SmartMoney's Strange Market Madness

  • March 7, 2006

SmartMoney launched a new stock-picking contest where you go through five rounds (similar to basketball playoffs) and a final championship round to win a Sirius Satellite radio and service. While the prize does not amount to much, the winner would certainly have bragging rights. They also do not let you choose your own stocks and you have to pick amongst the stocks they have pre-selected. Stocks are classified into various categories such as Growth, Value, Income and International. I was happy to see InsideArbitrage pick Tata Motors (TTM) amongst the international stocks that they have pre-selected.

There are certain strange things that I noticed about this contest. Mixed amongst the stocks is a fund like EFL, which is an emerging markets bond fund. Another really odd thing is the categorization of stocks. Stocks such as Yahoo (YHOO), Google (GOOG), EBay (EBAY), Apple (AAPL) and Genentech (DNA) fall under the “Value” category while stocks such as Pfizer (PFE), Merck (MRK), Sara Lee (SLE) and Citigroup (C) fall under the “Growth” category. Warren Buffett once remarked “Growth and value investing are joined at the hip”. Keeping that in mind, I still cannot see how this categorization makes any sense. I get the feeling they switched the categories by mistake or a machine picked the stocks. The income group looks fine except for the presence of U.S Steel (X) with its 0.7% dividend yield.

If you would like to try your hand at picking stocks, check it out here (registration required).