synergize (97.00)

MSN CAPS Accuracy: Facts to Know

May 09, 2008 – Comments (1) | RELATED TICKERS: NVDA , XRIT , NM

I joined MSN CAPS last year. I added some picks but did not pay too much attention on my scores or rankings and how those scores and ratings were being calculated.

Lately I've been very active picking and closing stocks that I was able to reach the maximum of 200 and pretty much maintained close to that number. To my surprise it gave me the "Trader" lucky charm. What that means is 50% or more picks were opened and closed in last 60 days.

I've been doing very good with my scores but accuracy hurt my rating. At first, accuracy did not really  bother me because my thought is that in trading win/loss record is not as important as your profit/loss record. I mean I can have a win-loss record of 25/50 (33%) but with a profit/loss record of $50/%25 (50%). My profit-loss would still mean a net profit of $25. Win-loss cannot guarantee that you have that net profit.

In trying to compute accuracy percentage myself and clearly it wasn't close enough to my CAPS accuracy rating. That surprised me and I tried to research how CAPS computes the accuracy by going to the Player Rating Help section.

So just an FYI below are the important rules to know:

"...
To calculate accuracy we take the number of accurate picks divided by your total number of picks.

What constitutes an accurate pick depends upon the status of your pick.

Active picks with positive scores are accurate picks.
Active picks with negative scores are inaccurate picks.
Ended picks with scores of 5 or higher are accurate picks.
Ended picks with scores below 0 are inaccurate picks
Ended picks with scores between 0 and 5 do not affect your accuracy rating.
...
"

Now I know and this should help me improve my accuracy rating in the future.