Dan Running made more than a half-million dollars in the stock market this fall and only has $10,000 to show for it. And he is delighted.
Mr. Running, a 27-year-old senior at the University of Baltimore, defeated business and finance students from some of the nation's top universities in the AT&T; Corp.-sponsored Collegiate Investment Challenge, besting 152 entries from Harvard University alone.
"The best thing about it is that the Ivy League students lost to me," Mr. Running said. "More than anything, that's the greatest achievement of all."
As a student who has paid for his education by working as a janitor at his church in Howard County, Mr. Running knows the value of a dollar, not to mention the $10,000 contest prize. The vacation for two to the Bahamas that he also won is his first big vacation, he said.
Jeff Pruitt, another University of Baltimore student, finished eighth, and UB placed as a school in the top five, just ahead of the Harvard Business School.
Mr. Running, a finance major who lives with his wife in Ellicott City, had little doubt that he could top the experts in the simulated investment contest. Although his voice is soft, his words are not, and he somewhat brazenly told his classmates he would do well.
"I told them I could beat the [return on the] Dow by 10 percent," Mr. Running said.
He did more than that. In the nine-week span of the contest, which began Oct. 10, the Dow Jones industrial average dipped 3.4 percent. Mr. Running, by comparison, parlayed his entirely fictional $500,000 into $1,075,366, an increase of 115 percent.
He accomplished that by borrowing heavily on margin -- another $500,000 -- and investing in the parent company of the firm that makes Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, a popular line of children's toys, and unloading the stock before they looked too good to be true.
"I just hop on for the ride," Mr. Running said. "If I think it's dropping, I dump it quick."
"He placed as big bets on stocks as he was allowed to," said UB Professor Joel Morse, who taught the investment course that Mr. Running took this fall. "Let's not call them bets. He took big positions -- positions in the presence of uncertainty."
Those big positions in the presence of uncertainty were based on the religious reading of Investor's Business Daily, and on calling the AT&T-sponsored; hot line and The Sun's Sundial service for frequent updates on the value of stock.
In addition to running a church basketball league, he also coordinates a chat forum for fledgling investors on America Online, a computer information network.
Mr. Running was confident of his abilities, despite his two unimpressive showings in earlier efforts at the competition, which has been conducted for the past seven years.
"He is extraordinarily intense," Dr. Morse said. "He took the game as seriously as most people take a big sporting game. He was a good example for the class."
Mr. Running is a self-described big gambler -- or at least he considered himself one when he would drop $5 to $10 a month on lottery tickets.
"And I thought, there's got to be a better way to use my money and get a tangible return," Mr. Running said. "If I'm just going to be throwing my money away, I should invest in something."
And so Mr. Running invested in something several years ago -- called "penny stocks," valued at less than $2 apiece -- and threw his money away. While the opportunity for large profits from such investments is quite real, the probability of loss looms large because the firms frequently fail.
"I invested about $1,000, and I lost it all," Mr. Running said. "I eventually learned that's too much risk; there are reasons why the penny stocks sell for under $2."
He was a student at Howard Community College at the time, studying finance.
But his own finances are, and were, tenuous. After his parents' divorce, Mr. Running grew up as one of five children on his grandfather's farm in rural Howard County. His mother, a teacher's aide, could not afford to rear the children on her own.
Mr. Running graduated from Glenelg High School without spectacular grades, and soon undertook an unpaid, two-year mission for his church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, also known as the Mormons. His time was spent in Inchon, Korea.
Mr. Running said he has built up thousands of dollars of debt for his education and that of his wife, Amy. She is a nursing student at Howard Community College; he transferred to University of Baltimore, a two-year, upper-division program, from HCC two summers ago.
And he said he now views knowledge as a good investment. He devours stock reports and analyses, but relies on his gut instinct more than anything else.
As for that $10,000, Mr. Running intends it to use it to pay off his student loans and those of his wife -- as long as he can resist the temptation to invest it, he said.