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Strategies & Market Trends : Value Investing -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Paul Senior who wrote (11977)	2/4/2001 1:54:34 PM
From: Paul Senior	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 78476

A Sunday rant and vent - idiocy of stock picking contests. These things are mostly set up by journalists or people with something to sell. They almost never are promulgated by serious or successful investors. Because real investors know how difficult it is to buy and hold on to a stock until real gains are achieved -- let alone have some arbitrary contest-ending deadline forced on them (which almost has to be just a few months or less - otherwise people would lose interest or even forget they've entered the contest). Further, the goal of the contest is always (in my experience) to beat everyone else. That is just not a realistic, viable goal for an investor. An investor who would or should in reality have a goal that is an accumulation of $$$$ - substantial in amount and earning a good return if the funds are not accumulated for a specific purchase. So the contest leads people to pick stocks they believe will go up quickly and beat everyone else's picks. These would be, or should be, stocks that the contestant wouldn't actually own or would own only as small part of his/her investments. Imo, it's really a waste of time to consider these contest-type stocks for actual purchase with the expectation they will see superior increases in so short a time frame (the contest period.) Plus, the emotions of paper trading are imo SUBSTANTIALLY different from what is experienced in actually owning stocks. And understanding or mastering those real life emotions are often what is critical to investment success. Whole thing is just a waste of time (just like my writing this post!) which diverts people from the real issues, and worse, for unsuspecting or new investors, the excitement and apparent interest by so many people regarding the contest, obscures what successful investing is about. So there! Paul Senior