Geoff Gannon February 2, 2006

On an Interesting Experiment

Today, I’d like to invite you to join me in an interesting experiment. To test the importance of focused investing and both its positive and negative effects, I’ve decided to set up five simulated funds with varying restrictions and see how they perform. There’s a site that allows you to do this sort of thing called Marketocracy. I can’t yet vouch for the service, but it’s free.

I’m more interested in testing my funds’ performance against each other than I am in testing their performance against the markets. The restrictions to be tested are:

1. A Home State Fund (only invests in companies headquartered in one’s home state – mine is NJ)

2. A Top 20 Ideas Fund (spreads assets evenly over one’s top 20 ideas)

3. A Top 100 Ideas Fund (spreads assets evenly over one’s top 100 ideas)

4. An Over 10b Fund (only invests in companies with market caps > $10 billion)

5. An Under 1b Fund (only invests in companies with market caps < $1 billion)

If you want to see examples of these funds, you can view my five creations: Jersey FundSniper FundShotgun FundGoliath Fund, and David Fund.

I hope to create five groups on Marketocracy that will allow us to track each type of fund and discuss the difficulties caused by these limitations. All funds should also meet Marketocracy’s compliance rules.

I hope some of you will join me in this experiment. We might learn something.

(I know there are readers outside the U.S., for you the Home State Fund will simply be a Home Country Fund. This isn’t a huge advantage, remember some U.S. readers could be from states like California – so, they’ll have a big economy to play in too.)

You can start by joining any or all of the first three clubs:

Home State Funds

Top 20 Ideas Funds

Top 100 Ideas Funds

(I will set the other two clubs up as soon as Marketocracy gives me permission to go beyond the three club limit).

You need to be invited to join these clubs. Anyone can get an invitation by sending an email to: [email protected] asking for an invite. All readers will be welcomed.

You can also request an invite from inside Marketocracy.

Please tell me what you think of this idea by commenting to this post.

Share: