In my post for top 10 predictions for 2016 I noted how lucky I had been for 3 years running as all my picks seemed to work. I pointed out that all winning streaks eventually come to an end. I’m not sure if this constitutes an end to my streak but in my forecasts for 2016 I was wrong with one of the three stock picks (GoPro) and also missed on one of my seven forecasts of industry trends (that the 2016 political spend would reach record levels). My other 2 stock picks and other 6 trend forecasts did prove accurate.

I’ve listed in bold the 2016 stock picks and trend forecasts below and give a personal evaluation of how I fared on each. For context, the S&P was up 7.5% and the Nasdaq 10.0% in 2016.

1. Facebook stock appreciation will continue to outpace the market (it is currently at $97/share). One year later (January 3) Facebook opened at $117.50, a year over year gain of 21.1% from the time of my blog post. While this was short of the 40% gain in 2015, it still easily outpaced the market.

2. Tesla stock appreciation will continue to outpace the market (it is currently at $193/share). One year later, Tesla shares opened at $219.25 (January 3), a 13.5% gain from the time of my blog post. It might have been higher but the acquisition of Solar City created headwinds for the stock as revenue grew well over 100%, gross profit improved and in Q3 (last reported quarter) EBITDA was positive. Still, it outperformed the market.

3. GoPro stock appreciation should outpace the market in 2016 (shares are currently at $10.86). This pick was a clear miss as the stock declined 17.1% from the time of the blog post to January 3. In my defense, I had it partly right as the stock peaked at $17/share at the time of the drone and new camera announcements. In retrospect, given GoPro’s history of poor execution, I would have been smarter to recommend selling at the time these were announced. Instead, I mistakenly viewed execution as pretty easy and failed to suggest this. Since the company, once again, had an execution misstep, I was proven wrong and the stock subsequently declined.

The remaining predictions were about industry trends rather than stocks.

4. UAV/Drones will continue to increase in popularity. Drones continued to increase in popularity at the end of 2015 and into the first half of 2016. According to Market Watch, drone sales were up over 200% in April of 2016 as compared with April of 2015. Starting in December of 2015, the government began requiring drone operators to register on a federal database and by December 2016 had registered over 600,000 drones and users.

5. Political spend will reach record levels in 2016 and have a positive impact on advertising revenue. This forecast proved incorrect. Donald Trump won the presidency despite raising less money than any major party presidential candidate since 2008. Hillary Clinton, raised nearly twice as much as Trump, but still fell short of what President Obama raised in 2012. In the case of President-Elect Trump, more than half of his small raise consisted of $66 million he personally donated to his campaign and $280 million from donors giving $200 or less. Mrs. Clinton, despite depicting Trump as the candidate of the rich, received a substantial portion of her donations from wealthy individuals. The two candidates raising less money meant that the size of the boost in advertising from political ads fell short of my prediction.

6. Virtual/Augmented Reality will have a big year in 2016. As expected, 2016 was the big launch year for VR and AR. Highly anticipated VR product launches (the Facebook Oculus Rift in March, the HTC Vive in April and the PlayStation VR in October) showed strong consumer interest with sales of over 1.5M units. Pokemon Go’s 500M + downloads and the initial release of Microsoft’s Hololense generated intense interest in AR, creating a flurry of application development across a variety of industries including healthcare, agriculture, manufacturing and retail. Unsurprisingly, this excitement is mirrored in VC investment dollars, with a 140% growth in funding over 2015, bringing the total amount invested this past year to $1.8 Bn. This shows a strong trajectory for more development across gaming and commercial applications in AR / VR as we move into 2017.

7. Robotic market will expand to new areas in 2016. From chatbots being introduced by many companies for interacting with customers, to a giant fighting robot (16 foot tall, 20,000 pounds) that can lift and throw a car, to robots for making pizzas, to robots that help educate kids, 2016 was a year of enormous expansion in the robotics market.

8. A new generation of automated functionality will begin to be added to cars. In 2016 autonomous cars moved from concept to closer to reality. To date, the technology leaders appeared to be Tesla and Google, the former building a fully integrated product, the latter a set of components that can be integrated into many different vehicles. Tesla, who appears to be furthest along in putting a fully autonomous car on the road in volume, added more components (software and sensors) to its autonomous technology but suffered a setback when a driver ignored Tesla requirements to “supervise” the autonomous driving and suffered a fatal accident. Autonomous cars took many steps forward in 2016 as additional companies entered the fray. Uber, a company that has much to gain from driverless cars (like eliminating the need for its over 1 million drivers), began an experiment in Pittsburg to offer driverless cars (supervised by an actual person in the driver’s seat) as part of its service. These cars are being manufactured in a partnership with Volvo using technology created by Carnegie Robotics (who’s founder was one of the creators of the Google technology). Uber also acquired Otto, a startup focused on driverless trucks, to gain further technology. In August, Ford announced its intent to bring an autonomous car to market by 2021. Audi just announced a partnership with Nvidia to bring an autonomous car to the road by 2020-21. Toyota, Chrysler and others have also announced intent to create such a vehicle. While I believe that the actual mass usage of driverless cars will be further out then 2021, we seem to be close to a breakout of “supervised automated vehicles”.

9. The Internet of Things will expand further into kitchen appliances and will start being adopted by the average consumer. In the past 12 months Samsung, LG, GE and others have launched numerous smart refrigerators. These can now be thought of as devices that can connect to a smart phone through an app. The user can receive alerts like ‘a water filter needs replacing’ or ‘the door was left open’. Some have digital bulletin boards on the fridges, other features can let you know when various items stored in the fridge are running low, and still more features can be deployed to control functionality (change temperature, etc). The adoption of these devices has reached sufficient levels for them to be carried in mainstream stores like Best Buy.

10. Amazon will move to profitability on their book subscription service and improve cloud capex. Amazon did indeed make three major shifts in its book subscription strategy. First, it significantly reduced payouts to publishers for their books that were downloaded; second, it reduced the proportion of third party published books offered to subscribers to the service and third it reduced the amount it pays their own authors. While Amazon does not report these numbers, I believe this combination has reduced the cost to Amazon by over 50% and has made the service profitable. The gross margin before stock based compensation for Amazon’s cloud service increased year over year in Q3 (last reported quarter) from 27.1% in 2015 to 31.6% in 2016.

While it wasn’t in my Top 10 post for 2016, I did predict that Kevin Durant would sign with the Warriors as he would fit right in and improve his chances of winning championships. He has signed, seems to fit in well, but we’ll have to wait to see if the championships follow.

I’ll be making my 2017 picks within the next week.