Oil and gold contest - only one week left!

Just one week remains before entries close for the latest installment of the semi-annual contest "Guess the mid-year price of oil and gold". Not much has changed since last week when this contest was first announced - oil is up a few dollars, gold is about even.
As always, the winner will receive a free one-year subscription to the companion investment website Iacono Research where the model portfolio had a year-to-date gain of just over 9 percent, as of yesterday's close. It's down a bit up a little more today.

Recall that the last contest, concluded a few months ago on December 31st, was won by Dorcas' Daddy after prices plummeted from their summer highs and bold calls of $40 oil and $680 gold bested all others as shown below.
Yours truly followed 10th and 4th place finishes in the two prior contests with somewhere around 70th place, so I'll be looking to improve on that this time around.

[Note: If I do win - which may just happen someday - it will result in bragging rights only and the second place finisher will receive the first place prize.]

The results of the last contest are shown in graphical form below.
Don't let that scale fool you - the vertical axis varies +/-66 percent around the center point while the horizontal axis varies by just +/-40 percent, meaning that, vertical distance is much greater than horizontal distance in percentage terms.

That's third place finisher Mathlete all the way out to the right at $45 oil and $1,200 gold.

Unfortunately, once oil got to below $50 a barrel, it wasn't much of a contest and the fact that crude oil traded at about $80 a barrel when the guesses were made during the financial market meltdown last October provided little solace for most.

After entries close one week from today, a new chart like the one above will be populated with all the guesses that have been received and it will be updated every other Friday until the last few weeks of June when the tension will really mount and weekly updates will be provided!

No, the tension doesn't really mount.

Well, maybe a little.

The contest is based on the combined percentage differences between the guessed values and the closing prices on June 30th, 2009 using the near-month (August) Nymex futures contract for WTI crude oil and the COMEX closing bid price for gold bullion.

Entries may be made either by posting them in the comments section of this post or sending mail to either tim-at-iaconoresearch.com or tliacono-at-yahoo.com. All entries must be received no later than May 12th, one week from today - there will be at least one more notice such as this one as a reminder and current subscribers to the investment site can win a free one-year extension to their existing subscription.

The winner will be announced on June 30th - good luck to all!

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To learn more about investing in natural resources using commonly traded ETFs, stocks, and mutual funds, see this description at Iacono Research. Or, sign up for a free trial.