In the latest issue of Barron’s, tickerspy gets coverage in a roundup about “The Net Set’s Standout Stock Pickers.”  In the article, Barron’s looks at active, successful members from a number of sites, including our own Pozhil AKA Rajan Rajan.  Barron’s tells us: “Rajen identifies a sector he finds interesting, then digs deep into the companies and metrics that drive it. Although he’s managing dozens of sector portfolios at any given time, he leans toward energy, commodities, materials, China and Brazil.”  Congratulations on the coverage, Pozhil.

Thanks to all of you who helped us out earlier this month by participating in our survey. We were able to glean a lot of great info from it, and hopefully many of you will get to see your ideas in action as we continue to roll out new features and upgrade current ones.

And congratulations to member johnftracy who was the winner of the random drawing from among our survey respondents. As promised, johnftracy collects a $50 Amazon gift card. Didn’t win this time? We hope that continued improvements at tickerspy will be a consolation prize (and if not, we’ll likely do another survey and drawing within a few months).

In the meantime, we always welcome and value your feedback on tickerspy. If you have any suggestions, questions or comments, please send them to help@tickerspy.com or leave a comment here. We love to hear your thoughts and ideas!

Lots of interesting stories have flowed through tickerspy this week.  If you haven’t seen them, you might want to check them out:

• Wall Street is abuzz about the WSJ’s massive, fascinating three-part look at the demise of Bear Stearns (BSC) and the subsequent “rescue” by the Fed and JP Morgan (JPM).  It may be behind the WSJ paywall, but if you can access the series it’s a terrific read.  Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.
• tickerspy favorite Ken Heebner of Capital Growth Management was the subject of a long profile in Fortune, calling him “a true contrarian.”
• Finally, I spotted an interesting piece from Bloomberg, pointing to what might be the next “BRIC” market.  BRIC, of course, stands for the hotbeds of emerging market growth: Brazil, Russia, India, and China.  The possible new member of the BRIC club? Indonesia.   The populous island nation’s proximity to hot Asian markets and a democratic system that continues to stabilize are selling points.  A couple of caveats, though.  There are only a couple of Indonesian companies traded on U.S. exchanges – PT Indosat (IIT) and PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia (TLK) – so it may be tough to get much exposure.  The article is also hesitant to anoint Indonesia the next big thing just yet, suggesting that Mexico is further along.

We’ve just made it easier to talk to other members on tickerspy.

Here’s how it works:  Every time you leave a message on another member’s profile, it creates a “conversation page.”  Here’s an example.  This conversation started when member profit2010 left a message on member Ace’s profile.   Ace was able to reply in any of three ways.  He could reply by typing in a message on his profile and pressing the “Reply to Most Recent Message” button (this button becomes visible once someone has left you a message), he could reply directly on the conversation page, or he could leave a message on profit2010’s profile.  It should be fairly simple to understand once you see it in action.

A couple more upgrades related to conversation pages:

• On your profile page, you now have a special section for conversations, so you can keep track of who you’ve been discussing the market with.
• On the conversation pages, you’ll see a “compare portfolios” area on the right that shows you how both people’s portfolios are doing and what stocks you have in common.
• We’ve also made these compare modules available for members you’re tracking (see the “compare” links in the tracked members area on your profile.  And we’ve made them available on all Pro portfolio pages.  If you have a portfolio and you click on the Berkshire Hathaway profile, you’ll see your portfolios compared and which stocks you have in common.

As always, let us know if you have any feedback, questions, or suggestions about this new feature or anything else on tickerspy.

Over the past week or so, a handful of small energy names have skyrocketed, with some of them doubling or tripling in a matter of days. There appear to be a few causes for this. Briefing.com covered the activity recently and laid out three-step process that led to the “mini-bubble”:

The current craze in micro-cap energy stocks is ultimately being driven by the accelerating rally in the price of oil during the past week (point #1). Normally, this might not be enough to move the often low-quality micro-caps, but then you had an extremely bullish earnings report by PDO last Thursday (point #2), which not only led to an attention-getting 60% gain for the stock that day, but induced momentum traders to scramble to find other sympathy plays. The broadening out phase (point #3) occurred when we saw a succession of positive press releases by other, similar US-based energy co’s (MXC, CLR, SSN), while the backdrop of new highs in crude oil continued to make headlines each day.

