A woman who has never bought a stock in her life appears to have bested the financial pros in CNBC's stockpicking contest.It would be a fairy-tale ending for a contest wrought with drama and controversy. Mary Sue Williams, 46, has been a waitress for 20 years and was a welder before that. She has never bought or sold a real stock in her life. In fact, she says she never even paid much attention to the markets before signing up for the challenge. Yet Williams has already bested thousands of financial professionals who entered the contest with Ivy League degrees and complex trading models. "Part of this was luck," she says. "A lot of it was a gut feeling, some eenie-meenie-minie-moe, and common sense."
A victory for the little guy? Well, yes. But it's also sign of what Paul Auster once called the "music of chance." Picking stocks is about luck as much as strategy. In a field of 375,000 contestants with 1.6 million portfolios, someone has to finish first. Lubos Pastor, a finance professor at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business, says that in a contest like CNBC's, with a short time horizon, there's no reason that the pros should have any advantage over novices armed with smart strategies and good fortune. "If you have 1,000 people flip a coin 10 times, one of them is going to get 10 heads in a row," he says.
via BusinessWeek
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