Junior John C. Lavan lived out every business major’s dream last fall when his name and picture appeared atop the front page of the Money & Investing section of the Wall Street Journal. Lavan won the paper’s periodic Investment Dartboard contest by e-mailing a stock pick to the journal’s interactive edition and seeing it outperform stocks picked by investment professionals and by Journal reporters throwing darts at stock listings.
Lavan was one of four readers whose entries were randomly selected to compete in the contest out of more than 800 submissions.
The company whose stock Lavan touted was Elbit Ltd., an Israeli manufacturer of electronic and imaging systems. The finance major from Long Island admits that not a lot of thought went into its selection. “It took all of about two minutes. He said he wanted a technology issue with a low price, so he ran his finger down the Nasdaq stock market tables until he came to the letter e. He’d never heard of Elbit but it was selling for less than $6 when the contest began. By the end of the competition it had risen 110 percent.
Over the same period, the Dow Jones Industrials average dropped 2.1 percent.