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TheInflationist Challenge Year End Summary: 2009

Top Ten 2009 : TheInflationist Challenge

Congratulations to our top ten investors who participated in The Inflationist Challenge 2009. For new readers, we started this site a year ago with the intention of harnessing the collective talent of investors and traders. The rules were simple: everyone started with $40,000 and could trade in anything - long or short.

Our only Rules are:

1. No Day Trading as trades are impossible to verify and are of no value to part time traders with full time day jobs (like us).

2. Trades need to be posted in real time.

Traders annual performance will be summarised year end (See table below). We debated whether to reset our portfolio value to $40,000 at the start of each year (vs rolling over), and have decided to let it roll over from the year before. Starting portfolio value will be recorded at the commencement of each calendar year so that every trader’s long term performance can be measured by the same (percentage) yardstick.

For 2009, David Haselhurst (known as The Speculator in The Bulletin; now in Money magazine) recorded an impressive 278% return! This was achieved trading equities only (on a long only strategy usually based on speculative penny stocks). The problem, though, is that the share price of his picks usually go up as soon as (and not uncommonly before) his stock picks are published.

The Warren Buffett Index (for new readers please read our post on the Warren Buffett Index) recorded a 28.15% return since its inception on 3rd May 2009. We will update his portfolio based on Berkshire Hathaway’s Annual Report, and will only include stocks which go below the “official” purchase price.

TheInflationist Challenge 2009 Summary

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