I have been interested in the weekly stock picking competition participant's ability to throw up big winners and losers week after week.

Surely if we could cut the losers short we could make some money from these stock picks I thought. Not only that, but I can remember reading that providing money management is sound you could almost randomly pick stocks and make money.

Here is a little spreadsheet in which the stocks were picked randomly from the ASX20 for the first 13 weeks of the year. The direction of trade (long/short) was also picked randomly.

There is then the question of what level to use for a stop loss. The cell on the spreadsheet marked cutoff can be used to adjust the level to see its effect on the bottom line.

To recalculate over and over, but position the cursor in a blank cell and hit 'delete'.