So far, my calls have been pretty accurate this year. (700% VRX winners, I’m looking at you.)

In December 2015, I turned in a bearish market forecast that was at direct odds with most Wall Street analysts. I pointed out that none of the factors pressuring markets are going away and that a big sell-off across the board – followed by a multi-year bear market – is likely. Then I got into specifics, including my year-end S&P 500 target (which I later revised even lower), the U.S. GDP, and even the presidential election winner.

But my stock recommendations, for the most part, have been spot on.

As I write this, a couple of our long plays are up over 50%, and we’ve also got one spectacular short that’s down 50% since the beginning of the year. (It’s not even DB – that stinker is down a mere 36%.)

Here’s the full report…

Our Long Plays

As you can see, I only have two long recommendations that are pure stocks. The rest are gold-related, volatility-related, or mortgage REITs. Not surprisingly, the gold-related stocks are doing the best – and I’m happy to see that my willingness to take a chance on the gold miners (GLDX and GDXJ) is paying dividends. I don’t typically recommend the miners, but when I made these calls last year, I reasoned that these gold miners are a very leveraged bet on a recovery in gold and are so out of favor that they are worth a shot. Further, I recommended the ETFs rather than individual stocks to mitigate the individual operating issues associated with individual companies. So far these picks have worked out well and I continue to recommend them.

Gold-related investments are long-term picks that can easily take more than one year to work out because gold is a generational play. But after the first three months of the year, they’re already turning in quite an impressive performance. If you bought them, I’m happy for you. My full list of gold recommendations, of course, is here.

Our Short Plays

I also like to recommend stocks that are going down. The clear winner (or is it loser?) here is FitBit – which I pointed out is a fad (and is getting its lunch eaten by the Apple iWatch, which has its own problems). DB, of course, continues to implode. (I’m recommending some new puts on that – see below.) I’m not a fan of overpriced social media and technology stocks, which are in a bubble, and you can see several of them collapsing before your very eyes on this list.

How to Play the Deutsche Bank Collapse – Updated 4/11/2016

As always, I prefer puts as a less risky way to play the short side. I’m looking at a couple of puts that are attractive based on current prices. The first has an expiration date in October, the second in January. It’s up to you how to play this based on your expectations. In my view both are good bets:

• BUY DB October 21, 2016 $11 puts (DB161021P00011000)
• BUY DB January 20, 2016 $10 puts (DB170120P00010000)

Since the beginning of the year, DB has lost over 33%. If it loses another 33% in the next six months (definitely in the cards), the DB October 21, 2016 $11 puts (which as of this writing are trading around $0.20), would be both a cheap way to short and very profitable.

For nine months, the puts go down to $10 (the DB January 20, 2016 $10 puts are currently trading at around $0.05) which is an extremely cheap way to play this stock.