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, well… kinda. I picked some random words 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
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 Q1: 11.94 plus 0.25/unit dividend. YTD Performance = +6.84%
2. Hathor Exploration Limited (HAT:TSX-V) Stock price as of December 31st, 2009 (close): 1.81 and after Q1: 1.96. YTD Performance = +8.29%
3. Arctic Star Diamond Corp. (ADD:TSX-V) Stock price as of December 31st, 2009 (close): 0.055 and after Q1: 0.065. YTD Performance = +18.18%
4. AVIS Budget Group (CAR:NYSE) Stock Price as of December 31st, 2009 (close): 13.12 and after Q1: 11.50. YTD Performance = -12.35%
So on an equal weighted basis the picks are up 5.24% as a group. This puts me about mid-pack 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:
1. Dividend Growth Investor: +9.58%
3. My Trader’s Journal: +5.78%
4. WhereDoesAllMyMoneyGo: +5.24%
5. The Financial Blogger: +2.87%