- ContributedRoberts
IT'S ENOUGH to give financial brokers a breakdown.
Five-year-old Tia Roberts has emerged as the clear winner in an experiment to compare different ways of choosing the best shares to buy.
The youngster along with Christeen Skinner, a financial astrologer, and Mark Goodson, an independent analyst "invested" 5,000 pounds sterling in a fantasy portfolio one year ago.
Tia (pictured) from London not only outperformed her fellow experiment participants but even defied a 16 per cent drop in the FTSE 100 (the Financial Times index of the 100 top-performing companies on the London Stock Exchange) with her randomly selected choice of shares.
The experiment was organised by the British Association for the Advancement of Science as part of National Science Week, an initiative backed by the United Kingdom Government and that aims to celebrate science and its importance in our lives.
Christeen Skinner studied the movement of the planets to choose her portfolio. Mark Goodson used his years of investment expertise and computer analysis to pick his. And Tia just chose her shares at random. One year on - and at the start of National Science Week 2002 - the results are as follows: Tia Roberts: up 5.8 per cent. Christeen Skinner: down 6.2 per cent. Mark Goodson: down 46 per cent.
Richard Wiseman is a psychologist from the University of Hertfordshire, southern England, and devised the experiment. He said: "It's amazing to see that after a year of the experiment Tia's portfolio is still doing well. During an unstable year for the market, when the TSE 100 dropped 16 per cent, Tia's random selection has still managed to outperform the others."
Defending his loss, analyst Mark Goodson said: "I'm not surprised Tia is still out in front after a year. Short-term investing is little more than gambling and you look at different factors than you would if you were long-term investing."
Henk Potts, from Barclays Stock Brokers who carried out the financial analysis of the portfolios, said: "The portfolio of old economy stocks that Tia randomly selected have stood her in good stead in what has been one of the toughest years in the stock market's recent history. Her opponents' forays into the telecom sector proved to be disastrous. Tia did well to avoid this area."
Asked for her view on her stock success, Tia thought it was "wicked" that she had beaten the stock market. Taking time out from her homework, and using the same random selection process as before, she has chosen the following five stocks as tips for this year's investors: Cadbury Schweppes, Northern Rock, Prudential, Pearson, Shell Transport.
