Week Five Results In - We Have a New Leader!

It's nice to have strong markets during an investment challenge, as almost everyone enjoys watching how their portfolios rise in value. So far we see that 40 of the 59 portfolios in the contest (68%) have generated positive returns over a 5 week period. That is a great result.

Often there is a position or two that tends to drive overall portfolio performance, and we have seen this with many of the strong portfolios in our contest. A few weeks ago we listed the top 10 individual positons in our contest, one of which had over a 100% return over just a few weeks. When we did our review, the 10th best position at that time had a 25%+ return.

This trend continues, and we've seen some other positions rise rapidly since our last review, and a couple in particular have helped catapult a portfolio into 1st place. Alexandra F.'s portfolio has had very strong gains over the past few weeks, driven by two positions that have gained over 25% in the first 5 weeks - Complete Genomics, which is up over 33% and Netflix, which is up almost 26%. Alexandra F. is now our leader, with a 30.6% return on her portfolio!

Great work, but there are others who are not far behind, including Volodymyr V., whose portfolio has dominated for a few weeks, and is currently in second spot with a 28.8% return so far. His portfolio holds the National Bank of Greece position, which has generated a 106%+ return so far when converted into CAD. Other positions for Volodymyr have also been fairly strong, with Apple up over 16% and Guggenheim China Small Cap ETF up over 13%.

In third place we currently see Adam M., whose portfolio is up over 23% at the halfway mark of our contest. His big contributors to portfolio performance include MAG Silver Corp (up almost 29%) and Imperial Metals (up over 20%).

Week Five signalled the halfway mark of our contest, but it also was the trade date. We had many contestants making trades, and we will release the new portfolio positions once we have entered those trades in. We are using Friday February 17th closing prices for both sells and new buys. We'll get the posting of the new portfolios as soon as possible.