And ... we have another winner!
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Today's closing prices for a barrel of oil and an ounce of gold were $79.36 and $1097, respectively, making BN the winner of the seventh "Guess the Price of Oil and Gold" contest by a narrow margin over Scepticus and RP who were in fourth and first place last week.
[Note: The scale in the chart above paints a somewhat misleading picture of the final results below as horizontal displacements in percentage terms are smaller than they appear.]
It was a fairly exciting contest in the final days as BN came out of nowhere, first appearing in the top ten last week in sixth place and then vaulting to the top spot after the oil price continued to rise and the gold price continued to fall. The complete top ten is shown below, KC moving up from fifth to fourth and oilcan dropping from second to fifth.
Yours truly finished a disappointing 28th after making a brief appearance in the top ten a few weeks ago, the first such appearance in a year or so after a string of top ten finishes.
Dan, you finished in a tie for 14th.
For full details about the contest, see this summary post from last month.
Recall that BN will now receive a free one year subscription to Iacono Research where the model portfolio will end the year up somewhere between 15 and 16 percent, better than the average hedge fund in 2009 but well back of the major stock indexes.
Does anyone know anyone who's been fully invested in stocks this year?
Thanks to all who participated - there will be a mid-year contest next year which should kick off sometime in April.
Congratulations BN - please send me mail so I can get an account set up for you.
To learn more about investing in natural resources using commonly traded ETFs,
stocks, and mutual funds, see this description at Iacono Research.
For subscription details, click here.







![[Most Recent Quotes from www.kitco.com]](http://kitconet.com/charts/metals/gold/t24_au_en_usoz_2.gif)
![[Most Recent USD from www.kitco.com]](http://www.weblinks247.com/indexes/idx24_usd_en_2.gif)
In a holiday-shortened week, the price of crude oil finished at $78.05 a barrel and gold closed on Thursday at $1,104 an ounce, putting the current prices just below the average contest guesses of $80 for oil and $1,144 for gold.
RP moved up from third place over the last week and APB, last week's leader, dropped seven places while GW, in second place last week, fell out of the top ten completely.
The price of crude oil surged from just under $70 a barrel to over $73 while gold declined modestly to $1,112.40 an ounce, though you wouldn't know that by looking at Wednesday and Thursday's price action where the metal plunged almost $50 in less than 24 hours.
Yours truly apparently had his 15 minutes last week with an appearance in position 7 but tumbled about 10 places due to the rising oil price.
After declining for the last three weeks, the price of crude oil, at $69.87 a barrel, is now well below the average contest guess of $70 a barrel. Similarly, gold's two week downturn leaves it at $1,115 an ounce today, well shy of the average guess of $1,144 an ounce.
Yours truly vaulted from out of nowhere to position number 7, a big improvement over the last two contests where the top ten was never seen after doing quite well the previous three or four times. All things considered, I wouldn't mind being out of the top ten with those guesses - preferably a position on the chart well left of the yellow diamond indicating today's prices.
That's Ted S. snuggled up close to the recently added yellow diamond representing the closing prices for oil and gold yesterday - $75.47 a barrel and $1,161 an ounce, respectively.
At this point, CS, RA, and frequent commenter Ted S. are in the top three spots, each with combined errors of less than four percent, but a lot can happen over the next five weeks. Note that CS's guesses are to the left and up a bit from the 11/28 yellow diamond reflecting the current $1,167 gold price and $76 price for a barrel of crude oil. Since the x- and y-scales are different in magnitude, vertical and horizontal distances are not equal in percentage terms.
There were a total of 70 entries with average guesses of $80 for a barrel of oil and $1,144 for an ounce of gold (this compares to average guesses of $81 and $918 for the last contest).
From the
From Yahoo! Mail:
The graphic at the top of this post will be updated every week, usually on Fridays, until the contest concludes on New Years Eve.
A free one-year subscription to the investment website
Since the guessing began a week ago, that yellow diamond indicating the current price of oil and gold has moved a full $40 to the right.
In graphic form, you can see that, despite a number of bold calls for gold, there wasn't a whole lot of movement while the contest was underway.
This time around the rules are the same as they've always been - the contest is based on the combined percentage differences between the guessed values and the closing prices on December 31st, 2009 using the near-month (February) Nymex futures contract for WTI crude oil and the COMEX closing bid price for gold bullion.
That was quite a move to the right over the last few months and, looking back over the last few years, with the obvious exception of the late-2008 meltdown in the price of oil, the overall direction has been decidedly up and to the right.
A handful of economic reports created some very positive sounding headlines, thus adding to the renewed optimism:
While I'm not expecting another late-2008 stock market melt-down this year (although anything is possible), we are about to enter what has been, historically, the worst time of the year for equity markets and neither the economy or company earnings are anywhere near as good as most investors would like to think that they are. Moreover, there are a host of negative factors that, at some point, will impact investors' attitudes.
The labor market woes continued last week as state unemployment rose across the country, the jobless rate in Michigan now at 15.2 percent, the first time in 25 years that a state has recorded an unemployment rate in excess of 15 percent. The conventional thinking that the labor market is a lagging indicator will soon to be put to the test as the employment situation shows no signs of improving, though it continues to worsen at a slower pace.
