Sunday

The Inflationist Challenge 2009

24 Comments January 4, 2009 – 5:16 am |   | Permalink |  Print This Post |

Australian investors will have heard of David Haselhurst, the stock-tipper extraordinaire whose tips for “The Speculator Column” outstripped the All-Ordinaries index in 30 of 34 years, with nine years of TRIPLE digit growth. Some call him the Warren Buffett of Australia, who (on paper) puts even the Oracle of Omaha to shame. For those of you who don’t, he is the author of the weekly The Speculator column previously published in The Bulletin for the last 35 years. You can now find him here. David Haselhurst was in charge of the late Kerry Packer’s investment portfolio in the 1970s, with discretion to place buy-orders up to $40,000 (corrected for inflation this amounts to $370,000 today). Below is a summary of his performance in the last 35 years:

The Speculator Historical Performance

The Inflationist is a believer of undiscovered public talent, evidenced by the success of the Idol concept. The Inflationist aims to provide objective, transparent stock coverage by leveraging on public investing talent. The experiment we plan to conduct, with your support, is to invite all investors to play by roughly the same rules as Mr Haselhurst, i.e. to start off each calendar year with $40,000 (AUD or USD or EUR – we calculate your portfolio returns in 12 months time) to invest in a virtual portfolio. That way, your portfolio performance speaks for the quality of your articles (price action is all we care about really). The slightly modified guidelines are:

• You may trade in commodities, currencies and bonds
• You may trade both long or short positions
• Purchase and sold prices are calculated using the opening or closing price of the day
• You may trade in any market (Dow, FTSE, ASX, DAX, Hang Seng, Singapore, etc)
• No Day-Trading as trades are impossible to verify and retrospective trades are of no benefit to readers
  

If you have an informed opinion on investing that you wish to share with The Inflationist community, we welcome you to register as an author to participate in The Inflationist Challenge. Once registered, you need to be logged in to access your personalised Stock Trading Portfolio Management System using our Stock Trading Widget. This customised and unique Widget will automatically update prices and calculate your portfolio performance. To learn how to use our Widget, simply follow the instructions here.

By updating your portfolio based on your views and trade plan, your portfolio performance speaks for the quality of your articles (price action is all we care about really). The Inflationist aims to provide an open platform for Stock Bloggers, Investors and Traders to provide objective, transparent stock recommendations – allowing readers to leverage on undiscovered public investing talent.

To post an article, our WordPress-powered platform is self explanatory and it is as easy as sending an email. For those not familiar with WordPress, and cannot be bothered learning, email your picks and a brief explanation for your selection (refer to The Speculator’s columns to get an idea of how this should be written) to us at theinflationist@gmail.com. We will post your articles for you on the site. The Top Ten Inflationists will be invited to dinner with investment moguls and founders of TheInflationist in January 2010 when the results are finalised. Be warned, we will also be participating in The Speculator Challenge and are confident of outperforming the index and everyone else!

haselhurst