Hello everyone!

We apologize for the lack of posting as of late, our personal lives have become very busy. Anyways, the AOL Stock Challenge has ended (7 weeks), and here are the results.

We started off with $100k, and we ended up with $103180 which is approximately a 3% return in 7 weeks with a rank of 137 out of 1239 contestants. Not too bad considering that we used technical analysis only. The winner had a whopping final portfolio value of $161000!

We must admit that we started to slack off near the end of the round and we should have sold off some losers before they turn the turn for the worse, like FCP and AVN.UN.

Our biggest winners were APOL, WAG, and NGX (already sold off).

Here was our final portfolio holdings:

Standings (rank and portfolio value calculated
since portfolio creation to last update)

Portfolio Details

As you can see from our holdings below, we have picked up a few more stocks. Perhaps it would be a better strategy for this game to pick a few stocks only and ride them out. Alas, we have a tendancy to pick up whatever looks like a good buy.

Over the past few days, we have purchased: SCSS, RRZ and ARU. We are still buying based on technical analysis ONLY. If we were to put real money into the market right now, SCSS (select comfort) would probably be our first pick. Tom Gardiner over at fool.com has extreme confidence in this stock and has recommended it many times in his Hidden Gems newsletter.

The income trusts didn’t explode out of the gate as we expected with only a modest gain. AET.UN is still our biggest winner with a 10% gain.

To date, we are ranked 83rd out of 1211 traders with a 4.39% gain. Only a few weeks left in this round of the AOL Stock Challenge!

It’s now time for another stock challenge update. Our picks aren’t doing as great as what we would want but not too bad at the same time. As of right now, we are placed 104th out of approximately 1100 people with a 2.79% return since Nov 20, 2006. I guess gaining $2790 in 3 weeks isn’t so bad but we want to do better. We have done some shifting around in our portfolio, here are the Current holdings:

Current Holdings

Since our last post, we have unloaded 50% of Apollo and have added Walgreens (WAG) and Petrolifera (PDP), both of which showed technical bottoms. Our biggest gainer, Arc Energy Trust, has overtaken Apollo with a 8.91% gain. Our biggest loser is First Calgary Petroleum with -%7.98 decline.

3 weeks in and still treading water!

Stay tuned…