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If you had £100,000 to invest = a real game is on

Posted: November 24th, 2020, 1:09 pm
by Pipsmum
There is a slight catch in that you have to sign up for three months of the Telegraph for £3 but then you can have a pretend £100k to play with, and a real £10k cash prize for the cleverest investor.

Just a bit of fun....

telegraph.co.uk/fantasy-fund

Lets have a Lemon win it. If it's you, and you entered because of me... then remember me in your will. Lol.

Re: If you had £100,000 to invest = a real game is on

Posted: November 25th, 2020, 8:47 am
by Pipsmum
I didn't manage to enter until day 2 but was placed no 1194 of 4052 entrants yesterday so very happy with that early position. JD sports doing a dive didn't help much. It's teaching me quite a lot at the same time because their whole site is actually very informative.

Turns out they do weekly £100 prize too. What fun.

It's like a three month snail race. Anyone can win it if they put their snails in the right place and the wind blows in the right direction.

Re: If you had £100,000 to invest = a real game is on

Posted: November 25th, 2020, 9:25 am
by AleisterCrowley
I'm guessing the best tactic is to go for a selection of really wild bets - rather than behave like a sensible 'real life' investor.
If you 'buy' the usual stalwarts you'll only every be in the middle of the pack

Re: If you had £100,000 to invest = a real game is on

Posted: November 25th, 2020, 2:21 pm
by bungeejumper
Can you short bitcoin?

BJ

Re: If you had £100,000 to invest = a real game is on

Posted: November 26th, 2020, 9:57 am
by Pipsmum
bungeejumper wrote:Can you short bitcoin?

BJ


That'd beat the lot

Re: If you had £100,000 to invest = a real game is on

Posted: November 26th, 2020, 3:09 pm
by gryffron
Moderator Message:
Topic moved as it is far too sensible for LoOTP.
Wasn't really sure where to put it. Hopefully it will find a wider audience here.
Gryffron

Re: If you had £100,000 to invest = a real game is on

Posted: November 26th, 2020, 4:07 pm
by AleisterCrowley
You can short Bitcoin in real life I assume ? - IG Index perhaps, if you're that keen BJ

Re: If you had £100,000 to invest = a real game is on

Posted: November 26th, 2020, 5:28 pm
by Pipsmum
AleisterCrowley wrote:I'm guessing the best tactic is to go for a selection of really wild bets - rather than behave like a sensible 'real life' investor.
If you 'buy' the usual stalwarts you'll only every be in the middle of the pack


It's quite hard to be very wild on the FTSE350 at the mo.... Almost better off with a pin and the heat map. My great grandmother always used her hatpin to bet on the grand national once a year and she nearly always won something.

Re: If you had £100,000 to invest = a real game is on

Posted: November 26th, 2020, 7:58 pm
by AleisterCrowley
Small biotech, and cobalt miners. Possibly not oilies

Re: If you had £100,000 to invest = a real game is on

Posted: November 26th, 2020, 8:05 pm
by Mike4
bungeejumper wrote:Can you short bitcoin?

BJ


The market can stay irrational for longer than you can stay solvent.... as some well-respected geezer once said.

Re: If you had £100,000 to invest = a real game is on

Posted: November 26th, 2020, 11:14 pm
by bungeejumper
Mike4 wrote:
bungeejumper wrote:Can you short bitcoin?

The market can stay irrational for longer than you can stay solvent.... as some well-respected geezer once said.

Yeah, well maybe I wasn't being entirely serious. :lol: And anyway, crypto isn't an investment, it's a bet. So shorting a crypto would be betting on a bet.

Might still make sense for this competition, though. I mean, given that the worst that can happen is that you lose a completely notional £100,000 that's cost you nothing, while at best you might get ten thousand real smackers. I'd take those odds. :)

BJ

Re: If you had £100,000 to invest = a real game is on

Posted: December 15th, 2020, 8:56 am
by Pipsmum
Are any lemons playing this? There are 5084 players so far. That's pretty good odds for a 10k prize. Better than the lottery.

Re: If you had £100,000 to invest = a real game is on

Posted: December 15th, 2020, 6:21 pm
by OldPlodder
I wonder if Jayesh Manek has entered!

Plodder

Re: If you had £100,000 to invest = a real game is on

Posted: December 16th, 2020, 4:20 pm
by bungeejumper
OldPlodder wrote:I wonder if Jayesh Manek has entered!

Wow, that takes me back a fair way. Didn't he start a fund on the basis of his two competition successes? And didn't it crash and burn?

Oh yes, it did, although it took nearly 20 years to hit the scenery for the last time. https://portfolio-adviser.com/uks-worst ... s-up-shop/
While the sector has on average produced total returns of 296% over the last 20 years in sterling terms, the Manek Growth fund is down -53.18%, according to FE.

