Beat the Street: W. Zhou Shall Win

A portfolio of airlines and financials captures the weekly $5,000 prize.
By TSC Staff ,

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

Yet again, diversification proved the difference in taking home the $5,000 cash prize in

TheStreet.com's

Beat the Street

game. Everyone knows that a well-balanced and diversified portfolio is the key to long-term investing success, but who would have guessed that diversification can pay cash money in a weekly trading game?

W. Zhou, under the player name "Vivicat," finished with a portfolio value of $313,738.44. Vivicat is the second player to break the $300,000 barrier, with an outstanding 25.5% weekly gain. Coming into the last day of trading on Friday, it looked for sure that a long-only portfolio of airline stocks would take the treasure and glory. However, to the surprise of many, the biggest weekly gain came from a mix of airlines and financials.

Vivicat's winning portfolio was led by long positions in

Northwest Airlines

(NWA)

,

Delta Airlines

(DAL) - Get Report

,

AMR

(AMR)

, the parent of American Airlines, and

UAL

(UAUA)

, the parent company of United Airlines. But the kicker to the portfolio was two financial stocks,

Ambac

(ABK)

and

MBIA

(MBI) - Get Report

. These two financial plays proved to be the key to Vivicat's success with eye-popping weekly returns of 35% and 14%, respectively.

Congrats to W. Zhou on good diversification and even better stock-picking!

As you get ready for Week 5 of the game, be sure to review the following articles, which should give you a leg up on the competition.

The weekly Rocket Stocks

portfolio

features stocks that have the potential to move fast to the upside. Keep an eye on these.

Also, be sure to review Friday's

Mad Money Recap

, and

Jim Cramer's

portfolios of the week.

Need some guidance on how to Beat the Street? James Altucher shared his insights on

How to Win Beat the Street

, and all competitors should review that.

And if you're bearish on the market, check out

How to Beat the Street: Short-Selling

.

If you didn't play in the first four weeks, one of the features of this contest is that each Tuesday you can make one change to your five stocks. Keep an eye out for the weekly

Power Stocks

article for ideas on what you should swap in.

P/>And get some ideas on the

Beat The Street forum

Ask questions, post ideas and share thoughts on stocks with the rest of the community.

This article was written by a staff member of TheStreet.com.

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