Trade Like Soros

This is the first in a regular column starting today: the Stockpickr portfolio of the day. Each day we'll feature a new hedge fund, mutual fund, trading system or special portfolio that we are covering on Stockpickr.

What's Stockpickr? In a nutshell, it's a new joint venture with TheStreet.com that lets you see the stocks that hedge funds, mutual funds and other investors are holding.

George Soros, the founder of the Quantum Fund, is one of the most successful investors ever and it's always worth studying his latest holdings, particularly last quarter, when he has made a significant shift.

A $100,000 investment in his fund when he started it in 1969 would've been worth $150 million by 1994. Soros' most famous investment was when he "broke the bank" in England by betting billions against the British pound on "Black Wednesday" in 1992. Forbes has Soros ranked No. 27 in its "richest in America" list with a net worth tipping the scales at $8.5 billion.

Soros has always fashioned himself as more a philosopher than an investor, and he maintains that his skill as an investor is simply the successful application of his philosophy that he dubbed "Reflexivity" in his book, "The Alchemy of Finance."

Basically, this theory holds that markets are at an equilibrium -- until they aren't. And then speculation takes over and brings things to a feverish pitch that can't be stopped by rational theories of economics, and the efficient market theory gets thrown out at these moments.