BOSTON (CNN/Money) - Former New York City mayor Ed Koch famously used to gauge his popularity with typical bluntness. He'd greet fellow Gothamites with a simple question, "How am I doin'?"

I'll pull a page from Mr. Koch, who not-so-famously dabbled in the dot-com craze when he co-founded TheLaw.com, and ask, "How'd I do in 2004?"

The answer? Pretty well. Since I don't actually buy or sell stocks based on my columns (ethical guidelines preclude me from owning stocks in the areas I cover), there's no index or tracking fund to gauge my actual performance in monetary terms. But in this column, we'll look back at some of my bigger hits and misses. Come back tomorrow for my colleague Paul LaMonica's assessment of his 2004.

I did best in the hardware sector in 2004. In January, I heralded the arrival of Wayne Inouye at Gateway (Research) and described what he had to do to turn the company around. Throughout the year, I've checked in on the company, writing mostly favorable pieces. Gateway is up 17 percent for the year.

In February, I called attention to and praised Dell (Research) for the surprising moves the company was making by launching new high-margin, gamer-centric laptops and music players. This year has been a great one for the Pride of Round Rock, and with CEO Kevin Rollins's recent comments that he may consider using AMD chips in future Dell products, it looks like the company will continue to shake things up next year as well. Since February, Dell is also up 17 percent.

In March, I cautioned investors about the rush in AskJeeves (Research) shares after the company purchased Interactive Search Holdings. The stock was up 40 percent on the year at the time and, after my column ran, continued to head north. But in the last few months, it's come back to earth as the online search industry gets more competitive every day. The stock is down more than 10 percent for the year.

I've been long on Electronic Arts (Research) for some time now, and in a column that ran on Dec. 8, I advised readers to pick up some ERTS, arguing that there was still some pop in the scalding stock. Since that piece ran, the stock is up 13 percent. What a nice way to end the year, except...

In February, I was struck by a study from InStat/MDR that projected that 29 percent of all telephone users in the United States would abandon their landlines and go all cell phone by 2008. I thought that number was conservative and predicted great things for Nokia (Research) as a result.

Unfortunately, I was pretty far off the mark, with Nokia closing the year well in the red -- down 30 percent -- as its market share slipped from a peak of 39 percent to about 33 percent.

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In April, I criticized Sun Microsystems (Research) after it made amends with longtime nemesis Microsoft, announced a layoff of 3,300 employees, and named Jonathan Schwartz president and chief operating officer. I wrote that the company had lost its focus and was being squeezed on the high end by IBM and on the low end by Linux and Intel.

On the eve of its Q3 results, I warned investors against the company. Since then the company is up more than 15 percent, due to the favorable reaction to last month's launch of its Solaris 10 product.

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