"One way for the amateur stock picker to find great stock picks is to get ideas from the Top Holdings list of your local mutual fund manager"

Dow Jones 10,997.35 (Up) Week Ending 04-09-2010

One way to search out picks to add key players to your stock portfolios is to check out what successful mutual fund managers are buying and holding as their top holdings in their portfolios. You look at their list then you cherry pick their best idea and buy it in your portfolio. Pretty simple, right? (The stock market is not like fantasy football where only one team can own that best player!)
So, I decided to look at the Brandywine Funds of Friess Associates. (I list a connection to their site in the right-hand column of my Freewilly site and also a link for Winterthur.) This fund group, founded by Foster Friess, who was a multiple time guest of Louis Rukeyser's "Wallstreet Week", are located in the bucolic area of Greenville, Delaware with the Brandywine Creek, Winterthur, and the lands of the iconic Dupont family fortunes. Foster's ranching/cowboy interest, (they use to have a Pig down in Greenville and may still), have taken them to Jackson Hole, Wyoming now also. Foster,(pictured right), is an advocate of making money and doing good deeds with it. Sounds like a good plan to me.
Let me say first that you can buy any one of their funds as a component of your portfolio and be perfectly happy with your returns. Their 3 funds are: Brandywine Fund -Mid Cap Equity-Growth (Symbol BRWIX), Brandywine Blue - Large Cap focus (Symbol BLUEX), Brandywine Advisors Midcap Growth Fund (Symbol BWAFX).
I searched the top holdings of that last fund, managed by Bill D'Alonzo and his Team at Friess and saw that they had 3.75% of the fund and the top holding of their top ten invested in the stock of:
Inverness Medical Innovations Inc.(Symbol IMA, $38.05) of Waltham, Massachusetts. This stock has been beat up a little bit since mid-January when it was at $44.00 and seems like a great value to buy at its current price. Inverness has 14 stock analyst right now recommending it as a BUY. It has a 5 year sales growth rate of 43.6% which I really like, being a salesman by vocation. 2010 earnings are projected at $2.73 per share and 2011 are looking like $3.15 per share.
The company enables individuals to take charge of improving their health and quality of life at home. Its products and services focus on infectious disease, cardiology, oncology, drugs of abuse and women's health. Brandywine's specialty is finding these companies with great earnings values and capitalizing on them over time.

So check out those fund prospectus and see what's in their top ten list.

All the best, Freewilly