Moving up in the standings, but not for long
It’s hard to find high volatility stocks that are likely to move up in this market. I made a little progress on the CNBC stock contest, but this is going to be a lot lower tomorrow when they update the results (seeing how the markets had another abysmal day). It would be a lot more interesting if you could take short positions. Everyone would probably be in NEW and LEND.
As an aside, the rules for the trading contest apparently don’t prohibit multiple accounts owned by the same person. Consequently, someone named “Nancy Beaumont” has entered hundreds of portfolios. By the rules, they can only win once, but having multiple high-volatility portfolios in the running significantly improves your chance of ending up with one or two successful outliers, sort of like buying multiple lottery tickets, but with much better odds. At the moment they’re occupying 8 of the top 20 rankings.
Tags: stock, market, trading, contest, fun, investing, cnbc, risk management
March 17th, 2007 at 1:23 am
John,
I think cnbc got us both mixed up. Your 13% is tied with my 25% return. lol it also told me I’m rank at 2536th place too. Which is the same as yours. What is going on? Hey how often does your account rank gets updated? It seems like it only updating my account whenever I complained.
March 17th, 2007 at 1:42 pm
I don’t think they’re updating the rankings consistently. I noticed that my ranking stayed at exactly 2536 despite my return varying up and down over the period of a few days. Sadly, I missed out on the big rebound in LEND this week, so it may be difficult to catch up at this point.
March 17th, 2007 at 7:19 pm
LEND was not allowed to trade, don’t worry about it. What we missed was FMT. The top 10 leaders all has it. That is why they’re all gapping away from the rest. All the top ten already had about $2M in their account.
So if the ranking isn’t updated consistently, then how do we know if those guys on the top 20 list were ranked accurately? Any ideas?
March 17th, 2007 at 8:01 pm
I suspect the daily leaderboard hasn’t been accurate every day during the start of the contest, based on updates to my own account, and also having seen a few other blog posts describing similar/identical ranks (2536) or unchanging rank while portfolio value changed.
I do think they spent some extra time last weekend trying to get an accurate tally and to figure out what to do with all the “Nancy Beaumont” portfolios. They didn’t get the weekly rankings out until quite late, and didn’t post the weekly winner until the day after.
From this point on, I think the game will probably mostly be about the 1-week percentage gain category.