And ... we have another winner!

Today's closing prices for a barrel of oil and an ounce of gold were $69.89 and $926.60, respectively, making ycching the winner of the sixth "Guess the Price of Oil and Gold" contest by a narrow margin over jlowey and Bruno T.
In first place for the last three weeks as prices moved very little, ycching wins a free one-year subscription to the companion investment website Iacono Research.

Sadly, the Inscrutible Chicken came up short in his late move toward the top, finishing fourth.

Better cluck next time...

A list of the top-ten finishers (out of over 80 guesses) is shown below. Interestingly, the type of calculation makes a difference for the second and third place finishers, but not for the top spot (i.e., the "Diff. Alt." column is a square root of the sum of the squares calculation versus the simple sum of the percent differences in the "Total Diff." column).
The average guesses of $59 for a barrel of oil and $936 for an ounce of gold were off by a total of almost 16 percent and, during the almost two months that the contest went on, the oil price rose from just under $60 a barrel to almost $70 and the gold price moved up about five dollars from around $920 an ounce.

Ycching, please send me your email address and I'll get an account set up for you.

Thanks to all who participated.

There should be a much more exciting year-end edition of this contest set to kick off sometime in October. With the notable exception of 2008, as the oil price was heading toward almost $150 a barrel in June, the year-end editions have always been much more exciting than the mid-year editions due to generally larger price moves.

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.