Welcome to week 10 of my stock-picking throwdown with Mr. Market. Let's get right to the numbers:

Company

Starting Price

Recent Price

Total Return

Akamai (NASDAQ:AKAM)

$22.23

$14.71

(33.8%)

Harris & Harris

$6.22

$4.74

(23.8%)

IBM (NYSE:IBM)

$129.05

$90.78

(29.7%)

Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL)

$22.75

$17.02

(25.2%)

Taiwan Semiconductor

$10.34

$7.74

(25.1%)

AVERAGE RETURN

--

--

(27.52%)

S&P 500 SPDR (AMEX:SPY)

$126.73

$93.21

(26.45%)

DIFFERENCE

--

--

(1.07%)

Source: Yahoo! Finance as of Oct. 17.

Mr. Market still has me down like everyone else but, lately, I've been making up ground. And I continue to be optimistic; 15 years of Foolishness through good and bad markets will do that.

Good results will, too. Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) beat estimates in the most recent quarter, and Big Blue's results show that it's a stock market superhero. I've been a recent buyer of Big G and other tech issues because, like Foolish colleague Buck Hartzell, I believe now can be my finest hour as an investor.

That's how top investors generate superior returns -- like when David Gardner produced a decade of 20% returns by buying and holding the likes of Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) and eBay in the real-money Rule Breaker portfolio, or when Tom Gardner selected a "simpleton portfolio" to hold for a decade, with market-crushing results. I think these five tech stocks will produce plenty of durable gains.

This week's checkup
Now, let's move on to the rest of this week's update:

There's your checkup. See you back here on Friday for more tech stock talk.

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