The Daily Pennsylvanian
According to a contest being held by TradingMarkets.com, MBA students may have new competition: Playboy bunnies.
The TradingMarkets/Playboy 2006 Stock Picking contest, which officially began on Jan. 3 and will continue through the end of the year, selects 10 female models from around the world who pick five stocks in which they would hypothetically invest.
Those stocks are then monitored by TradingMarkets.com, an online information source for stocks and trading. At the end of the contest, the model with the highest percentage gain for 2006 is the winner and selects a charity to receive a $50,000 donation.
But as it turns out, business students who are working to earn an MBA -- as are almost 1,700 at the Wharton School -- may better prepare themselves for a career in finance by investigating a career in modeling.
"Four of the 10 models are beating 11,705 out of the 11,739 equity mutual fund managers in the U.S.," according to Ashton Dorkins, editor-in-chief of TradingMarkets.com.
Dorkins said he uses Morningstar.com -- which provides personal financial advice -- to track how the top American investors are spending their money, then compares it to the bunnies' picks.
Wharton officials, unfazed by what these numbers may indicate, are taking the results lightly.
"It's an entertaining survey," said Thomas Caleel, director of MBA admissions and financial aid. "I love it."
But Dorkins said there is a serious angle to the contest.
"It shows that investment strategy is pretty random, that anyone can come along and outperform," Dorkins said. "A lot of MBA programs will teach you that anyway."
While Hanoch Papoushado, a second-year MBA student, agrees that "there is some element of luck" in good investments, he "wouldn't take these results seriously at all."
TradingMarkets.com also features biographies about the models, including the rationale behind their stock and charity choices.
Amy McCarthy, who is carrying the lead with a stock that is up 13.31 percent, said that she invested in Terax Energy because "girls got to have a lot of energy!"
McCarthy's selection of Sky Petroleum Inc. was based on her logic that "if the gas prices get any higher, we might have to go back to riding horses."
Playboy's Miss August 2004, also known as Pilar Lastra, picked Google, explaining that, if it "wasn't for people being able to Google me all the time, my mother would never be able to keep track of me."
Other analyses suggest that the models have a better chance at picking profitable stocks because they are more in touch with the economy through people not involved in business, as opposed to fund managers who are more focused on their own companies.
The contest falls in line with others aiming to provide entertainment while proving new investment strategies. The Wall Street Journal, for example, hosts an annual contest in which a blindfolded monkey throws darts at the Journal's financial page in order to select a profitable portfolio.
But according to Dorkins, most people don't take these types of initiatives too seriously.
"We haven't had any negative feedback," Dorkins added.
