Does higher customer satisfaction lead to better stock performance?

After reading a scientific article in the Journal of Science claiming exactly that, we put together two mock stock portfolios. One contained companies that both scored in the top 20% of the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) relative to their competition and beat the national ACSI average. The other was the reverse, companies scoring in the bottom 20% and having scores lower than the national mean.

Since May, when the portfolios began, the ACSI fund is down 5.63%. The ANTI-ACSI fund is down 8.16%. Also, we messed up. Overview inside…

It’s much too early to draw any sort of conclusion whatsoever but we thought you might be interested in seeing how they were doing so far.

We realized two things we did very wrong:
1) We’re a month behind in reporting the changes, somehow we miscalculated 4 months (we figured for four months in advance, rather than four months inclusive… doh!)

2) The ACSI index covers over 200 companies, but it only releases new scores for a limited number of industries each quarter. That is, different industries take turns getting reported each quarter and you don’t see the industries next set of scores until 12 months later. Therefore… we have a bunch of number crunching to do and have to evaluate and buy a crapload more companies, backdated to their May prices when the experiment began. Good thing we’re only playing with imaginary money!

PREVIOUSLY:
The Consumerist ACSI Fund v2.0
How To Beat The Stock Market: Buy Companies With High Customer Satisfaction Scores

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