Sun 4 Mar 2007
Join me for a bit of silly fun in the CNBC “Million Dollar” trading contest, which starts on Monday. The prize is a “million dollars” paid in an annuity, but heck, I’ll still take it if I win.
The basic rules:
- You can only buy and sell stocks at the closing price of the day (market orders only)
- No short selling, no options, no leverage
- Mergers and share splits apply, but dividends don’t
- Stocks must have a $500 million market cap as of their closing price on Friday March 2nd (you can use the Yahoo Stock Screener to find all 2,723 tickers that should be elligible for the contest)
One of those crafty folks over at Fool.com has discussed the way to win the contest… He basically points out how to win any trading contest — take the biggest risks that you can and hope that you’re one of the lucky winners. A sound, safe, low risk strategy does not win contests.
It should be very interesting to see how the first week of the contest fares if the market continues to behave like it did last week…
March 5th, 2007 at 7:45 am
I wonder if one of the best strategies is to stay in cash this week…after what just happened on the Tokyo exchange, it’s going to be hard to find anything much to buy. Even gold is taking a dive…
March 5th, 2007 at 5:27 pm
I just checked, and most of the ultra short or inverse ETFs were not available… so cash could be a winning bet for today’s contest.
CNBC would have a conniption if their contest winner didn’t do anything at all to be the lesser of losers!
For the record, I plunged into a mid-market gold miner in today’s contest trade… If gold stocks starts to rebound, I could do well in the contest…
March 13th, 2007 at 7:40 am
This just in… you’re allowed to enter the contest more than once as long as you use a different email address.
Hypothetically speaking, if someone has unlimited email addresses and knows a little bit of web client scripting expertise, perhaps they could create a series of portfolios with just about every possible portfolio combination…