The action hasn’t gone unnoticed on tickerspy.  Member pozhil, who has portfolios tracking a number of sectors, whipped up a portfolio earlier this week called “Oil exploration small cap.”  Its performance today indicates that we may be well into the pullback phase of this market event.

Still, which Pros and members were ahead of the curve on this one and which of these small cap names were most popular?  Among the Pros, no individual Pro investor had more than one of these names as a top-15 holding.  Going by dollar value, hedge fund New Mountain’s $25.7 million, end-of-Q1 stake in CLR is the largest, but since CLR is really the only mid-cap among these names (it’s market cap is over $10 billion), it might be more interesting to look at  the $17.7 million stake in END held by hedge fund Steelhead Partners.

Overall, among these energy names, END and CLR are most popular among the Pros, while tickerspy members prefer IVAN and BEXP along with CLR.

If you haven’t seen them yet, the new portfolios showing updated holdings for all of our most popular Pros are now in tickerspy. Click on the links below to access them.

• Warren Buffett
• Mohnish Pabrai
• Capital Growth Management (Ken Heebner)
• Fairholme Capital Management
• The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
• George Soros
• Lone Pine Capital
• Tiger Global Management
• Carl Icahn
• T Boone Pickens
• Baupost Group
• Atticus Capital
• Greenlight Capital
• Third Avenue Management
• Ruanne, Cunniff & Goldfarb
• Sprott Asset Management

Which Pros are you watching these days and why?

Pretty much all of the Pro investors have reported their end-of-Q1 holdings in accordance with SEC rules, and we’ve got them at tickerspy.  Now that we have all this data on the site, we thought it might be interesting to look at where the Pro money is going.  In the aggregate, which stocks are most popular among the Pro investors?

Luckily, there’s an easy place to do this on tickerspy: Ideas and Research.

Looking at our list, many of the usual suspects are there, mega-caps GE, XOM, and JNJ are at the top of the list.  Moving further down, there are appearances by tech giants MSFT, CSCO, IBM, INTC, and AAPL.  The top financials – still a shaky sector these days – are BAC, C, AIG, and JPM.

I found the bottom two spots (as of this writing) to be particularly interesting.  At #19 is oil services giant SLB, which has become very attractive as certain subsets of the energy complex have reaped rewards from high oil prices.

At number 20 is an ETF, EFA – the iShares MSCI EAFE Index Fund.  This ETF tracks includes stocks from Europe, Australasia and the Far East – basically everywhere but the U.S. – and is the most popular ETF among the Pros.  The clear message here, as I interpret it, is that Pros have been scrambling to get international exposure amid the domestic economic slowdown and impact of the falling dollar.  Some of the multinationals on this list will provide that, but none will give quite so much as EFA.

We’ve finally got enough of a track record going at tickerspy, that we thought it might be worthwhile to start calculating the top all-time portfolios on tickerspy since the site launched last year.  You can find it on the bottom right of the portfolio page within our Ideas & Research section.

Right now, tops all-time is member hogman37 for his Shipping portfolio, which includes big winners like DRYS, GNK, and TBSI.  These drybulk carriers have been beneficiaries of huge spikes in demand from China and other emerging markets.

Keep an eye on the charts to see who’s moving up and down (and start tracking them to follow their next moves).  Also, stay tuned for some great upgrades to the Ideas & Research area in the coming months.

Several big names have new portfolios up on tickerspy.  Click below to check out their latest holdings:

• Berkshire Hathaway
• Pabrai Funds
• Fairholme Capital Management
• Lone Pine Capital
• Tiger Global Management
• Carl Icahn
• Atticus Capital
• Third Avenue Management
• Greenlight Capital

There’s still a few big names left among the stragglers, so keep an eye out for other new Pro portfolios coming in over the weekend and on Monday.

Over the next few days we’ll be adding end-of-Q1 holdings for all of our most popular Pro investors, including big names like Berkshire Hathaway, Pabrai Funds, Fairholme Capital Management, and Soros Fund Management, so stay tuned to tickerspy. (If you want to be notified of when the new holdings are in, start tracking the Pros you are interested in, and then keep an eye on your Alerts page.)

We already have new holdings in for a pair of popular Pros:

Ken Heebner’s blazing mutual fund firm Capital Growth Management added new stakes in AA and PCU and made a bunch of other moves.

ETF firm Claymore Advisors counts Brazilian commodity giants PBR.A and RIO as its top holdings.

Update: Another popular Pro is in:  Seth Klarman’s Baupost has several brand new holdings as of the end of Q1.