since the portfolio is an amalgamation of various posters' efforts, it would seem more effective to change the structure so that any poster who chose to participate had 100K, and could trade that money in any way they chose, than to limit the capital to 1M or any particular number...while i don't know that you could ever achieve a "realistic" portfolio, since i don't even know what that would be, given the fact that it would never mirror one person's actual investing or trading, it would seem that making each participant's results of equal weight to the total performance would at least give it a more valid outcome
i don't have a problem with shorting per se, but when the portfolio is now likely net short in a rising market, and almost all of those short trades are made by one person, it might as well be his own portfolio...my comments were not about shorting in general, but about taking money from long positions and moving it into short positions in a rising market, and moving it into shorts of the strongest stocks out there at that....sure it is possible to make money shorting the spikes in this market, but why try to pick up pennies and nickels when the dollars are being made on the long side? for one person to do it is an interesting experiment, but for that person to do it with basically all of the available money makes the portfolio irrelevant, again IMHO
perhaps you could give each person 100K and have them do their own summary post at the end of the week to reduce the accounting burden for you...this way we would get an idea of how different approaches were working at any given time, since each person would have a different way of trading their money....from my casual observation i would guess that wiesia is kicking everyone else's butt here, as she is in the contest on the other thread, but her efforts are completely overshadowed in this current format...in this area i am probably biased, because she trades a lot like i do, and even trades some of the same stocks (she even sells things like ISO too soon like i do <g>), so her trades ring more true for me anyway
carl |
