Tuesday, August 11, 1998

A Foolish Victory
By Jack Cooper (JCooper302)

As 1997 wound down our local paper, the Wilmington (DE) News-Journal was taking entries for an annual stock market game. As a recent convert to Fooldom, I entered all family members in this contest, which took a hypothetical $10,000 and invested evenly in five stocks. We followed our progress during the contest period that ran from January 1, 1998 through June 30, 1998.

We kind of lost track of our progress during a family vacation to Florida and we were surprised to see a big article in a Sunday paper announcing the winners. Low and behold, our eleven-year-old son Peter's entry finished 9th out of about 2,400 entrants. We had used a combination of Dow Dividend selections and some stocks from the Fool Portfolio. Peter's stock picks were America Online, Amazon.com, Lucent Technologies, AT&T and Chevron. Peter thought it was cool to see his name in the paper. The article highlighted a young girl who had finished in first place and won $1,000, with something like a 190% return just by picking names she liked from the stock exchange listings.

We were totally surprised when a representative of the News-Journal called yesterday with the news that they had made some errors in calculating the returns and Peter was actually the winner! Apparently some stock splits and other changes had not been considered when figuring the winners. Well, the paper's photographer just left after taking a picture of the real winner and the paper is going to run an article announcing their mistake.

The bottom line is that, with basic Motley Fool ideas, a novice who didn't know much about the stock market prior to November 1997 helped his son beat a whole bunch of people who thought they could pick fast-growing stocks. Let me just say that my wife, who had a lot of doubts about investing in stocks, now has a lot more respect for Motley Fools. Now maybe she will stop complaining about all the time I spend online soaking up Foolish advice. By the way, Peter is eagerly awaiting the $1,000 check and I'm trying to convince him to invest it Foolish Four stocks so he can reap the rewards from years and years of Foolish investment growth!

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