BusinessWeek: The Million Dollar Waitress

Via Reason's Hit and Run blog:

It's not quite the random walk hypothesis in action, but it looks like the winner of a stockpicking contest sponsored by CNBC might be a waitress who "never even paid much attention to the markets before signing up for the challenge."

Business Week reports that Mary Sue Williams "of the tiny Appalachia town of St. Clairsville, Ohio" is showing a 29 percent return so far in the two-week contest.

And, from the linked BusinessWeek article:

Williams, 46, has been a waitress for 20 years and was a welder before that. She has never bought or sold a real stock in her life. In fact, she says she never even paid much attention to the markets before signing up for the challenge. Yet Williams has already bested thousands of financial professionals who entered the contest with Ivy League degrees and complex trading models. "Part of this was luck," she says. "A lot of it was a gut feeling, some eenie-meenie-minie-moe, and common sense."

There's an interesting side note in the article (and on the CNBC contest page) about people who have been trying to exploit weaknesses in the game to artificially boost their gains and win.

BusinessWeek: The Million-Dollar Waitress

Related: CNBC's Million-Dollar Challenge