Beat the Street: Women 2, Men 1

Note: All winning portfolios and players are subject to verification.

The women suffered their first loss in TheStreet.com's Beat the Street this week, with an ironic twist. J. Thomas helped the men post their first victory with, get this, shoe stocks! Who said that it was only women who love shoes? It pays big for men to love shoes as well.

J. Thomas, under the player name "Bandit7," finished with a portfolio value of $305,943.47. Bandit7 is the first player to break the $300,000 barrier with an impressive 22.3% weekly gain. He rocketed into first place led by long shoe positions in Deckers(DECK Quote) and Skechers(SKX Quote).

For those of you unfamiliar with Deckers, they are the makers of the popular Uggs shoes. Uggs came into vogue with the help of Oprah Winfrey a couple years back when she spotlighted them on her show. Just today, DECK was up $25.31 to $142.76 on the back of a strong earnings report. The other shoe play, Skechers, returned 24% for the week.

Thomas' other portfolio holdings were long VMWare(VMW Quote), long Riverbed(RVBD Quote), long EMC(EMC Quote) and short Ambac(ABK Quote). Thomas used his swap-stock oppurtunity on Wednesday to sell his long position in EMC and buy DECK. Good decision!

Coming into the final couple of days of trading, Bandit7 was in 31st place and down a whopping $ 40,124.34 to a leaderboard dominated by shorts in airline stocks such as UAL(UAUA Quote), JetBlue(JBLU Quote), Continental(CAL Quote) and longs in Anadigics(ANAD Quote) and Sirtris Pharmaceuticals(SIRT Quote). So it goes to show that it ain't over until that final bell rings.