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Pastimes : Stock-Picking Challenge -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Larry S. who wrote (1847)	2/7/2001 5:29:43 PM
From: Jon Tara	Respond to of 2402

Scott is still there. However, SI Bob is gone, and had been assigned to write the software to provide the daily updates. Frankly, I think the whole contest was ill-conceived from the get-go. It was naive to think that it was practical to give entrants a complicated set of instructions for submitting their entries using SI portfolios and multiple messages to a board, have the entrants be able to understand and follow the instructions, and then expect somebody to write software that would make sense of the resulting mess. And it was certainly too late to be beginning to write that software! As I said earlier, the SENSIBLE thing would have been to have written some software allowing entrants to fill-out a simple form where they would enter the 5 symbols. It would have been simple, then, to write some software to track the portfolios and provide daily or even real-time updates. No need to parse the data out from the thread while trying to figure out which posts are contest entries, which are corrections, and which are discussion, and no need to check for rule violations, other than legal selection of the stocks (i.e. must be NYSE, AMEX, NASDAQ, BB) which could have been done at the time that the entrant filled-out the form. (Will we never learn from Florida? :) ) Nobody at SI (or nobody in power at SI) seems to have had the management skills or just plain common sense to have seen this. It's only one little fiasco, but perhaps indicative of a bigger fiasco?