#2 tries harder

Marketocracy is a website set up for the purpose of
identifying the top amateur stock pickers and traders in the country
and making their picks and insights available for professionals.
Anyone can join, at the outset you will be alloted $1 M in virtual money,
which you can use to buy and sell stocks.
Results are tabulated with maybe an hour's delay over real-time prices.
In about ten years they have attracted some 80,000 members.
Every quarter the site publishes rankings of its members.

The results for the past quarter, ending Dec. 31, 2008, were posted today.
I made #2.

Here's a cut-and-paste from their site of my full results since I joined:
Oct 17, 2008; Nov 14, 2008;


ALL RANKINGS FOR YOUR FUND
Date 1 Month 3 Months 6 Months 1 Year 2 Year 3 Year 4 Year
Sep 30, 2005 64.7% 88.7% Q:
Dec 31, 2005 88.9% 67.6% 89.6% Q:
Mar 31, 2006 52.4% 75.1% Q: 79.9% Q:
Jun 30, 2006 52.6% 94.0% Q: 92.6% Q: 94.8% Q:
Sep 29, 2006 2.3% 60.5% 92.2% Q: 94.9% Q:
Dec 29, 2006 56.5% 96.6% Q: 96.2% Q: 98.4% Q:
Mar 30, 2007 65.6% 40.0% 89.8% Q: 97.2% Q:
Jun 29, 2007 62.1% 88.1% Q: 77.4% Q: 95.7% Q: 98.0% Q:
Sep 28, 2007 8.7% 48.0% 75.9% Q: 87.4% Q: 95.6% Q:
Dec 31, 2007 93.6% 96.5% Q: 88.4% Q: 88.9% Q: 97.8% Q:
Mar 31, 2008 97.5% 99.3% Q: #71 T: 99.1% Q: #56 T:
Jun 30, 2008 97.2% 94.5% Q: 99.2% Q: 99.0% Q: #87 T: #93 T:
Sep 30, 2008 97.4% 40.6% 94.5% Q: #31 T: #16 T: #10 T:
Dec 31, 2008 40.7% #54 T: 98.2% Q: #15 T: #7 T: #2 T:


Lemme see if I can copy in my chart:



I suppose this is a skill that I could market.
I just seem to be too shy about it, not to mention
that the kinds of people most likely to want to avail themselves of my skills
are not the kinds of people that I most commonly gravitate towards.

Mainly its just something for me to enjoy about myself, quietly.

New Year Predictions

I wrote this comment to a Washington Post opinion piece:

It would be typical of americans to think that pop culture and cheap art hold any insights into the future.
Because I have been right, time and time and time again, when nearly everyone else has been wrong, I offer my opinions.

First of all, whether because of mankind's waste or just because of natural cycles, the next ice age is wgathering strength. Within the next generation, large areas of the United States and Northern Europe will become uninhabitable, while the Sahara and the Middle East will become green and fertile again. This event alone would cause major shifts in power balances in world politics. But there's more:

The past year's financial crisis and credit crunch were only the opening salvo of economic distress for the Caucasians in control. The debt of the United States has grown beyond imagining. It deserves junk status, it deserves default, and in time people will figure that out. The United States has lost super-power status and will no longer be a major factor in world events.

Also, peak oil is not a theory, it is a reality -- the peak production occurred in 2005. The decline is inevitable and will happen faster than anyone expects. Also, politicians and science fiction writers notwithstanding, there is no other energy source on the planet to replace it. None. For that reason, all technology and civilization have begun an inevitable, permanent decline.

The good news is that there is hope. High technology led to arrogance and greed, to genocide and willful abuse of simple human beings, unprecedented in history, and will never happen again. Simple lives, subsistence living, and taking care of each other whenever possible, will gradually come into preeminence as all this bovine feces falls away. Those of us who survive will be happy.