Back in January, Benzinga published a list of 15 marijuana stocks to watch in 2015. The S&P 500 is up more than 2.1 percent so far this year, but how are marijuana investors enjoying 2015?

As the debate over marijuana legalization rages on in the United States, April 20 (4/20) seemed an appropriate time to provide an update on the year-to-date (YTD) performances of these 15 marijuana names.

See Also: 15 Marijuana Stocks To Watch In 2015

Here’s a breakdown of the full list:

A key to surviving and succeeding as an entrepreneur is to have fallbacks – secondary strategies to employ when the primary strategy fails to achieve the desired result.  This is particularly true when raising capital.  An entrepreneur who walks away from a pitch with no money is normal.  Statistics on bank applications and angel presentations show that over 95% of the time the pitch will fail.  The entrepreneur must pick themselves up and dust themselves off and go pitch again.

The single most common reason that an entrepreneur fails to obtain capital when making a pitch is that they are pitching to the wrong capital source.  The deal that the entrepreneur has to offer does not match the criteria of the investor. 

The 2014 midterm elections will go down in history as one of the most important years in marijuana history. It provided validation that two trailblazer states — Washington and Colorado — had made the right decision two years prior in pushing through a voter-passed ballot initiative, allowing for the possession and consumption of adults. Many were skeptical when those states passed their respective laws, but in 2014, they suddenly don’t look so crazy.

Ben & Jerry's Homemade said it was considering making pot-flavored ice cream "where it was legal," but it's been beaten to the punch. Isaac Lappert, a third-generation ice cream purveyor and graduate of the Culinary Institute, has started Cannabis Creamery in (rich) hippie and hot-tub central: Sausalito, California.

Cannabis Creamery's mission, as described on its Facebook page: "To give you first and foremost a high quality tasting ice cream with a kick to it ;)." (Pun no doubt intended.)

Hazy Beginnings

For Canada, cannabis may have been criminalized in 1923 but the push for legalization has increased significantly over the last decade. The contention has resulted in a considerable amount of media coverage and public debate. Between its prevalence in politics, pop culture and now physical shops, we have marijuana on the mind.

Marijuana has come a long way.  In just a few short years, the drug has gone from being banned throughout the United States to holding some legal status for the majority of Americans. As of April 20, four states have legalized recreational use of cannabis and 23 allow marijuana to be prescribed for medical use.

But marijuana hasn’t shed its reputation as a subversive gateway drug in the collective American consciousness on its own. For years, investors, entrepreneurs, advocates and researchers have been pushing the dialogue on marijuana forward, helping to back well-heeled campaigns aimed at changing hearts, minds and laws around the country.

DENVER, Colorado — The edibles market in Colorado is sweet on education.

But smoking marijuana and consuming a THC-infused edible create two vastly different experiences. So when the state legalized recreational marijuana, allowing any adult over the age of 21 years to purchase cannabis products, guidelines for edibles consumption needed to be put in place.

The dosages on marijuana edibles aren't just for those experimenting with cannabis for the first time — or the first time since their college days — they're for everyone. Prior to the state of Colorado setting a standard dosage, most people didn't know the size of a single-serving.

Single-serving cannabis-infused cookies.

Federal trademark officials in Alexandria, Va., recently received an unusual package: a hand-delivered parcel containing vials of a clear liquid that smelled of oranges.

The sender wasn’t a crank. It was a corporate trademark lawyer representing Flotek Industries Inc., a Texas producer of hydraulic-fracturing fluids used to extract oil and gas from rocks deep in the earth.

Every business owner knows the importance of branding their business by picking a name customers remember and with offering services or products people will keep coming back. Branding your business is certainly important and necessary, but branding yourself is even more important. No matter what niche you’re involved in, you probably have competitors. What makes you different than your competition? Well, that’s what personal branding is all about, letting your customers know exactly what makes you different, and better than the rest.

On July 1, Oregon will become the third state to allow the sale, possession, cultivation and private use of marijuana inside its borders. Like Colorado and Washington in 2012, and Alaska, where the the new law is being implemented in two phases, Oregon ended marijuana prohibition via a statewide ballot measure, which voters approved on Nov. 4, 2014.