Virtual riches

gold coins,
originally uploaded by technicolor.

CNBC is running another one of those fantasy investment contests, runnng from now until July, and I've signed myself up. Why not? The prizes are

1. Five Hundred Thousand Dollars
2. One Hundred Thousand Dollars
3. Fifty Thousand Dollars
4. A Trip for Winner and one Guest to see Game Three of the 2008 World Series.
5. A Trip for Winner and one Guest to the Sea Island Golf Resort.
6. About $5000 of Sony stuff.
7. A Trip to Jamaica for Winner and one Guest.
8. A pair of TAG Heuer Watches.
9. A Florida golf clinic with (recently retired) Annika Sorenstam, plus other perks.
10. A Trip to Turks and Caicos for Winner and one Guest.
11. A weekend in a Bentley.
12. A Trip for the Winner to play in the Main Event of the 2009 World Series of Poker.
13. A Trip for Winner and one Guest to see the 2009 Super Bowl.

You just have to outsmart a few hundred thousand other players, that's all.

I've set up four of the allowed five million dollar portfolios for myself, and so far none of them are in the red. These are themes of the portfolios:

1. Earnings reports The weekly prizes are based on largest percentage change of a portfolio, and I figured that the best way of catching a lucky coinidence of a number of stocks "popping" was to chose those schedued to have earnings reports that week. Last week, I started with Brocade Communications, Sony, BMC Software, and Nordstrom turn in good performances for me, with Urban Outfitters posting a loss after missing the analysts' expectations. This week it will be instead Hewlett-Packard, AnnTaylor, Campbell Soup, Saks, and Staples.


2. Tech tech tech The sector that hasn't had to bear too much of the brunt of the slowdown these last few months. I've put together a port with Ansys, IDC, Microsoft, Oracle, and CommVault which is the best-performing of all so far.


3. Take me The other way a stock can get a big pop is if it suddenly finds itself on the receiving end (or occasionally the issuing end) of takeover activity. So I looked for some solid, defensive stocks with a decent amount of cash and built a port consisting of CSC, Heinz, and NetApp. A shot in the dark, really.


4. Vice As the words of the hymn say,

   Tempted and tried, we're oft made to wonder
   Why it should be thus all the day long
   While there are others living among us
   Never molested, though in the wrong

   So with this in mind I thought about some industries which flourish by causing other folks dismay and came up with this list: MasterCard, Fortune Brands, CACI International, Halliburton (duh), Altria, British American Tobacco, Baidu, Las Vegas Sands, and Foundation Coal Holdings. Just sayin'.

Any suggestions for a theme for my final million dollar portfolio? Put them in the comments. Or let me know if you are a fellow player and how you're doing. (There's still time to sign up.) If I think of it, I'll post an entry about how these strategies of mine ended up faring.

Gift idea #7: All human knowledge

The Vanity of Human Hopes,
originally uploaded by Lump Of Hesitation.

Did you know you can download a best-of collection of Project Gutenberg's collection of etexts to burn on a DVD, or, if you want to customize the selection, roll your own selection of books to burn onto disk? Combine this with some text-to-speech software and one would never need to feel deprived of something to learn about. The only better thing would be if they had perfected the skull jack so that you could just pipe all this information directly into your brain.

And it's all free. Free, I tell you!

It is true that for the most part, the texts in the collection are only those already in the public domain, and as such are some 80 years or more in age. But if you think about what has happened since the 1920s in human history, you might well conclude that the sum total of mankind's wisdom has not significantly increased since then, and one could even make the case that it has slipped down a notch or two. And there are some dandy selections in there. (Some of which I have even had the privilege of having edited.)

This concludes my little gift-giving series, which I hope has given you an outside-the-box idea or two - please let me know in the comments if you have any success with these. If you're up to it, since after all, Wittgenstein tells us "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence." I should caution, however, that in a recent report, scientists tell us people suck at gift-giving for those they care about, so don't set your expectations too high.