Who is the best investor... on this forum :-) ?

[suomynona]

Hey people,
Let's play this game:

Everyone has 10,000 USD to invest in the markets.

Every transaction costs 20 bucks + the price of your deal (i.e., to buy X shares it's 20 bucks, to sell Y shares it's 20 bucks).

How do you invest this money? Let's keep track of what every participant is doing and we'll see who can get the best returns on investments :).

For simplicity let's assume you have the following choices:
1. Invest in stocks (NYSE, NASDAQ, ... of course with currency conversion if the market is not in USD).
2. Invest in GOLD, PLATINUM, OIL....
3. Invest in currencies (USD, CAD, EUR, ...).
4. Interest savings account: 3% per year, compounded monthly (i.e. 3/12% for simplicity)

We're assuming we don't have margins. I.e., you cannot buy for more than your available cash.

Let's also say that you can short stocks. For simplicity, let's assume that to short x USD of stock y, you need to temporarily not lock X>x dollars of your account. In case the total value of the stocks increases beyond X, you're forced to rebuy the stocks.

Everytime you make new transactions, or every week or so, you list your positions, available cash and total net worth :), we can then rank members.

Let's spend 3 days to come up with a list of rules and let's play!

[Dry Ice]

Over how long of a period?

[Danny Z]

$20 bucks is too much when you have $10,000, your stock will never appreciate beyond the price of the transaction unless you get lucky day trading but that's not investing, that's luck and wasting your day on the NASDAQ and DJA indicators all day, you need something like etrade $20 for 10 monthly transaction for it to start making sense

[Tayyar Keserwen]

Could we invest in fixed income securities (government bonds, etc.) ?

How reliable will each contestant's results be?

[suomynona]

Originally Posted by Danny Z

$20 bucks is too much when you have $10,000, your stock will never appreciate beyond the price of the transaction unless you get lucky day trading but that's not investing, that's luck and wasting your day on the NASDAQ and DJA indicators all day, you need something like etrade $20 for 10 monthly transaction for it to start making sense

Hey Danny,

I usually trade at 20 bucks per transaction and it's ok for me. E.g., at 2K USD you need 2% gain to break even. So on the long run it's not bad at all even though I agree it could be better. But of course if you put 100 bucks into a stock it doesn't make sense.

But ok let's say 2 bucks per transaction. Is that better?

[suomynona]

Originally Posted by Dry Ice

Over how long of a period?

Mmm good question. Let's have the first milestone in June'09 and then every 6 months?

[Lallous]

MyStocks

[NASR_MIN_ALLAH]

id give them to the people kermel yseero 2 million........

"iza ta7t el shete malyon w noooooosssss , keef law shamaseeeet ?"

i couldnt hold myself.sorry.

[shevchenco]

I would spend $5000 on AAPL - Apple Inc. (NASDAQ) stocks and keep the rest of the $US 5000 as cash.

[suomynona]

Originally Posted by Tayyar Keserwen

Could we invest in fixed income securities (government bonds, etc.) ?

Let's say anything works (Except Poker, roulette, black jack, and other casino related stuff).

Originally Posted by Tayyar Keserwen

How reliable will each contestant's results be?

Whenever someone does anything, he/she has to immediately write a message stating the time and price of the purchase/selling. We could always add info on top of one message (like a history log with timestamps) for reliably keeping track of the results.

Now people could cheat with short term fluctuations but let's trust the participants :-).


I propose a simple format:

Date/Time Action Amount_USD Total_Free_Cash Total Worth
Oct1_08_1PM - - 10000 10000
Oct2_08_1PM BUY_NYSE:JPM 2500 7500 9995
Oct2_08_3PM BUY_NASDAQ:INTC 1000 6500 9000
Oct3_08_1PM SELL_NYSE:JPM 4500 11000 11700


The red transactions are outstanding ones. People could keep this table in an excell sheet and copy and paste it here when they make updates.