CHICAGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--At a time when the stock market is struggling just to maintain any gains, investors are finding it extremely difficult to come up with investment choices that outperform the market averages. But, while it may be challenging to find stocks that are performing well in this turbulent market environment, it’s not impossible. Having said that, Zacks Investment Research releases the rankings of the model portfolios of some of the street’s retail brokerages for the first half of 2008.

The leading brokerage firms employ analysts who produce recommendations for hundreds of stocks, which can not all be bought for a client portfolio. These brokerage firms then create model portfolios from all of the stocks each firm is following. These can be used as a starting point in the stock selection process to meet a specific client's risk & return needs. The process to create these lists range from a bottom up quantitative methodology, to a top down fundamental process. The model portfolios in the Zacks survey include U.S. traded equities including ADRs.

This is the second consecutive survey during a volatile stock market. What’s very important to take note of in this mid-year update, is that even though the model portfolios for thirteen of the fourteen participating retail brokerages produced negative total returns for the first six months of the year, nine of them outperformed the S&P 500. Seven of the fourteen outperformed the bellwether index by a percent or better. The significance of this being that brokers continue to be a reliable investor resource for stock picks. The better performing model portfolios in the first half of 2008, contained stocks in the Computer Technology and Oil sectors. Raymond James, Morgan Keegan and Credit Suisse took first, second and third place respectively. Matrix won first place in the three year category and Goldman Sachs won the gold in the five year.

The top 14 ranked brokerages for the first half of 2008 (12/31/07 to 6/30/08) are as follows…

• Wedbush Morgan and New Constructs joined the survey in January of 2008
• S&P Total Return……-11.91%

Zacks complete one-, three-, five- and seven-year rankings are available to the media upon request. Zacks calculates the performance of the brokerage "model portfolios" it tracks, on an equal-weighted basis. Total return performance figures include stock price changes, dividends and hypothetical trading commissions of 1% for each addition and deletion to the model portfolios.

The S&P 500 Index is a well-known, unmanaged index of the prices of 500 large-company common stocks, mainly blue-chip stocks, selected by Standard & Poor's. The S&P 500 Index assumes reinvestment of dividends but does not reflect advisory fees. An investor cannot invest directly in an index.

Zacks Investment Research, Inc., developed the concept of the EPS Surprise and created the first quantitative model to predict stock prices based on patterns, estimate revisions and surprises, called the Zacks Rank. Zacks Investment Research does not engage in investment banking, market making or asset management activities of any securities.

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