Nabloid Solar #1 on Marketocracy for 1 Year!

April 17th, 2008

For those of you that don’t know, Marketocracy is basically a website that allows you to run your own mutual fund.  You are given $1 million to start with.  You are required to follow ALL the diversification laws that the mutual fund industry is subject to and it tracks your performance against the performance of other members.  There is even a REAL mutual fund that uses information gathered from the top 100 performing mutual funds.  Enough about the site though.

Amazingly, out of 55,000 stock pickers and 65,000 mutual funds, guess who is ranked #1 for the last year?  Me.  That’s right.  Nabloid Solar pulled in an astounding 112.86%.  In fact, my solar mutual fund was once MUCH higher (2x what it’s worth now) and so my gain was essentially twice that (but I lost it, so can’t count it) - but at one point I was doing FAR better than I am now.   Right now my net asset value is 16.44, but it was almost 25 near the start of the 2008.  It’s definitely taken a hit in just a few short months.

What was my method?  I wish I could tell you that I’m the best investor out of the bunch, or that I did more research than the rest, or that I actually invested in these companies and made a killing.  To tell the truth, I was just using Nabloid Solar to keep track of a basket of stocks that I was interested in.  I didn’t time the market and I didn’t pick stocks after an in-depth analysis.  I just picked a group of 16 solar stocks that show some promise and decided to sit back and see what happens. 

I’m not against investing in oil and gas (I’m actually FOR it), but I do in my heart believe that ultimately (it may take some time!) we will make a switch from oil to solar.  It won’t be quick, and it won’t be all at once.  I do think we need some better battery technology (perhaps ultracapacitators or nanocapacitators?) so electric vehicles become a true competitor (they do quite well but the range is a bit weak).  Don’t get me wrong, there is a TON of money to be made in oil.  But I think solar is the future and I have to keep an eye to the future. 

So perhaps, since we don’t know what particular stock will soar, investing in a solar ETF is a good idea as this little experiment just showed?  I need to do some more research on particular stocks.  I see the benefits of ETF’s but I still prefer to weed out the weak stocks and invest directly.  To each his own.

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