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Barron's magazine features another classic case of how hard it is to pick winners and losers. Twice a year, the magazine gathers together some of the country's leading money managers for the Big Money poll, and each investor picks his or her two favorite, and two least favorites stocks. In Nov. of 98 the picked stocks went up by 46% over 12 months - very, very impressive, unless you note that the stocks they liked the least went up by 105% during the same time. In many years, as you would expect, the picked stocks do much better than the pans, but, not always. In Oct. of 2001 the picks lost 38%, and the pans actually rose in value by 2.65%.

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