Morning:
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Who is better at picking shares in the midst of a major recession a highly trained, media-friendly stockbroker, or the office cat?
It turns out it's the cat, though Jeremy Batstone-Carr of Charles Stanley didn't do too badly either.
Back in November, I argued that the stock market was a place to avoid for at least the next six months. The banking crisis was at its peak and new nasties were emerging daily from previously solid-looking companies.
Anyone who claimed they could nimbly trot their way through this mess was fibbing, I reckoned. Sometimes, do nothing is the best advice but it's a route the City never advocates (can't think why).
Charles Stanley, game chaps that they are, reckoned they could pick five stocks that were near recession-proof, where investors' capital would be protected and the odd dividend might come along.
My choice at this point would have been to stick your cash under the mattress or in a building society account Birmingham Midshires was then offering a six-month bond paying 6.85%.
For the sake of fun, the office cat also picked five shares by pawing his way around a page of the FT, and we picked five of our own offered with extremely low levels of conviction.
How did we get on? Well, the stockbroking moggy won and starts next week as head of UK equities at Merrill Lynch (he's too good for them, actually.)
The building society account earned a perfectly solid 3.4%, and the mattress held firm less 50p to cover the bucket of sand needed in case of fire (surely the cheapest fund management fee in history).
As for our tips (okay, mine) they rather show that newspapers shouldn't be in the business of giving share tips in the first place. They performed worse than the mattress, worse than the market, worse even than Merrill Lynch.
Over the course of the six months, the real competition was only ever between the Bat, the cat and the mat. Early on, it really did look like the mattress would prove to be the soundest bet as crisis followed crisis.
So what did we learn?
For one, we learned that stockbrokers can sometimes genuinely add value, something I have tended to dispute, though Charles Stanley's returns would be less once you take out the fees they would have charged.
Second, the stock market remains such a wild place that stocks chosen entirely at random are likely to do as well as the most well-reasoned selections.
This means that a lot of the research that floods out of City stockbroking houses is much less valuable than the authors make it sound. The stockbroking industry tends to have an excuse for everything, most typically that its predictions were wrong because of things that it could not have foreseen. Exactly, you might say.
As for the professional equity analyst, he sort of made his point he protected capital and he did better than my low-risk advice.
Under the original terms of the competition, he was supposed to forfeit one of his surnames if he lost to the cat.
But he was a good sport, taking considerable abuse along the way with good grace. So instead we'll raise a (small) glass to the stockbroker who remains Jeremy Batstone-Carr.
The broker's view
Congratulations to the cat. Who would have thought, just one month into the contest, it might recover from three profit warnings and a failed bid to win!
We opted for shares we felt wouldn't let investors down through difficult conditions. The absence of profit warnings from our selections, and the dividends we expected, underpinned our solid performance.
We admit to being caught out by the aggressive revival in investor risk appetite from early March, which sparked the cat's march to victory with a concentrated portfolio, particularly in mining.
But we have comfortably beaten the index over the six-month period. Interestingly, the March turning point shows how quickly sentiment can change. We are now much more optimistic than six months ago.
Jeremy Batstone-Carr
For a safer bet, I'm looking at Applegarth's cricket scores
When Northern Rock went under and chief executive Adam Applegarth was Public Enemy No 1, some feared for his fate and his batting average.
But the website of the Sunderland Cricket Club suggests that he impressively threw off the burdens of high office.
In 2006, just as he was busy shoving Northern Rock over a spectacular cliff, his batting average was a Mark Ramprakash-like 27.
He took 2007 off to finish the day job.
Last year, while some speculated at the state of his mental health, he put local league bowlers to the sword, averaging a fairly decent 36. He has played three games so far this season as he continues to live with the knowledge that he owes the rest of us £15 billion (that's roughly the cost of the Rock bailout).
At the moment, he is averaging only 20, but a top score of 35 not out suggests more to come.
The lads at extrabet.com have agreed to offer a spread for the Applegarth average at the end of the season.
They reckon he can't do better than between 28 and 31.
I believe in him and am buying at £5 a run. Proceeds to a financial literacy charity.
Bring back the prawn man to save us from the pubcos
Stuart Maconie's Adventures on the High Teas* is a treat. The author drinks and eats his way across Middle England, answering most of the key questions along the way, such as: who discovered pork pies?
The only time I disagree with him is on the subject of the gastropubs that he thinks are better than what they replaced.
The relentless tide of Thai fish cakes and lamb shanks across every village and town is a bit deadening. But it is a vast improvement on the days when whole pubs would quiver with delight at the prospect of the prawn man' coming round with his tray of marine delicacies in plastic bags, writes Maconie.
Giles Thorley and Ted Tuppen, who run Britain's two biggest pub companies in Punch Taverns and Enterprise Inns, seem to share this view.
They are charming men both, but I suspect their idea of a good pub is not mine. They can't see why anyone might miss the pubs of 25 years ago.
The prawn man was great. It would be nice if a side-effect of the recession is that we get him back.
* Adventures on the High Teas: In Search of Middle England (Random House, £11.99)
