McWilliams takes 3rd place in stock contest

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Brad McWilliams is no yahoo. His pick of the Internet firm Yahoo! was part of a winning strategy in a national stock-selection contest. |ret||ret||tab|

McWilliams, vice president of investments at AG Edwards & Sons Inc. in Springfield, placed third out of 20 stock-picking experts in the 1999 Computer Reseller News magazine mutual fund contest. |ret||ret||tab|

CRN is a national magazine based in Jericho, N.Y., that focuses on the high-tech industry. McWilliams said he was invited to participate in the contest by a CRN executive after being in contact with him about an unrelated matter in 1998. CRN announced the results of the contest, which ran from January to December 1999, in the January 2000 issue. McWilliams finished the contest with returns of 155 percent. The contestants were each given a hypothetical $100,000 to invest in January 1999.|ret||ret||tab|

"I felt privileged to be invited to be in it in the first place ... a lot of people that are in the contest have been guests on the PBS show "Wall Street Week," write investment research letters and head investment research departments in different brokerage firms, so I think I was in some pretty good company," McWilliams said. |ret||ret||tab|

McWilliams said his competition was 13 other investment consultants, five channel executives or high-tech industry leaders who competed under pseudonyms such as Competitor, Raging Elk and Black Knight, and several CRN executives who competed together as the CRN Grab Bag. McWilliams was in the lead for the first few months of the contest and didn't fall from the top three during the year. |ret||ret||tab|

"In the first quarter, I was in first place probably 90 percent of the time. As the year went on, I bounced back and forth between second and third place," McWilliams said. |ret||ret||tab|

McWilliams said the CRN executives asked the contestants to pick six stocks, two of which were to be held for the entire year, two of which were to be held for six months and could be traded in, and two that could be traded each 90 days. Potentially, McWilliams said, the contestants could hold 14 different stocks throughout the year, if they took the opportunities to trade in at the three- and six-month hash marks. |ret||ret||tab|

"The reason they do it that way, and stretch it out over a year, is that they don't want you to just get lucky," McWilliams said. |ret||ret||tab|

McWilliams said he used a computer program he developed himself in cooperation with Investor's Business Daily newspaper, and using the fundamental research service Zack's Investment Research, to pick the stocks for the contest. His picks for the 1999 contest: GeoCities, Yahoo Inc., Cisco, 3Com, Microsoft and Lucent. |ret||ret||tab|

"At any given time, out of 6,500 stocks, I'll come up with five or so stocks. Then I'll look at them from the technical standpoint," McWilliams said. |ret||ret||tab|

McWilliams said if contestants do well in the mutual fund contest, CRN asks them to participate again the following year. CRN invited him in January to compete in the 2000 contest, which he accepted. CRN has not yet announced the contestants or their stock picks for 2000. |bold_on||bold_on||ret||ret||tab|

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