Chimpcontest update: Ah, the irony!
August 28, 2011
– Comments (18) |
RELATED TICKERS: VICL
, CIGX
A year ago I was just another pawn in the Chimp's evil games, submitting my contest entries and watching them go nowhere. I liked the contest concept but felt it could benefit from some twists to make it more than just a lottery game. I volunteered to split the payout with the Chimp and developed a contest with a requirement for a pitch in the form of a haiku, an extremely simple 17 syllable poem. We added a judging system in which the contestants themselves could affect the odds of other contestants winning the contest. I hoped that the contest would bring out the latent creativity among CAPS players, and stimulate more pitch writing. I expected a voracious response leading to more contests with limericks and song parodies, ultimately leading to books, movie deals, and of course world domination.
What happened instead was that only about 70 haikus were submitted to fill the 100 available contestant slots, and a large proportion of those were obviously half-hearted efforts with little thought put into them. Apparently $500 isn't enough of a stimulus to churn out seventeen syllables for 1930 of the 2000 or so active players here. Perhaps the economy isn't as bad as people think. Many of those who submitted haikus couldn't be bothered to rate others, so that most haikus had to be scored short of five votes. If anything, pitch-writing has become more sporadic and marginal since the contest began. The Chimp has given up on human civilization as a result and has retreated deep into the primordial forest from which he sprang.
I was slightly gratified that the contest winner chose Vical, a biotech stock that I strongly recommended at the time the contest began. But BlackSwanCapital has apparently moved on to other projects, so I'm stuck looking for another way to close the contest. The second place finisher was MotleyAnimal who entered another biotech, Star Scientific. Wow, one of my most detested stocks, and the subject of a feud with Pumper-in-Chief James Altucher. How ironic. And even more ironically, the long-expected implosion occurred exacly one week after the close of the contest and Star would be in the middle of the pack if the contest ended today. In MotleyAnimal's favor, however, he closed his own pick on Star three days before it tanked for a strong positive score.
So I've decided the fairest way for me to conclude the contest is to pay out $250 to MotleyAnimal for his default victory and leave future contests to jungle creatures with more realistic expectations. MotleyAnimal, congratulations and please provide contact information in a reply to your CIGX pitch.
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