Sharpen Your Stilettos -- Here's the Paris Hilton Index

Paris Hilton is out of jail!

It is amazing that a celebrity who is famous for just being a celebrity can get so much press coverage, but Paris Hilton has had 14,886 news articles appear about her in Yahoo! News in just the last 30 days.

Fred Fuld, who guest-writes at Stockpickr.com and also maintains the excellent blog Stockerblog, did some research into connections between Paris and various companies and developed a Paris Hilton Stock Index, which shows some interesting returns, and some interesting investment possibilities.

There are a number companies that are associated with Paris Hilton in one way or another, and all these stocks can be found at the Paris Hilton Stock Portfolio. It's interesting to note too how many of these stocks appear in the portfolios of prominent investors.

What is amazing is that the Paris stocks outperformed the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 from May 1, shortly before she first went to court, until the day she first went to jail, rising over 10%. However, since her incarceration, the Paris stocks were down about 2.5%.

Investors are probably hopeful that Paris stays out of jail, so that "her portfolio" keeps rising. See the chart of the index below.

Paris has perfume lines, jewelry lines, cars she sponsors, food she does commercials for, books she writes, TV shows, gossip rags that live off of her, and much more in her multimedia empire that draws her millions a year.

For instance, Parlux Fragrances(PARL) makes Paris Hilton perfumes and colognes. This is a very low-cap stock ($77 million) and therefore should be considered very speculative.

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.(NWS) is one of the companies that has benefited from Paris' publicity. She starred in "The Simple Life" television show, which was produced by Fox Entertainment Group, a wholly owned subsidiary of News Corp. In addition, News Corp. owns The New York Post and TV Guide, where Paris always gets a lot of exposure. Even without Paris, News Corp. is still a solid company with a price to earnings ratio of 20.8 and a favorable P/E to growth ratio of 0.97.

Speaking of celebrities, the News Corp. stock shows up in the Bill and Hillary Clinton Portfolio at Stockpickr, which lists the stocks held in and recently liquidated by the Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton blind trust. The Clinton trust held a couple other stocks in the entertainment industry -- Walt Disney Company(DIS) and General Electric(GE), which owns NBC.

News Corp. is also held by the Clipper Fund, which also owns "famous" blue-chip stocks such as Microsoft(MSFT), Coca-Cola(KO) and American Express(AXP). The fund was up 15.3% last year and has outperformed the S&P 500 with an average annual return of 12.2%. News Corp. also appears in the portfolio of Prince Al-Waleed.