sell just once a year and keep turnover at those annual revisions to just 10%. (That's five buys and five sells out of a portfolio of 50 stocks.)

Then hold -- and count your gains.

The gain on the 50-stock portfolio as of the market close Sept. 20 was 20.66% for the previous 12 months. That beat the 14.83% gain of the Standard & Poor's 500 Index and the 18.37% gain of the Nasdaq Composite Index.

And it has worked out just fine during the nine years that I've run this portfolio. For those years, the 50 Best Stocks in the World portfolio is up 70.96% vs. a 49.12% gain for the S&P 500 and a 59.74% gain for the Nasdaq Composite.

By the way, you can do even better than this by following macroeconomic trends and picking sectors that benefit from those trends. But that style of investing takes more work and time than many people have. And it's a more aggressive style, with bigger ups and downs, than many investors are comfortable with.