Following up on those Glassdoor stock picks

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About 2 years ago, I wrote a post on how the best 20 companies to work for on Glassdoor has outperformed the S&P index. I decided to put around $10K into each company, so let’s see how it went. And let me just say that dumping ARK may have been one of my best stock moves of all time. Anyway, here’s a quick recap on what those 20 stocks were:

The results are below. As you can see, I’m up about 26% over the past 2 years compared to just 15.5% on the S&P500. I mean, this was clearly carried by NVDA, but NVDA is also a part of SPY too. If I take out NVDA, I’m at a 11.5% return, which isn’t bad, but that defeats the entire story of ‘the top 20 Glassdoor companies beat the market.’ I can’t remove the top company on the Glassdoor list just because it had outsized returns. If I take just the top 10 (not shown but trust me,) then I’m at a 36% return.

Now while I didn’t do this for 2023, let’s see what it would have looked like. Once again NVDA carrying the team to a 91% return vs 34% for the S&P 500. Funny how the #1 company Box only had a 1% return (ouch!) but it may explain why they aren’t even in the top 20 in 2024. Guess the “happy” employees weren’t too happy with the stock options and left. Noteably, CrowdStrike (not in 2022 list) also had a 244% return. AMD, Netflix and MongoDB weren’t on the 2022 list either and they also helped carry the 2023 team.

Now if we take just the top 10 companies (sorry not shown,) then we’re at a 131% return due to NVDA. Even if you take out NVDA, we’re at a 95% return. Regardless, this shows that once again, the top 10 or top 20 Glassdoor list does beat the S&P 500.

One caveat that I will note is that Glassdoor doesn’t break out public/private companies from their list. For instance, in 2022, Block was actually the #36 company if you include private companies. For 2023, MongoDB was actually the 45th company on the list (but #20 if you take out private companies.)

The 2024 list is below. Real quick, we do need to note that Glassdoor has been publishing real names and this has made users pissed (I’m not sure if this affected the 2024 list or just 2025 list and beyond.) Anyway 2024 so far, we’re at 15% vs just 10% for S&P500. If we take just the top 10, it’s at 18.5%. Odd how Meta or Amazon isn’t on any of these lists (W for SPY). Then again, we don’t see Apple (L for SPY) or Tesla (hard L for SPY.)

Do what you will with this information.