Market Rotisserie

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If we traded just Procter & Gamble and Bristol Myers at Cramer Berkowitz, we could know them inside out. But we wouldn't make much, let alone beat the averages. All the action in this year's market has been in stocks of the moment, those newly minted dotcoms or dotcom-related issues that seem to soar 30 and 40 points at a clip. There's only one problem with owning them. Call us old-fashioned, but we like to know more about stocks than their symbols and past trajectories.

We like to know what the companies behind them do, what areas they are trying to dominate and what business cycles might hold them hostage. In short, we like to know as much about them as, say, the teams we pick each week in the pro-football Rotisserie League we fret so much about around the office.

So, in one of our wackier moments--racking our brains about how to force ourselves to learn these great new companies, with market capitalizations already north of $10 billion--we resorted to a Rotisserie League of our own, a stock Rotisserie League. In our league, which focuses on companies that help other companies mine the Internet (called business-to-business), we draft and play real-live stocks with a mythical million-dollar pool.

The results have been spectacular. My sparring partner, my associate Matt Jacobs, and I, forced to pick 10 "teams" each to compete in the B2B Rotisserie League, have crash-coursed the whole 1999 new-stock lineup. We make our mistakes with phony money and save the real deal for the portfolio. Our draft may have lacked the tension of the NFL's live ESPN version, but it turned up such gems as VerticalNet, VeriSign, Commerce One and Ariba, companies that until I had to lay out 750 Gs of Rotisserie money, I couldn't do much more than ogle from afar. And in the B2B league there's no team I have to lose money on every week, as I do with the Eagles, my hometown fave. I'm emotionally incapable of betting against them. I don't think I could have learned these companies fast enough without facing the prospect of looking stupid against my fellow coach. And if I hadn't, I would have missed a couple of 50-point moves in real life from application of my Rotisserie knowledge.

Of course, it helps that we picked the hottest sport in the stock market to create our league around. Both of our teams (see thestreet.com for the rosters) have had big moves since their inception a month ago. But I know we would have sat out most of the real action in the likes of CMGI and Internet Capital Group--two league phenoms--had my associate not taken them in the top rounds of our mock draft.

It's funny. I always tell people that if they would just spend the same amount of time analyzing the stock market that they do the sports pages, they could make a fortune picking stocks. Now, given the time I spent setting up my league--vs. the rigor of picking 14 teams in my Fantasy Football League this weekend--I have the proof. Just as in sports, youth matters. As of last Friday, my 23-year-old associate Matt is up 26.1% to my 19%, helped by a 50% jump in his Internet Capital Group. I'm being hurt by AskJeeves, down 17% since I picked it. Ah, but there is good news. In the real world we own them both. And Internet Capital Group has more than made up for the Jeeves shortfall.