Stock Picking Competition

The Dublin Whale

Anyone up for having a stock picking competition? On http://caps.fool.com/ there is a league table with 75,000 players and they measure you're success in terms of accuracy of picks and return. You can go long or short stocks. I just joined up last week, it would be interesting to have a mini competition to see which boards member can get the highest ranking.

DarkDusk

This is similar to Investopedia.com's free simulator where you're given money and you can trade stocks. You are then ranked depending on profit and account value. They also have a forex simulator too. I've attached screens of my portfolio for the Million Dollar challenge - which is working out pretty well for someone with no experience investing at all!

freeze4real

Stock picking competitions are a joke.

over 75% of participants pick random stocks wothout no resaerch all.

This is what you wouldn't do if its real money involved.....as the money used to trade is fictional.

Another reason why its useless is that theres no pyschological or emotional impact involved in trading.

IMHO trading pyschology is the greatest battle that traders have to face.

Stock picking competition noy being able to fufil those needs makes it a joke, and I believe theres no learning involved with them... its basically turning you to be gamblers.

DarkDusk

freeze4real wrote: »

Stock picking competitions are a joke.

over 75% of participants pick random stocks wothout no resaerch all.

This is what you wouldn't do if its real money involved.....as the money used to trade is fictional.

Another reason why its useless is that theres no pyschological or emotional impact involved in trading.

IMHO trading pyschology is the greatest battle that traders have to face.

Stock picking competition noy being able to fufil those needs makes it a joke, and I believe theres no learning involved with them... its basically turning you to be gamblers.

+1 trillion to this.

You're bang on with this mate, well said I must say. I'd probably wouldn't use these rating sites for my virtual portfolio, never mind a real one! (if I had one!) Of course, I've noticed this myself when playing blackjack and/or roulette online - when it's for fun, my mind doesn't really care if I lose or not, and I'm willing to be gamble way more. When playing for real money I'm more conscious of my decisions and get frustrated when I lose and feel a kind of adrenaline when I win. Luckily, I've stopped gambling like this online because it is so easy to throw away your money without realising. (I only lost 50 bob but for some people it's 1000's). Sorry for getting off the subject there but I just wanted to back up your point.

The Dublin Whale

freeze4real wrote: »

Stock picking competitions are a joke.

over 75% of participants pick random stocks wothout no resaerch all.

This is what you wouldn't do if its real money involved.....as the money used to trade is fictional.

Another reason why its useless is that theres no pyschological or emotional impact involved in trading.

IMHO trading pyschology is the greatest battle that traders have to face.

Stock picking competition noy being able to fufil those needs makes it a joke, and I believe theres no learning involved with them... its basically turning you to be gamblers.

How you treat stock picking competitions is up to you. Personally I joined fool.com's site as a way to track my real life investment portfolio. I use td direct investing for buying and selling shares, but their platform doesn't make it easy to track your portfolio, so I joined fool.com as a way to track my gains and losses. It also tells you if you are beating the market indices.

I agree that the majority won't have portfolios based on their real life portfolio. Nevertheless I am aiming to make it into the top 5,000 on their leaderboard.

Here are my picks for anyone interested:

http://caps.fool.com/player/thedublinwhale.aspx

If anyone else joined post up your username too.

DarkDusk

I've attached my Investopedia portfolio after big gains today. As you can see, I've made a few changes since my last update in this thread, but the outlook is looking very good.

The Dublin Whale

Impressive stuff, whats your trading strategy?

DarkDusk

I've got no strategy, to be honest. I'm good at spotting good equities for the medium to long term, as you can see. I would not classify myself as a day-trader as I prefer to hold the stocks and watch them grow. Big gains today in my portfolio, but the way the markets were performing, you'd be doing very badly to see any sort of losses today. See attached today's update.