Long-time readers of this blog know that Professor Tom Scott of Sweet Briar College introduced my book The Naked Portfolio Manager to his "Principles of Investment" class last fall, and asked his students to construct rules-based models that followed the book's principles. Professor Scott has been tracking the results of these models on his website since the first of the year, and the preliminary results are amazing. So far, the students' models have impressively outstripped the SP 500, and now the entire college is keeping tabs on the results!

According to Professor Scott, the Sweet Briar composite has returned 11.64% for the first quarter of the year, beat the SP 500's return of 4.87 by more than two to one. That's very exciting, and congrats to the ladies for doing such a GREAT job. You can find a complete description of all the Sweet Briar models, a list of the stocks selected, and monthly performance updates here.

I had the opportunity to interview Laura Jett, one of the "Principles of Investing" students last week. Click here to listen to the six minute interview with Laura. After you listen to what she has to say and review the results at Professor Scott's website, you may find yourself wondering if traditional approaches to portfolio management may well be on their way out. Is rules-based a.k.a. "naked" investing the way of the future? I think so.

Stay up-to-date on the developments coming out of the Sweet Briar experiment; simply subscribe to my blog in the upper right-hand corner of this page.