One Stock, One Month, Three Prizes

The Background:

When fellow blogger Vitaliy Katsenelson wrote to me last year about his plans to release a book he had been writing for the better part of 2 years, I told him that I would be happy to read his book and review it before launch. In case you are not familiar with Vitaliy’s work, he is a contributing author for some of the biggest financial websites including The Motley Fool, TheStreet.com, MarketWatch.com and Minyanville.com while maintaining his own blog over at Vitaliy’s Contrarian Edge. He is also the Vice President/Portfolio Manager of Investment Management Associates and teaches a class on equity analysis and portfolio management at the University of Colorado at Denver.

Given current market conditions, Vitaliy’s book Active Value Investing: Making Money in Range-Bound Markets which discusses investing in range-bound or trendless markets could not have been released at a better time. I started putting together a detailed review of his book but Geoff Gannon of Gannon on Investing beat me to the punch with this outstanding review of Vitaliy’s book.

The Prize:

I talked to Vitaliy about contributing a signed copy of his book to subscriber number 2,000 of my investment newsletter after subscriber number 1,000 proved to be elusive and he said he could do one better and instead give me four personally autographed books in case I wanted to give three of them away in a contest.

The Contest:

For some time now, I have wanted to launch a stock picking contest but have held off because of the amount of work required to set something like that up on an independent website like InsideArbitrage. Vitaliy’s offer motivated me to go ahead with that project and we have now set up a simple stock picking contest that would reward the top three stock pickers with a copy of Vitaliy’s book. The rules of the contest are extremely simple as all you have to do is pick one stock and if your stock happens to be one of the top three performers by the end of regular trading on November 16th, you win. You can join anytime between now and November 15th and in case you are already a InsideArbitrage subscriber you do not even have to login to participate. We decided to make things interesting by allowing participants to pick either long or short positions.

Since this is a beta version of our stock picking contest we would appreciate your feedback so that we can make the next one more robust. If there is sufficient interest in this contest and if I can find the moolah for it, we will probably launch another contest over the next few weeks with a bling toy like the Apple iPhone (AAPL) or a Nintendo Wii (NTDOY.PK) as the main prize. You can check out how you are doing from the stock contest rankings page, which would be automatically updated just like our model portfolio.

The Rules:

The three primary rules are,

1. Only stocks that trade above $1 at the time of selection and that are listed either on the NYSE, Nasdaq or the American Stock Exchange will be accepted (sorry no pink sheet or bulletin board stocks at this time).
2. Regular dividend payments will not be taken into account both on the long side and the short side.
3. The stock contest price would be the highest price of the day for long stocks and lowest price of the day for short stocks if you pick the stock during a trading session. If you pick a stock after hours or over a weekend, the next trading session will be used to determine the highest price of the day for long stocks and lowest price of the day for short stocks. While this puts contestants at a slight disadvantage, it also helps stop people from gaming the contest.

Don’t forget to read the full list of rules and happy stock picking.

Click here to enter the contest.

Click here to view current rankings.