Thanks for a great board idea Dubi, I will follow this one with interest.
I actually was about to ask you which of your current investments you were most confident about (as much as is possible of course), which represented the greatest gain potential, and time frames. My impression btw, is that EVSNF is perhaps your favorite right now (in combined terms of confidence, % gain, and time frame)?
A few suggestions for this new board, feel free to use, modify, or discard them:
1. Add today's price to stock picks, and add a % gain when listing a projected future price - example below.
2. Define a "template" to use for submitting price targets. E.g. in the title of a post predicting COR to hit $4 by 12/31/2005, a suggested post title format would be: COR +69% 12/31/2005 ($4.00) 10/01/2005 ($2.37)
At a glance, without needing to open the post, it shows stock, the % gain predicted and the date it is predicted by, the date the prediction was made, and the price at which it was made.
Then inside the post provide supporting text. Links to other boards are certainly acceptable, no need to retype what has already been written.
3. Ideally only list one stock per post.
4. As much as possible, I would hope the board would discourage price predictions without supporting text. It does little good for me to write a post saying "Look for COR up big next week". I'd certainly not be inclined to act on any post that didn't provide some rationalization/explanation. Having to provide a reasonable explanation of a prediction would help cut down on junk posts and hidden agendas. Even a short explanation is fine, but something tangible. I'd say even a "gut feel" is acceptable if it is labeled as such.
5. For posters that contribute regularly and keep their predictions updated, perhaps an keep an index table in the board's iHub box with a link to each stock and it's most current prediction(s).
6. Price predictions on the same stock by more than one person would be of great interest I think.
7. I'm tossing this one out as food for thought: it would be beneficial over time to have some sort of "report card" keeping track of each poster's "success" rate with predictions. I know there are lots of difficulties with this, not the least being that no one (I'm guessing) wants to devote time to keeping track of predictions, so I'm just tossing this out as an idea to kick around and see what might come of it. Another example of the difficulties of rating success would be if I predict COR at $4 by 12/31 and it is only at $3.50 on that date, that's still a very nice gain, just not as high as I predicted. Or if COR is still flat at the end of the year, but hits $4 in Feb 2006, then my target was right, just not the time frame. Again, just thinking out loud.
Just a few ideas, I'll list one of my picks in the next post to show what some of my suggestions would look like.
Thanks again for the great board idea... Aiming4.