Five years ago, I received a phone call from a fellow by the name of Manoj Nadkarni. He had read some of my stuff on semiconductor business and wanted to talk about that. A low key man with little or no marketing skills, he was a true chip-head, and just the kind of person I love to learn from. Well he mentioned that he had started a newsletter called, ChipInvestor. We talked about Xilinx, Altera, Applied Micro Circuits and a whole slew of other companies. Over the years we stayed in touch, but mostly through email. Today he wrote to me and informed me that his Chip Investor newsletter was five years old.

ChipInvestor.com in its first five years had a portfolio gains of 798% or a compounded annual return of 55 percent. During the same five-year span, the S&P 500 index and the NASDAQ Composite index had compounded annual returns of negative 2.6% and negative 4.1% respectively. According to Lipper Inc., a leading global provider of mutual fund information, the highest performance by any mutual fund for the same five-year period was a compounded annual return of 52.4%. Now that is something none of the big financial magazines are going to write about, but I think Manoj does deserve a tip of the ole hat?