It's been 17 months since I introduced the World's Greatest Retirement Portfolio to Foolish readers. This was, has been, and will continue to be my way of helping the world to invest better. Putting my money where my mouth is, I pledged to put at least $4,000 behind each stock and attempt to hold each one for at least three years -- though I've already broken that promise.

Since I began, the market has returned 10.9%, not bad at all by historical measures. But this portfolio has lived up to its moniker as the "World's Greatest," outperforming the market by 19 percentage points.

Below, I'll show you why it's doing so well, offer up three stocks that I think are excellent buys right now, and offer access to a premium report that offers deeper analysis than I can cover in one article.

Company

Publication Date

Change

Vs. S&P 500

Google (GOOGL 0.55%)

6/26/11

40.9%

28

PriceSmart 

6/28/11

66.3%

54

Baidu (BIDU 0.98%)

9/15/12

(3.6%)

(14)

Intuitive Surgical (ISRG -0.55%)

7/25/11

35.2%

27

National Oilwell Varco (NOV -0.16%)

7/28/11

(8.5%)

(20)

Coca-Cola 

6/21/11

16.2%

4

Whole Foods 

7/5/11

49.7%

41

Amazon 

7/12/11

10.2%

0

Apple (AAPL 1.27%)

6/30/11

78.1%

68

Johnson & Johnson 

8/1/11

15%

2
       

Total

 

30%

19.1%

Source: Fool.com, all returns as of market close Nov. 1, 2012. *Returns are for position in ATVI held from July 15, 2011, to Sept. 9, 2012, and transferred over to BIDU on Sept. 15, 2012.

Most of the companies are down from last month's returns, but so too is the overall market. One bright spot has been PriceSmart, which continues to execute on its wholesale plans for Latin America.

Looking ahead, there's only one company in this portfolio left to report earnings. Whole Foods will release its figures on Nov. 7. The company is expected to earn $0.60 per share on revenue of $2.9 billion.  

Whole Foods is one of my favorite companies, but it's not on the list of "buy now" stocks for this month.

3 Buy Now stocks
The first stock on my list might be one of the most tempting stocks to buy on the market right now: Chinese search engine Baidu. The company reported earnings last week that disappointed some investors, and others are concerned about competition from Qihoo 360. From where I sit, a lot of people are forgetting about the fact that the company grew revenue by 50% over the last quarter, still has a dominant position in the growing Chinese search area, and now trades for just 24 times earnings.

Next on the list is National Oilwell Varco. This company doesn't actually extract any oil or natural gas from the earth. Instead, it focuses on providing the parts that make the process of extracting this energy both efficient and safe. Earnings came out recently, and the company beat earnings expectations. However, concerns about the price of oil dipping -- which provides less incentive for oil companies to buy stuff from National Oilwell -- have recently pushed shares lower. The company is definitely a cyclical one, but I think the recent pullback presents a nice entry point for investors.

Last on the list is Baidu's American counterpart: Google. I've already reviewed why I think there's no need to panic about the company's recent earnings miss, which you can read here. For those who don't wish to click over, the long and short of it is that the company continues to execute on its core businesses, while being led under the deft hand of Larry Page in expanding its services in a wise manner.

As I said above, of these three, it's Baidu that is the most tempting to me right now.