In third place overall we had Lord Farquart who managed to take third in spite of only playing the game for one day. In august he bought the Aveng Group with R800k and never came back to see his 82% growth in that share.
Lamak was in second spot by going on a dividend splurge. He'd buy a high yield share before the las day to trade, collect the dividend, and sell it a few days later. In theory this just shouldn't work, but in the game it work exceedingly well for Lamak. He collected over R1.1 million in dividends, and even though he paid R240k in fees, he was still our second place person overall. Please don't try this in real life with large sums of money, it may fail spectacularly! Lamak actually posted a very nice profile on the forum, well worth a read here: shareforum.co.za/off-topic/just-me-long-story/
And in first spot we have Magash. He said he was even happier for winning this competition than he was when he came third in a race out of four people in grade one. Luckily for him back then, one of the people tripped! I managed to get a small profile on Magash, trying to see how he managed to do so well, was it skill or was it luck. Amazingly it looks like pure skill and market knowledge, here's the profile:
Master of Commerce from UKZN and currently completing a Doctorate of Business also at UKZN. I learnt to trade by actually investing, challenges like this also played a huge role in deciphering what works and when. There is never only one strategy that works, and choosing which approach works well for me was interesting but I use a a mixture of analytics, psychology and pattern recognition. Another theory that completely changed my outlook is Complex Adaptive Systems. There is also no substitute for reading, that is one of the few ways to acquire new information to turn into knowledge. I don't currently trade in my day job but will be making a career change soon that will see me more actively investing, I believe the saying is "watch this space".
Watch this space indeed. I'm sure many readers will be keen to invest with you if you were to join an investment house. In fact I'm going to send your details to a firm I know hoping for a huge finders fee!
The group contest ranked as follows:
3rd with an average worth of R1 254 460,40 was Die Gegradueerdes
2nd with an average worth of R1 271 857,87 was Thunder Buddies
1st with an average worth of R1 302 816,70 was g-fa
To prove that investing is tough, out of the 394 competitors (including ETFs), only 155 made a profit, but if you consider that inflation is at least 6%, only 50 people managed to beat it. This was a tough year for the market, as you can see by the returns on the ETFs.
Full results can be found by clicking here for individuals:
http://shareforum.co.za/competition/com_rankings.php?year=2016And here for groups:
http://www.shareforum.co.za/competition/com_groups.php?year=2016