And across all IA categories on a 17-year view, his Manek Growth fund was the weakest performing fund, delivering returns of -73.1%, data from Thomson Reuters Lipper shows, making Manek the worst manager in the country during one of the longest bull runs in history.


Thanks for the chuckle.

BJ

Re: If you had £100,000 to invest = a real game is on

Posted: December 16th, 2020, 5:54 pm
by dealtn
bungeejumper wrote:
OldPlodder wrote:I wonder if Jayesh Manek has entered!

Wow, that takes me back a fair way. Didn't he start a fund on the basis of his two competition successes? And didn't it crash and burn?

Oh yes, it did, although it took nearly 20 years to hit the scenery for the last time. https://portfolio-adviser.com/uks-worst ... s-up-shop/
While the sector has on average produced total returns of 296% over the last 20 years in sterling terms, the Manek Growth fund is down -53.18%, according to FE.

And across all IA categories on a 17-year view, his Manek Growth fund was the weakest performing fund, delivering returns of -73.1%, data from Thomson Reuters Lipper shows, making Manek the worst manager in the country during one of the longest bull runs in history.


Thanks for the chuckle.

BJ


That's a shocking return. Does anyone know the cause of such a disastrous outcome? I can only imagine some specific unsuccessful niche, huge concentration, or a tremendous dollop of bad luck.

Re: If you had £100,000 to invest = a real game is on

Posted: December 16th, 2020, 6:38 pm
by bungeejumper
dealtn wrote:That's a shocking return. Does anyone know the cause of such a disastrous outcome? I can only imagine some specific unsuccessful niche, huge concentration, or a tremendous dollop of bad luck.

If I recall correctly, Manek was a shopkeeper, a small-town pharmacist I think. And a hobbyist who had the misfortune to hit the equivalent of the Christmas rollover jackpot two years on a row. At which point, I suppose, investors may have imagined that they'd found a natural, unschooled talent who would trounce the professionals.

Well, in fairness, it was 1997, the era of irrational exuberance, when half the world was turning on to equity investment because it seemed like a one-way bet. Also, in fairness, Manek may indeed have had a stock-picking talent, but the thing that we so easily forget is that running a £300 million fund is a bit different from winning at Monopoly with your own money.

I am no slouch at picking winners myself - although I'm less good at picking the time to sell them :( - and I've broadly quadrupled my personal portfolio in twenty years. But I once had a great conversation with a wealth manager who put me in my place. He said that, once you've got other people's money in your control, the familiar temptation to back your own hunches suddenly becomes a rather frightening and burdensome responsibility - and unless you have an absolutely iron discipline you'd almost certainly buckle under the pressure and screw it up.

Woodford has recently taught us where hubris can get you once you get a run of bad luck and your bets start to go bad on you. You can fall over pretty quickly. The wonder of it, in Manek's case, was that so many investors stayed with him until the bitter end. Perhaps they only had negligibly small stakes, but there were vast numbers of them?

BJ

Re: If you had £100,000 to invest = a real game is on

Posted: December 16th, 2020, 8:33 pm
by AleisterCrowley
Fantasy investing and real investing require two totally different approaches (he says, stating the bleedin' obvious)
The only way to win things like this is to make big bets on wild outsiders. No downside , potential massive upside
Try that in the real world and 99% of the time you'll end up broke

You need to invest in solid reliable stalwarts like ..erm, Carillion and Centrica... two of my not so good picks

Re: If you had £100,000 to invest = a real game is on

Posted: December 17th, 2020, 8:21 am
by bungeejumper
AleisterCrowley wrote:You need to invest in solid reliable stalwarts like ..erm, Carillion and Centrica... two of my not so good picks

You also need to feel comfortable going heavily into cash, sometimes for six or twelve months, if the wind smells really bad. Something which most fund managers just don't have the mandate to do. Worked nicely for some of us in 2008, anyway. ;)

BJ

Re: If you had £100,000 to invest = a real game is on

Posted: December 17th, 2020, 9:19 am
by AleisterCrowley
Buy low, sell high. Good trick if you can do it consistently :)

Re: If you had £100,000 to invest = a real game is on

Posted: January 22nd, 2021, 2:19 pm
by Pipsmum
I was doing ok till the last rebalancing....hmmmm.

My best score was 161 and now back down to 534. Still quite pleased with that, but not enough yet to get anywhere near the current winners unless a really lucky selection of strong sails catch the wind right at the end......

There are currently 6297 entries so still pretty good odds.

I think TODAY IS THE LAST ENTRY DAY for the grand prize. The marks are judged on Feb 19th.