A few personal finance bloggers decided to have a friendly stock picking contest for 2009 and we decided to do it again for 2010. We had made our picks back in December of 2009 and the plan was to track the calendar year performance of four picks (equal weighted for the sake of determining portfolio performance). As alluded to in my post that discussed my picks initially – don’t take these contests too seriously. A one year horizon is nothing more than gambling.
This year I decided to pick stocks at random, something akin to seeing how throwing darts at a newspaper would work. But seeing as how I don’t have darts, and I read my newspapers online, that method would’ve been a recipe for disaster as I just bought a new monitor. Instead, I picked some three letter words at random and then found the ticker symbols to match those words and that was basically it! Here were the words I picked:
FUN, HAT, ADD, CAR – I like to have FUN, when it’s cold I’ll wear a HAT, I sometimes have to ADD at work and I’m definitely a CAR guy.
And here are the corresponding companies:
1. Cedar Fair L.P. (FUN:NYSE) Stock price as of December 31st, 2009 (close): 11.41 and after Q2: 12.32 plus two quarterly dividend payments of $0.25. YTD Performance = +12.36%.
2. Hathor Exploration Limited (HAT:TSX-V) Stock price as of December 31st, 2009 (close): 1.81 and after Q1: 1.51. YTD Performance = -16.57%
3. Arctic Star Diamond Corp. (ADD:TSX-V) Stock price as of December 31st, 2009 (close): 0.055 and after Q2: 0.04. YTD Performance = -27.27%
4. AVIS Budget Group (CAR:NYSE) Stock Price as of December 31st, 2009 (close): 13.12 and after Q2: 9.82. YTD Performance = -25.15%
So on an equal weighted basis the picks are down 14.16% as a group. This keeps me in the top half out of 9 participants so far in the contest. Not bad considering the whole 7 seconds I took to pick my stocks, but the year is far from over!
Here are the other bloggers’ results so far:
Here are links to the other guys. Not everyone has updated their blogs with their commentary. I’ve included the most recent returns for Q2, but some links might be to the Q1 commentary as we wait for them to update… Enjoy!
1. Dividend Growth Investor: +6.39%
3. My Trader’s Journal: -11.90%
4. WhereDoesAllMyMoneyGo: -14.16%
6. Million Dollar Journey: -17.38%
8. Intelligent Speculator: -19.06%
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