Update

An update on my position in CNBC’s “Million-dollar Portfolio Challenge”:


As you can see, I did make a couple of poor trades that whacked my score down to size.  Due to the nature of this contest, one is practically forced into going all in on one stock and hoping to find ... what? ... “serendipity”? ... “fortuitousness”?  “Luck” is not part of my vocabulary.  We’ll see where it goes from here.

Here are the trades I made those few days that killed me:

3/21:
Bought 16,850 shares of MLHR at 37.84
Bought 14,185 shares of CHL at 46.18

3/22:
Sold 16,850 shares of MLHR at 33.43 (-11.65%)
Sold 14,185 shares of CHL at 46.29 (+0.24%)
Bought 49,054 shares of JBL at $24.93

3/23:
Sold 49,054 shares of JBL at $22.26 (-10.71%)

CNBC’s “Million Dollar Portfolio Challenge”

I'm an investor, and I love to play the stock market. I may (read: “probably will”) share some of my ideas about certain stocks on this blog in the coming days, weeks, months, etc.

Perhaps you’ve seen where CNBC is running a twelve-week contest called the “Million Dollar Portfolio Challange.” Entrants are given an imaginary portfolio of $1 million to invest in stocks. In each of the first ten weeks of this contest, the player whose portfolio gains the greatest percentage in value wins $10,000 in real money and becomes a finalist to compete in the final two weeks. Ten more finalists are determined by the top 10 portfolio gainers overall for the whole ten-week span. Those twenty individuals then start anew with a $1 million portfolio and compete for the final two weeks. At the end of those two weeks the player whose portfolio has the highest value wins a grand prize of a real one million dollars.

Well, I love a challenge, so I thought I’d have a go at it. Yesterday was the third day of the third week in the contest, and here is my standing so far:

Number 1,996 may not appear to be wonderful, but when you consider that there are at least a quarter million contestants, it’s not too shabby either: (1,996/250,000 = 0.8%). I’ve managed to do well I believe, but I’m obviously going to have to do much better if I expect to win anything. My high water mark (in terms of rank) so far was after the end of trading on Monday this week, when my score looked like this:

Anybody else like the stock market?