Gyroscopic Investing

Tortoise wrote: Updated Suicide Portfolio Contest results for Week 4. Surprisingly, 5 of the 8 portfolios are now in the black! Can the contestants eventually recover from these dangerously high gains? Stay tuned to find out...

Wow.  HB Reader's portfolio, which essentially reverses every investment of the PP and then levers it up is the 2nd worst!  Kinda appropriate.

It really is interesting how hard it is to intentionally lose a whole lot of money on investments.  Also, ditto on "Brewster's Millions".  When I was a kid I was fascinated by the premise of that movie.

This is proving to be harder than it looks.

Lone Wolf wrote:

Tortoise wrote: Updated Suicide Portfolio Contest results for Week 4. Surprisingly, 5 of the 8 portfolios are now in the black! Can the contestants eventually recover from these dangerously high gains? Stay tuned to find out...

Wow.  HB Reader's portfolio, which essentially reverses every investment of the PP and then levers it up is the 2nd worst!  Kinda appropriate.

Yep, that's the PP way.  Slow and steady.

Week 6 results. Five of the eight suicide portfolios are still in the black! l82start's "Bankrupt Bankroll" is still the biggest loser, but Lone Wolf's "Never Ever Retire" and HB Reader's "Forecast and Destroy" aren't far behind in the race to the bottom.

It looks like Storm is learning the hard way from his "Asian Fraud" portfolio that sometimes fraud really pays off--but unfortunately not always when one wants it to!

Thanks for the update, Mr. McDuck!  Check out that max drawdown on l82start's portfolio!    With those kinds of chills and thrills possible in only 6 weeks, I wonder whether the rest of us stand a chance.

another good day for the bankrupt bank roll....  today's tot = $59,916.67  down $40,083.33  
my most volatile stock pick ( LEXPQ) has gone from having doubled in value to having lost 85.33%

what a roller-coaster ride!!!

It's depressing when my comedy portfolio outperforms my real portfolio.  I'm like George Constanza - I should just do the opposite of everything I want to do and I would be the richest man alive! 

My past performance portfolio took a 17 % hit today, getting me back into the red. I have no idea how day traders can keep the lining of their stomach intact.

The Arsenic House portfolio saw some nice losses today, bringing it just about back to even.

bankrupt bank roll changes -   the sticker QSGIQ has changed, and is now QSGI - (i think it was bought or came out of bankruptcy?) i hope this doesn't make tracking to difficult, it was easy enough to change over at my smart money portfolio tracker....

l82start wrote: bankrupt bank roll changes -   the sticker QSGIQ has changed, and is now QSGI - (i think it was bought or came out of bankruptcy?) i hope this doesn't make tracking to difficult, it was easy enough to change over at my smart money portfolio tracker....

Oops, I completely forgot that last weekend was time to provide week 8 results for the contest! Shame on me. I'll try to get around to posting week 9 results this weekend.

It looks like I already incorporated the change of QSGIQ to QSGI in the week 6 results, but thanks for making sure. The change didn't make tracking any more difficult.

Week 9 results. The last couple of weeks of punishing losses and volatility in the stock market have been like sweet manna from heaven to most of our suicide portfolios! Now only two of the eight portfolios remain in the black!

l82start's Bankrupt Bankroll, a fetid puddle of toxic penny stocks, is still circling the drain. However, Lone Wolf's leveraged bets for Chinese stocks and against precious metals have been steadily dragging the Never Ever Retire portfolio down for weeks. Can LW's portfolio continue with its consistent losses and eventually overtake the Bankrupt Bankroll? Oh, the suspense!

Week 12 results:

I'm right in the middle of the pack.

LNKD is what is hurting me. 

Thanks for the update!  I'm pleased to see that we're now very close to all being net losers.  While this is a competition, I like to think that we all share a certain spirit of brotherhood and can sincerely wish the worst for one another's stanky portfolios.

l82start, I don't know how you found that horrible pile of crap to invest in but those are some amazingly bad results so far.  Congratulations on being so thorough in scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Hey, Storm's portfolio lost a lot of money the past few weeks -- he's very close to losing money now!  Should his max drawdown be a little higher?

Lone Wolf wrote: l82start, I don't know how you found that horrible pile of crap to invest in but those are some amazingly bad results so far.  Congratulations on being so thorough in scraping the bottom of the barrel.

thank you,   and thanks to this forum and the inventors of this contest without whom i would (hopefully) never have discovered my hidden talent for losing money..  ;D

Lone Wolf wrote: Hey, Storm's portfolio lost a lot of money the past few weeks -- he's very close to losing money now!  Should his max drawdown be a little higher?

I've been defining max drawdown as the difference between a portfolio's lowest daily close and its starting value of $100k. So regardless of a portfolio's losses over a certain time period, if it doesn't dip much below $100k the max drawdown won't reflect those losses.

Do we want to define the max drawdown in a different way?

Congratulations to all the participants. I see bright futures for all of you managing Hedge Funds on Wall St. with this kind of performance.

L82Start is ready to get his own investment newsletter at this point.

Tortoise wrote: I've been defining max drawdown as the difference between a portfolio's lowest daily close and its starting value of $100k.

Ah, I see.  That makes sense for the contest.

I was thinking of it as the difference between the highest peak and lowest valley.  Sort of an attempt to answer the question of "in addition to losing me all of my money, which investment gave me the most horrifying, colon-clenching ride to the bottom?"

Your definition seems like a good choice for the contest, though.  What I think we're all hoping to find here is which investment can most reliably and consistently waste away your life savings without giving you even a moment where you might be able to cash out positively.

Tortoise, I just checked my suicide portfolio, and I am down nearly 50%; not bragging, but (for now), the past performance portfolio is looking bad. Would love to see an overall update when you get a chance.

Week 16 results. Way to go, 6 Iron and Storm! You guys have dropped like rocks from 6th to 2nd place and from 8th to 3rd place, respectively. Keep up the poor work!

Eight weeks remain in this Suicide Portfolio contest.

Darn, I'm sitting on the top.  I'm so ashamed.

I'm sure I could lose money faster if only I could actively trade my portfolio using my technical analysis software.

HB Reader wrote: Darn, I'm sitting on the top.  I'm so ashamed.

I'm sure I could lose money faster if only I could actively trade my portfolio using my technical analysis software.

Well...at least you haven't made any money.

HB Reader wrote: Darn, I'm sitting on the top.  I'm so ashamed.

I'm sure I could lose money faster if only I could actively trade my portfolio using my technical analysis software.

Though you maybe could have lost more, at least your portfolio may die to not fight another day.  Hindsight is 5/20... don't be a Monday morning benchwarmer.  Remember Warren Buffet's first two rules of divesting: Do Not Make Money!

I'm done.

I want to know l82start's secret to being so crappy. He's losing money faster than a sailor on Bourbon St. He has a gift!