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Mary Sue Williams, an Ohio waitress who said she has never bought or sold a stock in her life, has won the $1 million grand prize in CNBC's Million Dollar Portfolio Challenge.
It was a fairy-tale ending for a contest wrought with drama and controversy.
Williams, 46, has been a waitress for 20 years and was a welder before that. She bested a field of 375,000 entrants that included thousands of financial professionals who entered with Ivy League degrees and complex trading models. Weekly winners received $10,000 each.
In a profile of her as a finalist, the St. Clairsville, Ohio, woman told BusinessWeek that she had never even paid much attention to the markets before signing up for the challenge.
"Part of this was luck," she says. "A lot of it was a gut feeling, some eenie, meenie, minie, moe, and common sense."
Williams and her husband, Mark, entered the contest at the urging of his mother.
Video on MSN Money: What to do with $1 million?
Mary Sue Williams winsWatch the winner of CNBC's Million Dollar Portfolio Challenge get surprised with an oversized check and be there as she hears some advice on what to do with her money. Do you agree?
But Mark Williams didn't make it out of the contest's 10-week first round. His wife followed a straightforward strategy of researching companies that were about to announce their quarterly results. She figured that companies reporting earnings were the most likely to see big moves.
'They might learn something'
To pick specific stocks, she used the Warren Buffett approach: Invest in what you know. "I was looking for companies that had something to do with my life," she says. That led to some of her most memorable picks, among them lubricant manufacturer WD-40 (WDFC, news, msgs) and Crocs (CROX, news, msgs), best known for its sandals.Williams told BusinessWeek that she would spend much of any winnings paying for her daughters' education. The older of her two girls is studying nursing at Kent State University and has at least three more years to go until graduation. Sarah, 13, starts high school in the fall and hopes to work with animals, Williams says.
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If she won, Williams told BusinessWeek, she certainly wouldn't invest the money the way she did in the contest. It's far too risky, she says. "There's no way I could have done this if the million dollars were mine."
CNBC announced June 15 that it had hired Stanley Sporkin, a former Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement chief and federal judge, as well as computer firms Symantec (SYMC, news, msgs) and Neohapsis to investigate allegations of wrongdoing. A few top performers were suspected of exploiting a loophole in CNBC's trading software to inflate their returns.
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