To the thread:
Perhaps we should give some thought to excluding penny stocks from the contest in the future.
Point well taken, Daniel.
I didn't participate in the first contest. In retrospect, the picks there <http://www.geocities.com/WallStreet/Exchange/1642/change.htm> seem to be more institutional-level quality than the current crop. If memory serves, the question originally asked was more of a "ok, wise guy, name which stock in your portfolio will do better than ASND" than a "pick a stock, any stock, that's going to have outstanding gains in the next three months" kind of premise. There's a big difference between the two, because the former represents stocks you'd actually pick for risking your own hard-earned money.
I understand that your point isn't that people are getting an unfair advantage from picking penny stocks, but rather that the contest is less relevant to real world investing. Still, among the current top ten, there are very real companies that many of us actually hold (Manly, for example, got out of SEEK for real on Thursday). Most of the top ten stocks have benefited from the recent Internet insanity, but who knows where they'll be in two months. So for now, let's wait and see, because it may very well turn out that large-cap, widely held stocks will lead by summer, especially if there's any sort of market-wide correction.
Still, I'd support a bright-line rule, like $5 or greater, or bigger than micro-cap or nano-cap, for the Q3 contest. The reason I'd support it is that it might lend some marginally educational value to the contest.
Comments, anyone?
P.S. I'm one of the last two or three people on Earth who hand-codes HTML for web pages. The title type style is straight Word 97 with a little tweaking in Photoshop... on... the... MACINTOSH! I rejiggered the Java app to generate a pure HTML table on my machine at home and simply upload the page to the web site, so now there's no need for people to have Java-capable browsers to see the standings. |
